>Workers at a cryonics facility mutilated the frozen head of Hall of
>Fame baseball player Ted Williams, the author of a new book
>alleges.... The paper says the book details other incidents at
>Alcor, including the dismemberment of live dogs that were injected
>with chemicals in experiments. It also details suspicious
>circumstances involving the bodies of others frozen in steel
>cylinders at Alcor.
[...]
To anyone acquainted with the reality of the American way of life, the photos brought to mind the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture - say, the initiatory rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo to be accepted into a closed community. Similar photos appear at regular intervals in the U.S. press after some scandal explodes at an Army base or high school campus, when such rituals went overboard. Far too often we are treated to images of soldiers and students forced to assume humiliating poses, perform debasing gestures and suffer sadistic punishments.
The torture at Abu Ghraib was thus not simply a case of American arrogance toward a Third World people. In being submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture: They got a taste of the culture's obscene underside that forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom.
[...]
What Rumsfeld Doesn't Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib by Slavoj Zizek
http://www.lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm