Torture? What Torture? We Need More Torture!

What they regard as Tao is not Tao, and what they consider as right is often wrong. [They] do not really understand Tao, but understand some of it. … They are able to worst others by argument, but do not convince people in their hearts, because they are just playing around with words. … [They get] lost in the bypaths.

— Chuang Tse

What’s all this nonsense about torture?

Now, I ain’t no Einstein, but it seems to me, if it makes us safer, it’s a no-brainer!

In fact, maybe what we gotta do is torture a whole lot more.

I’m not talkin’ about droppin’ bombs on people from Predator drones. That’s a kind of torture if you get your limbs blown off or a beam thru your skull. But, it ain’t personal enuf. It’s what you call “collateral damage.” What we gotta do is intentional damage—up close and personal.

And let’s not stop with the so-called “terr’ists.” Let’s not pussy-foot.

I think everyone can agree that child-molesters should be tortured, right? If they do that kind of stuff once, they’re probably gonna do it again. Just like the terr’ists! And it’s gotta be tortured outa them. We gotta be intentional. That also means we gotta figure out their intentions! So, if we water-board ‘em a coupla hundred times, maybe they’re gonna get the point, confess their sins—and tell us what they’re thinking, what they’re planning! We gotta clean out that hornet’s nest in their brains. Cut’em off at the pass. (Or before the pass, if you know what I mean.) Now if somebody’s contemplatin’ that kind of stuff, it’s too bad. I don’t care a rat’s ass if their daddy was mean to ‘em or their mama didn’t give them enuf cuddlin’. What’s right is right!

Then there’s the stem-cell research guys. (I’ll get to the abortion “doctors,” in a minute.) These research types (yeah, women, too!) don’t even give the little embryo a chance to grow, a chance to feel the warmth of mama’s womb. Suppose somebody had done that to them? Well, turnabout’s fair play I’m sayin’. I say we get into their bone marrow and do some jiggering. Inject them with something chemical that’s gonna make’em feel like jello on a hot griddle.

As for them “doctors” that do abortions—hell’s too good for ‘em. I say we put’em in a little crawl space, get these giant forceps–and we crush their skulls. Do unto others, and all that.

’N’other thing: crime’s gotten outa hand since 9/11. There was some break while the criminals was layin’ low, bein’ cowards and all, but they been comin’ back full force. So, let’s not shut down Guantanamo! Let’s build a whole shebang more all over the world, carve out niches of land in commie regimes like Castroland, send these misfit criminal types there and let the locals at’em. Send’em to central Asia. They know how to boil people in oil over there. They been doin’ it since Jesus was in Bethlehem.

“What else?” you ask. …You got all this garbage on TV now. You got “cartoons” with foul-mouthed characters. Whaddaya gonna do? You can’t whup Homer Simpson. You can’t get to’em cause they ain’t real, but you can get to the “creators”–if you know what I mean. You got this show called “American Idol,” too. They got this guy wearing black nail polish! What kinda message is that sendin’ to the kids? Well, I say we extract his fingernails one by one—just like the Nazis used to do! I say we learn’em good. And that Simon Cowl judge-guy is an arrogant S.O.B. We oughta put him on the rack, see how much “stretchin” his ego can take!

Let’s not forget our Congress, either. You got Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi. I hear there’s some stuff they do with electricity in sensitive parts (!) that oughta shut those traitors up. And as for that white-black, smiley guy who stole the election—I’d put him through some “changes” I would. If you know what I mean!

All those guys that sold this country down the drain—yeah, bankers and CEO’s. What are we bailin’ them out for? We oughta be bailin’ them in. Right in the sewer! Ain’t they done enuf already? Ain’t they hurt the people good enuf? I say we strapado them! Put’em in the Iron Maiden!

We gotta quit this pussy-footin’. We gotta make examples of these vermin. Give’em gladius and sword and trident and net and let’em fight to death in the football stadiums and on the baseball diamonds. And the ones that win—we’ll make them figh again until old age or disease or mortal wounds finish’em off. Then we’ll hang their corpses from the nearest bridge. We’ll pike their heads! And we’ll show the world: we mean business! We’ll show them how tough democracy can be!

I ain’t sayin’ it’s pleasant for the torturer, but there’s some people who don’t mind it so much. Good, salt-of-the-earth folks like Lindsay England, for example—gonna smile for the camera while they tie up the scumbags and put out their cigarettes in the scumbags’ flesh. And good, honest patriots like Mr. Cheney and Rush Limbaugh. They ain’t gonna flinch. They’re gonna do what they gotta do. (And if we gotta rape the bastards,humiliate them before their Muftis and Allah–there’s plenty of cops who know where to put their billy clubs!)

We gotta get less “sensitive” about these things if we’re gonna win this War on Terror! We can’t let these Mueslis win or we’re gonna be back in the Dark Ages! War is hell as General Sherman said–and he oughta know! We gotta get some kick-ass backbone if we’re gonna save our country from all the garbage out there. Cause some things are worth savin’ and doin’ everything you gotta do to save’em. Some things ya just gotta do whether you like it or not. But there’s some people don’t mind it so much and we oughta use their talents!

Poet-playwright-journalist-fictionist-editor-professor, Dr. Gary Corseri has published work in Dissident Voice, The New York Times, Village Voice, CommonDreams and hundreds of other publications and websites worldwide. His dramas have been produced on PBS-Atlanta, and he has performed his work at the Carter Presidential Library. Gary can be reached at gary_corseri@comcast.net. Read other articles by Gary.

15 comments on this article so far ...

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  1. Erroll said on May 29th, 2009 at 9:33am #

    A good person to think of torturing would be Dick Cheney. Perhaps someone highly skilled in these methods could get Cheney to disclose what actually happened on Sept. 11, 2001 as so many Americans [and especially liberals] have been so quick to accept the government’s version of what supposedly occurred on 9/11/01.

  2. rg the lg said on May 29th, 2009 at 10:04am #

    Ah Gary …

    Did reality strike?

    No? You mean you are being sarcastic? A sarcastic poet fer gawd’s sake.

    Sadly, here in the cesspool of life, there are actually people who would take action on each and every one of your tongue-in-cheek suggestions. I can hear it now from some of our local pulpits: “Gary Corseri said … ” Power, influence … that you now may have amongst the very people you do not wish to empower.

    Such is … life.

    I enjoy sarcasm.

    RG the LG

  3. HR said on May 29th, 2009 at 1:14pm #

    The sad thing is, though the article is sarcastic, the reality is that millions here support what it describes. After all, it aint like torture is something new here in the land of the ignorant, home of the bullies.

  4. David said on May 29th, 2009 at 2:15pm #

    Nothin’ ’bout witches?

    If there’s evil in this great God-fearin’ land of ours, it’s caused by the black hearts of them witches, leadin’ us good folk astray and such.

    I say give ’em a quick trial and then burn ’em!

    Everybody who votes guilty gets a free six-pack after the roastin’.

    Who’s first?

  5. bozh said on May 29th, 2009 at 3:25pm #

    torturing alien [non]fighters does not bode well for US soldiers. It is probable that only a few afghans eve heard of osama let alone knew about the plot to bring dwn the towers.

    facts point out that it was arabs who carried out the atrocity and not any iraqi or afghani.
    the attack on america was the stupidest thing to do. I had no value of whatever kind. As matter of fact, it hurt mostly children. And if that was what these criminals wanted, then double shame on them. tnx

  6. Erroll said on May 29th, 2009 at 3:47pm #

    Actually bozh the facts point out more and more that contrary to what many people believe 19 crazed Arabs from the Middle East did not attack this country. The facts, as books written by respected journalists such as David Ray Griffin, Webster Tarpley, and Barrie Zwicker demonstrate, lean more in the direction of a false-flag operation performed by the Bush administration. At the very least, unlike the 9/11 Commission, an independent body, conducting an open and honest investigation, needs to be organized in order to find out the truth as to what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

  7. bozh said on May 29th, 2009 at 4:10pm #

    Errol, i shld have said that arabs drove the two planes thru the two towers at, what?, 2/3 of the height of the towers.
    Which may or may have not brought the towers to the ground. To tell you the truth, i am baffled about that atrocity. I am not taking sides because i am very unknowlegable about what dose it take to bring the towers dwn completely.
    but thanks for your observation

