Shibboleth - Flash Fiction

He charged five bucks a head. Frat pledgers, his fellow medical students of course, criminology majors who wanted to experience something beyond dry textbook case law and the freaks, voyeurs and pervs and drunks on a dare. Didn’t matter what their motivation, they all behaved so predictably around the cadavers. So unimaginatively. Posed in tableaus non-vivant they credited would demarcate them as animate set against the lifeless. Asking him to snap shots on their phones, you don’t get red eye from the dead that’s how you tell the difference. Though their mouths were smiling, their flesh betrayed them with lines and rucks of tension as against the smooth, unpinched mound of the dead. Emboldened, drunker or lightheaded from the embalming fumes, then they became more outrageous and yet more trite. More base. They started playing with the appendages. Dreary little skits and mockeries of sex. He wanted to charge them an extra five for the privilege but deferred seeing how ramped up they were. He merely issued a plea that these snapshots remain private and never see the light of day. No matter what the degradation heaped upon the corpses, they still bore more dignity than their abusers.

He now a fully qualified doctor of the flesh. Yet he was present as a medical officer not to heal, rather to insure that the ‘correctives’ left no visible sign of injury. He had to advise on when certain instruments and techniques threatened to leave their imprint on skin and how to forestall that. After all even in this secure facility, loose cameraphones could sink ships. But what he hadn’t reckoned on was a reprise of the tableaus from his past. Only this time with still living flesh. And this was not downtime activity, but part of the interrogative process. The torturers recreated mounds of human carrion with the living prisoners and asked him to snapped shots of themselves manhandling the breathing carcasses with the same scorn as those back at school did with the lifeless. He’d say their scenarios were no less vapid and asinine than with the corpses, but this was qualitatively different. This time he would not be charging a viewing fee. And he took the photos that he snapped and leaked them at the first opportunity.

Climate Camp

The fact that the Police have refused to rule out "kettling" coralling/containment and the possible use of blared music to soothe the savage breast or some such is not too far removed from practices condemned as heinous when adopted by torturers.

Remember the blasting of music as Psyops to force General Noriega to surrender when he'd walled himself up in the Vatican's Embassy after the Americans had deemed him no longer a political asset? The official line was that the music was blasted out to prevent the gathered media from eavesdropping on the delicate negotiations proceeding inside the building. But why then opt for the likes of Guns N Roses "Welcome To The Jungle" and Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" to an opera lover like Noriega (and professed hater of Rock & Roll). If they wanted to soothe his mood and make him more amenable, some nice Puccini aria, or even some panpipes beloved of homeopathy suites would have done the trick surely? No, they were trying to screw with his mind.

Scroll forward to Abu Ghraib 'interrogations'. The theme music from "Barney" (inane toddler TV show) and Metallica's "Enter Sandman" played on endless loop as part of the breaking down of the prisoner's mental state. Psychological torture plain and simple.

And now it lingers in the background as a possible tactic against Climate Camp.

My question is are the artists so employed happy to allow their music to be utilised in such a way? Is there any way for them to prevent it happening and thus show solidarity with those being tortured. If they have no power to prevent it, can they at least sting the military/Police for performance rights money? You know Metallica will for a start off... You could feasibly argue that within the confines of a prison in Iraq, such a case for public broadcast would be hard to cinch. But out in the open at Greenwich Park? With hundreds of thousands of witnesses outside the camp, also having their ears assailed? Pretty public to my ears.

So Climate Campers, if the authorities do choose to blast your eardrums to try and make your occupation a little less tolerable, be sure to keep a log of every track played and the time and frequency and send off to the Performing Rights Society to ensure the Cops have a large bill on top of the overtime claims. Then it might force them to rethink their approach.

Have a glass of carrot juice on me.