[lbo-talk] Re: Abu Ghraib / Robert Mapplethorpe

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Fri May 21 19:20:16 PDT 2004


``...What is useful about the right is that they tend to bring out a subtext in the dominant discourse in the liberal media, radically exaggerate it, and thereby make it visible to all. The subtext in question is the idea that the main problem of torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib is that it was sexual and therefore "particularly humiliating in 'Arab culture,'...'' fwd Yoshie

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What's interesting here is that I kept thinking it was Israeli intelligence experts fresh from their own dance arabesque with the PLO who suggested Abu Ghraib.

But now I think I may `see'. It is the US Right's idea of humiliation: stacked butt naked with their bed-fellows. Imagine Hastert, Frist, and DeLay's hairy butts in all their digital reality confronting the public gaze. Would you be outraged? Personally I would frame it. I am sure it would sell like hot cakes. These are the butt holes who brought you 21st century Amerikkka. Whenever I hear a Republican name, I reach for my chemical light stick.

What I've seen of Robert Mapplethorpe by contrast was consummately sensual and beautiful in its own darkening strangeness---an utterly different universe.

CG



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