  8. Mulga Mumblebrain said on May 29th, 2009 at 4:11pm #

    The mentality behind torture has nothing whatsoever to do with obtaining information. The ‘ticking-bomb’ excuse, manufactured by the Zionazi lie factory to justify decades of mass, brutal, torture of tens of thousands of Palestinians, is, of course, utter rubbish. There is absolutely no way in which to know whether information gathered under torture is true, or is just what the torturers want to hear, given up to end the torment. After all Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, after being water-boarded 183 times in one month, confessed to every crime since the Ripper murders. Israel, being the world leader in torture, particularly of Arabs, lent their expertise in sexually humiliating and degrading torture to their Yankee stooges in Iraq. There have been numerous examples of the US torturing people to death in the War of Terror, but this is, after all, the country that practised ‘pump and dump’ in the thousands of cases, in Vietnam.
    As most organisations concerned with attempting to rehabilitate torture victims make plain, torture is useless for gaining information. It is used to terrorise a subject population, to recruit informers and traitors and to satisfy the sadistic urges of psychopaths. In all these fields Israel stands unique in the world in the field. Not just does it practise mass torture, not only has it become the leading source of propaganda justifying torture, of untermenschen only, naturally, but its apologists are constantly on the alert to vilify and abuse those who point out this evil record. The logic of the ‘ticking-bomb’ argument to justify torture could just as easily be used to justify torturing a victim’s relatives, neighbours or friends if their tongues have not been sufficiently loosened by being tortured themselves. This sort of behaviour is of course the easier for those who see their lives and those of potential victims, as vastly more important than those of the torture victims. And who can deny that within Israel there are those, particularly within the military and political elite who feel just that way? After all the callous and brutal assaults on Lebanon and Gaza were clearly the work of creatures who have no inhibitions in killing civilians including children. One need only think of the abomination, one of many, confirmed by Israeli troops themselves, of the Gazan mother and her two children, cut down in the coldest of cold blood, for walking in the wrong direction when directed by Israeli troops. That no-one has been, and never will be, held to account for this Hitlerite crime, says all one needs to know about the reality of Israeli brutality, and no amount of abuse and accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’, that all purpose smear to silence all criticism, will change that truth.

  9. lichen said on May 29th, 2009 at 5:28pm #

    Yes, the will to torture comes from people who have been tortured themselves, often in childhood. Such as in Texas, the number one military-recruited state in the country, where children are still paddled at school and treated with equal disrespect, torture, and hatred at home, where boys have genitals mutilated as infants, and no one protects them from rampant bullying. When they are sent off to revenge themselves upon the bodies of middle easterners, that is exactly what they do.

  10. Tennessee-Chavizta said on May 29th, 2009 at 7:43pm #

    Mulga: Your comments are very smart right on the point about US politics. You should post your comments in a blogger.

  11. Carlyle Moulton said on May 29th, 2009 at 10:38pm #

    Why ever did we stop hanging witches and burning heretics?

    The problem is those stupid people who think human rights should be extended to those members of homo sapiens sapiens , such as niggers, camel jockeys and poor people that are obstacles for the interests of Gods True Children.

    What decent people really need are death squads, torture gulags and a lot of genocide to deal with God’s Step Children.

    Death squads, now!
    Death squads, now!
    Death squads, now!
    What we want is death squads now!

    Genocide now!
    Genocide now!
    Genocide now!
    What we need is some genocide now!

