>On Monday, March 15, 2004, at 07:33 AM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>>
>>--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>>>andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>>>
>>>>But this particular
>>>>complaint is unlike any "torture" I ever heard of,
>>>far
>>>>too imaginative for Americans
>>>
>>>John Waters & Thomas Pynchon are Americans.
>>>
>>>Doug
>>>
>>
>>But they are not running prison camps fot the
>>Pentagon! Happily.
>
>Surely there are some post-modern versions of James Jesus Angleton
>somewhere out there--or at least fans of Norman Mailer's _Harlot's
>Ghost_.
The more I think about Justin's assertion the weirder it seems. It's not just economic power that makes U.S. pop culture so dominant around the world - sometimes the stuff is really good and even etravagantly imaginative. It taps into and plays with all kinds of fundamental fantasies. Given the proscriptions around menstrual blood (check 'em out on Sistani's website <http://www.sistani.org/html/eng/main/index.php?page=3&lang=eng&part=1> - select "Kinds of blood seen by women"), it's not too much of a leap to torture the religious by exposing them to it. And no doubt the captors want to insult the religion itself, a la Ann Coulter.
Doug