Only In America

So I picked up another magazine today, this time the December 06 issue of Spin Magazine. And having picked it up, I opened right to pg. 87, where I was greeted by the artsy-magazine trademark of the obligatory "compassionate collage" or, as in this case, the "bleeding-heart pencil drawing". Embedded in this drawing was the descriptive (albeit slightly obtuse) headline "WAR IS LOUD." The letters all capitals (digitally engineered to look like blocks of stone), and with sound waves radiating from them.

The article goes on to describe yet another horrendous torturing practice of the United States military: the blaring of loud music (at extremely dangerous and uncomfortable listening levels) at political prisoners and suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, many of whom , as devout practitioners of Islam, are religiously forbidden from listening to music at all. This harmfully loud music (most commonly rap and heavy metal) is also often the first direct contact these prisoners have with western culture, a culture that, if they don't detest, they profoundly fear. After all, it is those societies (and that culture) that is holding them for indefinite amounts of time without charges and subjecting them to torture and un-ethical (not to mention illegal) interrogation practices. A Guantanamo Bay officer interviewed in the Spin piece describes a time the guards blared Neil Diamond's America over the loudspeakers, saying, "It was to try to keep the prisoners agitated and to keep them from talking to one another. We wanted to prevent them from keeping each others' spirits up and emboldening one another to resist interrogation. It just about caused an all-out riot. Strict interpreters of Islam are forbidden from listening to music. The whole basically erupted."

Spin journalist David Peisner also interviewed a former detainee at Guantanamo, a young British Muslim called Shafiq Rasul who was arrested in 2001 along with two friends for suspected of terrorist activity (all three were later released). He describes being chained in a "stress position" to the floor of a minuscule booth. The booth was pitch black except for the blinding flashes of a strobe light, and the air-conditioning was cranked to almost freezing temperatures. Loud, menacing heavy metal was blaring. Says Spin "Rasul endured such 'interrogation sessions' every day, sometimes twice a day, for nearly three weeks. Often there was little or no interrogation taking place." Rasul describes being left in that pitch black booth for up to twelve hours with the heavy metal music blaring, and says "Even if you were shouting, the music was too loud--nobody would be able to hear you. You're there for hours and hours, and they're constantly playing the same music. All that builds up. You start hallucinating." Another interviewee, an Egypt-born Australian citizen by the name of Mamdouh Hahib, desribes being captured by Pakistani police in in October of 2001, then being transfered (supposedly by U.S agents) into Egyptian custody. In addition to electric shocks, beatings, and other traumatic interrogation techniques, he was also forced to endure dangerously loud music. He says, "What surprised me was that they used English [-language] music. They put headphones on me, then put on the music very loud." From Egypt, Hahib was transferred to Guantanamo, but was in such awful physicological shape that he doesn't remember his whole first year being held at Guantanamo. The most shameful episode of his story was yet to come, however. Says Spin "Hahib says his interrogators asked him about his treatment in Egypt, and after learning the things that troubled him the most (threats to family, loud music), they proceeded to apply them themselves." Hahib says of the traumatic incident, "They were trying to make me crazy. They try to take your mind from you. Even today, when I hear loud noise, I get disturbed." Hahib was released without charges from Guantanamo in January of 2005.

And it's certainly not only the prisoners who have expressed disgust with these interrogation tactics. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 1977 that the use of harmfully loud music on prisoners is "degrading and inhuman." The Israeli Supreme Court decided eight years ago in 1999 that this practice "causes the suspect suffering. It does not fall within the scope of...a fair and effective interrogation." Amnesty International considers the use of drastically loud music torture, and even Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a retired brigadier general in the U.S army and a practicing psychiatrist, says that sonic bombardment is "really traumatizing to the brain. It will lead to anxiety and the kind of symptoms you get with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder."