  12. Mulga Mumblebrain said on May 30th, 2009 at 2:31am #

    I’ve just finished reading an op-ed piece in Friday 29th’s ‘The Australian’. It may be difficult to find, as it appears to have been removed from the web-site, and I had to buy a copy of yesterday’s paper from a newsagent.
    As I was reading through its brief few paragraphs I began experiencing that familiar sinking feeling one so often suffers as one is exposed to the extreme Rightwing hate-mongering that is so common in the media, particularly Murdoch’s sewer. I would venture to say that, in my opinion, it was one of the vilest and most clearly deranged pieces I have yet seen in newspapers, although my infrequent masochistic excursions into the pages of Commentary and a local wannabe impersonator, Quadrant, once, if not still, (who knows?), a recipient of CIA largesse,have acquainted me, alas, with the style.
    The author was one Merv Bendle, a minor academic from a minor, provincial, university. Bendle has been quite vociferous in presenting his ideological wares over recent years, beginning with becoming one of ‘The Australian’s’ plethora of pet Rightwing letter writers. I don’t think it would be judged unfair by most disinterested readers if I was to say that, in my opinion, Bendle’s shtick is fanatic devotion to the glory of ‘Western Civilization’, which has been nothing but a blessing for the earth and its people, and resolute hatred for all its ‘enemies’. These, it seems to me, Bendle sees as principally the malign ‘Leftist”enemy within’, and the fanatic Islamist, ie any follower of Islam who does not follow orders from Washington and Tel Aviv.
    The gist of Bendle’s memorable contribution was that the Nazi Judeocide was unique in all history. Moreover the attempt to compare any other genocide or atrocity to it was, in fact, an attempt to exculpate Nazism. Bendle asserted that all allegations of genocides by the West against indigenous everywhere were concoctions and inventions by vile Leftists, wicked enemies of Western civilizational magnificence. How he comes to see ‘Leftists’ as engaged in a project to resuscitate Nazism, only a student of the deranged psyche could, in my opinion, venture an explanation. Bendle was vociferous in his emphasis on historians of the dispossession of Aboriginal Australia, the ongoing destruction of its culture and sundry crimes like the generations of child-theft that devastated Aboriginal families. The Right in this country has mounted a ferocious and, in my opinion, utterly evil campaign to deny that these child removals ever happened, but you must recall that Australia, despite its pretensions to loveability is a deeply, deeply, racist country. In fact, at this very time, the bi-partisan policy of both major parties is the coerced assimilation of Aborigines into ‘mainstream’ Australian life, through a process of paternalistic and disempowering ‘interventions’ into Aboriginal communities, on the basis that these communities exhibit marked social pathology in drunkenness, violence and child abuse. These undoubted crises are never, however, blamed on centuries of dispossession, racism, contempt and disempowerment by the mainstream. No, and once again, as in every other Rightwing hate-fest in this country, Murdoch’s cess-pool is to the fore, it is all blamed on the victims. It is the fault of Aboriginal culture, or traditional law, or the ‘out-station’ movement that saw Aborigines return to their ancestral lands or of white ‘do-gooders’. The ‘do-badders’ are in the ascendancy, and an ongoing campaign of cultural genocide is being waged, with pitifully little resistance from the smug, complacent, ‘main-stream’.
    In my opinion, there is a bitter irony in Bendle’s Holocaust denying of all genocides but the Nazi Judeocide. One wonders what his position is on the extermination of the Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses let alone twenty million Soviet citizens. There is, I believe, in this peculiar, and to my mind, peculiarly distasteful obscenity, an element of Judeomania, for want of a better word. It seems to me that a certain type of extreme Rightwing, obviously religiously fanatic, Jew, and their accomplices and allies on the Gentile Right, literally see the Nazi Holocaust as the most significant event in history. While not for an instant underestimating its importance as one of the greatest crimes and tragedies of human history, I think that this elevation of the Judeocide to such an importance, let alone any doctrine that attempts to deny or diminish all the other similar atrocities in history, the slaughter of millions of indigenous by Western colonialists and imperialists the most obvious, is utterly pernicious. I cannot escape the conclusion that such a judgement is based on a calculus that sees Judaic lives as more valuable than those of North American natives, black Africans, Indian peasants and tribal people in South America, let alone Armenians. And such a mentality is, to my way of thinking, deeply wicked. Judaic lives are every bit as valuable as those of any other person, but not one jot more so, and the mass killing of Jews is not more worthy of remembrance than the mass murder of any other group. To make matters even worse, Judeofascists and their allies use the horrors of the Judeocide as an excuse for Israel’s current crimes, and as a cudgel to bludgeon those who criticise those crimes. In my opinion that is moral insanity and a grave insult to the memory of the Judaic victims of Nazism.

  13. mary said on May 30th, 2009 at 10:34am #

    Wow Gary your pen (or rather keyboard) is truly mightier than the sword. Powerful. Respect and awe.

    I am finding the witness statements from those who have been tortured more painful to read than looking at the photographs from behind a hand and find it difficult to understand how one human can do such things to another. Bush has just been speaking to a ‘sympathetic audience’ in Michigan condoning what has been done, just as Cheney did recently.
    http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/29/george.bush.speech/?iref=mpstoryview

    Mulga – Your Dr Mervyn Bendle from Townsville (any connection with Stepford?) seems to have a problem with people of a different skin colour judging from the titles of his articles. Just think that he is probably inseminating his ideas into the minds of the next generation of students whom he is employed to teach these subjects.

    •HI2013/3013/5013 History of Communication
    •CU2030/3030/5030 Science Fiction, Fantasy & Popular Culture

    http://www.jcu.edu.au/sass/staff/JCUPRD_016753.html

    I assume the dangerous stuff which you read is at this link –
    Don’t help the Nazis
    http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25552777-7583,00.html

  14. Wayne said on May 30th, 2009 at 11:15am #

    Have we learned nothing? The more of what ever you put into this world the more you get of it in the world. Why would you quote Chuang Tse and then infer violence? He and Lao Tsu believed in peace and being centered on the goodness inside man.

    Do you remember the quote “He who chooses to live by the sword will surely die by the sword”?

  15. kalidas said on May 31st, 2009 at 7:00pm #

    Well Gary, it’s the thought that counts…