Serious Torture

By Crispin Sartwell

According to the Guardian newspaper, American intelligence agents have been using Metallica and Barney, rather than rubber hoses and naked lightbulbs, to break Iraqi prisoners.

Thus they join a proud tradition of musical torture. At Waco, the Branch Davidians were subjected by the fiendishly clever minions of Janet Reno to Tibetan Buddhist chants, bagpipes, seagulls crying, helicopters, dentist drills, sirens, dying rabbits, a train, and songs by Alice Cooper and Nancy Sinatra. No wonder they set their own compound alight, or possibly not.

Our heroic American military employed Van Halen to flush the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega from the Vatican embassy in Panama City, and blasted hair metal at Afghan caves where they believed al-Qaeda fighters to be hiding. Perhaps it's not our freedom they hate and that drives them to terror, but Tommy Lee's drumming.

Indeed the Fox television network, in an attempt no doubt to conquer our country for the alien hordes of Rupert Murdoch, has assayed a similar approach, blaring hours of repetitive and unutterably puerile power ballads at the entire nation, hour after hour and night after night, on American Idol. At this point, I will tell them whatever they want to hear.

Since I'm raising children from ages 2 through 15, I am actually acquainted with people who voluntarily listen both to the classic, though bad, Metallica album "Master of Puppets" and to the "I Love You, You Love Me" Barney coda at high volume for hours on end. For this reason, I am skeptical about the efficacy of such dinosaurs as torture devices. You may simply create Metallica fans, or persons who agree with Barney that "sharing is caring." That would surely be a disastrous result for a world in which there is already so much suffering.

And yet I remain convinced of the ultimate effectiveness of music and, for that matter, of art and literature as means of inflicting intolerable pain, breaking wills, and making the world safe for multinational corporations. And as an American patriot, I would like to offer my services to our military intelligence in identifying works that would convert religious and political fanatics into drooling, incontinent blobs of degraded flesh.

There are, of course, the obvious candidates: Christian grunge as played by Creed and its imitators, for example, makes anyone with a trace of self-respect beg for the release of death. The horror that is Yanni has surely been visited as punishment upon a sinful world: even a few chords bring a grin of sadistic pleasure to the face of any decent torturer. And yet I feel that we can do even better, as follows.

(1) Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire," and in general all atonal and twelve-tone twentieth century "serious" music - above all that which employs the human voice as an instrument. The problem with the use of such potent material is, of course, friendly fire: it is possible that it would turn the interrogators themselves into raving morons. Nevertheless its efficacy as a torment has been proven time and again.

(2) The paintings of Renoir. My personal suggestion would be "The Bathers" of 1918-19, located in the Musee d'Orsay, Paris. The cotton-candy palette, flimsy grasp of physical form, and fuzzy thinking if any that embodied Pierre-Auguste's signal contribution to grand narrative of art history cannot be contemplated even momentarily without inducing the classic fight-or-flight response so valued by torturers. Safety-pin the prisoner's eyelids to his forehead and display "The Bathers" under museum conditions. It is preferable to use an original Renoir rather than a reproduction, though at a pinch a Monet will suffice.

(3) Ulysses. As many important critics have argued, Joyce's masterpiece is the greatest novel ever written in English. No doubt this assessment is based on the fact that, though excruciatingly long, it is entirely incomprehensible, so that pretending to enjoy and admire it is itself an achievement that requires infinite expertise and lifetime of assiduous labor. Joyce is enraptured by words, though he has a tin ear. So steep the prisoner in his prose and if the victim is still capable of coherent discourse, he will tell you more than you ever wanted to know. In fact, to prevent collateral damage, access to Ulysses - and indeed to all "serious fiction" - should be entirely restricted to professional national security sadists.

It is often said that whereas the fine arts are deeply moving and important, the popular arts are superficial and relatively valueless. Nowhere is this more evident than in military interrogation.

Crispin Sartwell writes from Railroad, PA.