Among the artists whose music was (and probably continues to be) used for these barbaric torture practices are metal bands Drowning Pool, Metallica and Rage Against the Machine. Rage Against the Machine?! As was mentioned in an earlier post, Rage Against the Machine made a name for themselves advocating leftist beliefs and educating music fans about American injustices and injustices across the world. Rightfully so, Tom Morello, RATM guitarist, PhD (in political science), and former class valedictorian at Harvard, is furious. He says, "The fact that our music has been co-opted in this barbaric way is really disgusting. That particular kid of interrogation has rightly been cited by Amnesty International as torture. If you're at all familiar with ideological teachings of the band and its support for human rights, that's really hard to stand." Now compare that with the bonehead remarks Steve Bennon, bassist of aggro-metal band Drowning Pool (for full effect, insert frat boy "duh...i dunno"s periodically at pauses between the sentences). "People assume we should be offended that somebody in the military thinks our song is annoying enough that, played over and over, it can physiologically break someone down. I take it as an honor to think that our song could perhaps be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that." But wait, wait, it gets better. He goes on to say, "If they detain these people and the worst thing that happens is they have to sit through a few hours of loud music--some kids in America pay for that. It doesn't seem all that bad to me." I can only imagine that that is similar to what is going on in an American soldier's head as he presses play.

Before any of my family had seen Borat, before Sacha Baron Cohen's ass had graced our television display (making us grateful we hadn't seen it on the big screen of a theater), there were several heated discussions about how "morally responsible" the film was, if or if not the film's dialouge was racist, and what it said about America that we had fully embraced Sacha Baron Cohen and Borat. They were involved discussions, with my father (and usually my mother) taking the side of many middle-aged parents, arguing about the film's ability to be easily misunderstood and the implied carelessness with which the film's message was conveyed. I took the side of Cohen and the legions of American fans cheering about his movie, saying that my parents weren't giving the viewers enough credit, that the film did, in fact, unearth hidden hypocrisy and bigotry in mainstream American society. But in hindsight, we weren't arguing about "ethical responibility" and "immoral carelessness," we were arguing about how we could reconcile Borat with our narrow, American idea of what political comedy should be: we were assigning the film a PC value, something that of course seems rediculous now as we hadn't even seen the film at the time. And I think many were guilty of this of this politically-correct mentality: my parents, critics, but, most of all, me. I didn't use these flash judgments to discredit or argue against the movie, but I did use them to pigeon-hole it, to clump it in a group with the pretentious, self indulgent (read: masturbatory) liberal cinema that is always trying to paint a frightening picture of America and American imperialism, but always fails miserably, creating movies that exist only to preach to the latte-drinking choir.

Borat doesn't try to do anything exept create a wonderfully hilarious movie with political undertones. It portrays a startling and terrifying picture of America simply by being there and observing the racist, misogynistic, heterosexist mentality of American culture. Cohen didn't write a script to show the worst in America, he just showed the worst in America; he discovered people who would good-naturedly admit to the desire to hang all homosexuals, college students who would proudly and laughingly describe the extent of their misogyny ("We f__k 'em here, f__ck 'em hard. And then we never call....They don't have my respect, that's why!"), and crowds that will cheer when Borat announces a desire to see "George Bush drink the blood of every Iraqi man, woman, and child". In fact, it almost seems hard to believe that it was Khasiktstan and not the U.S threatening to sue Cohen; we are the ones who should really be embarrassed.

Another thing that was discussed at great length during our household discussions was how funny and (here it comes again) "responsible" what we dubbed "humor of humiliation" truly was. We wondered about the humor in leading everyday people to humiliate themselves in front of a camera, and we wondered about the cruelty of Sacha Baron Cohen in doing so. Well wow, should we have waited until we'd seen the movie! Cohen (as Borat, of course) doesn't in fact humiliate people. Quite the contrary, in fact. He humiliates himself so as to see how other people react. He, after all, is the one who brings a trash bag of his own shit to a fancy southern dinner, he is the one that wrestles (flinch) naked with his grossly obese producer and then runs completely naked into an elevator and from there into a dinner party, and he, after all, is the one that seems close to tears when he is brutally booed off of the lawn by patriotic sports-fans when singing Khasikstan's national anthem (completely made up, by the way) at a rodeo. In fact, for most of the time, Borat simply stands around and talks (that statement is particularly appropriate if you have seen the films Borat-in-a-television-interview scene), often hilariously, with average people, begging then to spill their bigotry into his camera's lens. These people humiliate themselves, plain and simple. They don't need the help.
(The picture is of Ali G, one
of Cohen's past
characters. I know he's
not Borat, but I liked
the image.)

So are you offended by Borat? Are you shocked? You should be. It's a shocking movie. If you're not offended, you must be American.

(And now cue my fake Borat voice): M' name a' Jonah. A' hope y' enjoy m' blog. Ba'ba!