>George Neumayr wrote in The American Spectator: "Had
>Robert Mapplethorpe snapped the photos at Abu Ghraib,
>the Senate might have given him a government grant"
>("The Abu Ghraib Collection," May 12, 2004). The
>outrageous equation of photographic evidence of prison
>torture in the real world with works of art that stage
>scenes of S/M (which is itself a kind of theater for its
>practioners) has since been picked up and gleefully mass-
>marketed by Rush Limbaugh: "I would love to be able to
>claim the line that George Neumayr used, I can't claim it
>because George Neumayr used it first in the American
>Spectator. Neumayr said, 'If these prison photos had
>been taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, the very senators
>condemning them would have funded the exhibit at the
>National Endowment for the Arts'" (May 14, 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,'" rather than the presence of compulsion and
>absence of consent that distinguish rape and torture from
>consensual acts of sex in any culture.
Was this somehow delayed in a queue at your mailserver? Or are you putting out a greatest hits album already?
Doug