Pop Torture

"It is not accidental that in the torturers' idiom the room in which the brutality occurs was called the 'production room' in the Philippines, the 'cinema room' in South Vietnam, and the 'blue lit stage' in Chile...having as its purpose the production of a fantastic illusion of power, torture is a grotesque piece of compensatory drama."    --Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

In the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal the right wing was quick to blame the incident on two of its favorite bogeymen--popular culture and pornography. According to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Abu Ghraib is what happens when you "mix young people who grew up on a steady diet of MTV and pornography with a prison environment." Jan LaRue of Concerned Women of America spent the day Googling and watching "rape porn," "military porn," "torture porn" and "prison porn" and concluded that "the photos coming out of Abu Ghraib" were "very similar to a genre of deviant and violent pornography." Citing the thrilling sadism of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill as well as the "$10 billion-a-year" porn industry, National Review's Rich Lowry argued that Abu Ghraib demonstrates the "seamy undercurrents" of American culture.

Those steeped in the culture wars will find these arguments all too familiar: Blame pornography for rape, pin Columbine on video games, hold gangsta rap responsible for drive-by shootings. As liberal critics like Frank Rich pointed out, this latest right-wing jeremiad was a political strategy designed to "clear the Bush administration of any culpability for Abu Ghraib." Since you can't very well prosecute AOL TimeWarner or Larry Flynt, you might as well pin it on a few "bad apples" dimwitted enough to copy what they see on the boob tube.

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