Elementary Formula
INDIVIDUAL FANATICISM
CHEMISTRY OF THE WOLF PACK
RADICAL DEHUMANIZATION OF THE OTHER
END POINT
New and Better Ways
NICK CHRISTIE
On March 27, while in a mental state of deepening confusion and distress, Christie was arrested for misdemeanor trespassing at the hotel where he had formerly lodged as a guest. Law enforcement officers then subjected the frightened and disoriented man, urgently in need of medical treatment and care, to a series of extreme “corrective” measures: repeatedly pepper spraying his face and body for a total of ten times; stripping him completely naked; strapping him to a restraining chair; and finally choking him with a “spit collar”. Christie’s pleas for medical attention were ignored; then he was rendered speechless by the spit collar.
Homeland Torture
On March 29, Mr. Christie suffered acute respiratory distress and was taken to the hospital, where he suffered numerous heart attacks and was declared dead on March 31. The deputy medical examiner ruled the death a homicide as a direct result of sustained exposure to pepper spray, residue from which still coated his entire body at the time of his autopsy. Yet Assistant State Attorney Dean R. Plattner declined to file charges, claiming lack of sufficient evidence, despite numerous eyewitnesses; Plattner has since died of an apparent heart attack.
What we’ve been hearing about
The Lee County Jail contracted with Prison Health Services (PHS) for evaluative screenings, and for training officers in standards of appropriate response and in the use of “mental health technology” such as the restraining chair. PHS now appears to have mutated into Corizon, a corporation that still lists the Lee County Jail as a customer for their specialized “jail module”. The Corizon corporate motto: As pioneers in correctional healthcare, we continue to discover new and better ways to serve our partners.
We understand your unique needs
Deeply concerned about the fate of her husband, Joyce Christie traveled to Fort Myers on March 29 and immediately proceeded to the police station, where officers refused even to confirm whether he was in custody. While she was trying to convince the police of the seriousness of her husband’s medical conditions, he was elsewhere in the building being tortured by deputies. Later, she received an anonymous phone call that he had been taken to the hospital. Officers refused to permit her to see him until she posted bond; by the time she did so, Nick Christie was close to death.
Attorneys for Mrs. Christie have filed a civil lawsuit in federal court for medical malpractice, wrongful death, civil rights violations, negligence, pain and suffering. She says: Nick had a life. He was somebody, my husband, a father to my son. He’s somebody I miss very much. It shouldn’t have happened. He should be here. Three weeks later, I get his ashes back from Florida in a mail truck.
Export Model
The Game of Death
OBEDIENCE BOX
A colleague in the realm of Desperado Philosophy has brought to our attention a French television documentary made in 2010 titled Le Jeu de la Mort by Christophe Nick, who has since become a prominent critic of reality TV and its many brands of casual cruelty.
As a basic dramatic structure, Nick adapted Stanley Milgram’s well known obedience experiments in which “teachers” would deliver shocks to “learners”, while prompted and at times badgered by a scientist-in-situ. Interestingly, Nick claims his original inspiration for the experiment came not from his reading of Milgram but from a French version of The Weakest Link, wherein contestants are relentlessly bullied and belittled by the host, while also scratching and clawing at fellow contestants to avoid being culled from the feeble brain trust.
With the simple idea télé, c’est le pouvoir as his rather banal point de départ, Nick then sets out to discover whether that power is sufficient to cajole or compel ordinary citizens to become willing or at least obedient torturers, in public and on national television, and without any monetary incentive. With blinking lights, sexy helpers, a perky/pushy host, roaming cameras, and an audience shouting encouragement, the scenario has an air of inevitability about it, and indeed Nick solicits the proof that he set out to find: 64 out of 80 contestants deliver the full Monty throttle of 460 volts, at which point the victim – quite convincingly performed by an actor – no longer screams but slumps in the chair, ominously silent.
Voiceovers and expert commentary leave little to the imagination, as the basic structure of scripted subservience plays itself out over and over accompanied by a music pastiche that gropes for all the expected emotive buttons.
In post-mortem remarks, Nick said: They are not equipped to disobey. They don’t want to do it, they try to convince the authority figure that they should stop, but they don’t manage to. Indeed there was one contestant whose Jewish grandparents had been tortured by the Nazis. She had wondered all her life how the Nazis could perform such atrocities, yet now she has inflicted the same sort of pain upon a perfect stranger: I was worried about the contestant, but at the same time, I was afraid to spoil the program.
CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM
In the process of informing contestants that they had been lured into his scenario via the false premiss of a game show audition, and securing their permission for the film, Nick assured one and all that they had performed “normally”, and – sounding just like Philip Zimbardo – that the context of the situation was responsible for their actions; within his simulacrum of torture, they were not guilty, two thumbs up. Nick reports that most of them are thrilled to have participated in an experiment that could be useful for something, and some of them are ready to do it all over again.
As we contemplate this dreary episode, in which both the subject and the object of critique become unified in the expression of some far deeper truth that is, however, never allowed to push through the totalizing aesthetic of the film itself, we recall the words of Gitta Sereny, who spent seventy hours with Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Sobibor and Treblinka; Gitta Sereny, who wrote in her beautiful and moving epilogue: This [essential core], however, cannot come into being or exist in a vacuum. It is deeply vulnerable and profoundly dependent on a climate of life; on freedom in the deepest sense; not license, but freedom to grow: within family, within community, within nations, and within human society as a whole.
THE ESSENTIAL CORE
Agents in the Dark Wood
The year 1974 saw the appearance of two remarkably different explorations of the tense interplay between conscience and obedience, with the horrific experience of Nazi Germany offering historical background for both books: Stanley Milgram’s Obedience To Authority and Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness. However entangled their subjects may be, the subtitles reveal strikingly different ambitions, for while Milgram proposes “an experimental view”, Sereny sets forth on “an examination of conscience”. Inside the dark wood of morally compromised obedience, these two paths will lead us into very different places.
In his first chapter, Milgram makes clear the underlying motivation for his lengthy series of obedience experiments, which began shortly after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961:
It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.
Consistent with the parameters of the experiments, a summary exposition of which occupies his first nine chapters, Milgram introduces the problem of individual conscience within the context of systems theory:
The presence of conscience in men can be seen as a special case of the more general principle that any self-regulating automaton must have an inhibitor to check its actions against its own kind, for without such inhibition, several automata cannot occupy a common territory.
He next discusses the problems posed by such an inhibitor when placed within the hierarchy of complex systems, whereby efficient and preferably immediate compliance best achieves the objectives of the system:
Therefore, when the individual is working on his own, conscience is brought into play. But when he functions in an organizational mode, directions that come from the higher-level component are not assessed against the internal standards of moral judgement. Only impulses generated within the individual, in the autonomous mode, are so checked and regulated.
Because being part of the system assures survival and delivers numerous other secondary benefits to the individual, potentially disruptive autonomy is “checked”, identity becomes “agentic”, and the individual will thereby execute the commands of superiors within the hierarchy, free from the cumbersome inhibitions of conscience:
From a subjective standpoint, a person is in a state of agency when he defines himself in a special situation in a manner that renders him open to regulation by a person of higher status. In this condition, the individual no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others.
When morally or ethically disturbing consequences of actions come into conflict with the imperatives of the agentic self, undermining the strength of “binding factors”, strains then emerge within the system. Such strains are resolved first through expression of dissent and then, if left unresolved, by outright rejection of the hierarchy through explicit acts of disobedience.
O IS FOR OBEDIENCE
Now let us enter Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness, her prolonged examination of the conscience of one such agentic self: Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Sobibor and Treblinka, with prior experience in the Tiergarten Euthanasia Program. Sereny spent seventy hours talking with Stangl in a style that might best be described as empathic interrogation, her subtle intelligence slowly penetrating elaborately entrenched defenses, present since childhood yet perfected in the camps. She then spent eighteen months examining documents and cross-checking Stangl’s account of himself with Treblinka survivors and other witnesses, including his wife, Theresa, who had consistently urged dissent and disobedience, with little effect on agent Stangl. Over the course of the examination, Sereny leaves no doubt about what happens to a buried conscience: it rots.
AGENTIC STRAINS
Assigned to the point of maximum strain within the tight binders of the Nazi hierarchy, Stangl managed the messy business of genocidal extermination, applying his considerable administrative and creative talents to the task, details of which are exhaustively recorded by Sereny. Like so many before him, Stangl later tried to defend himself by claiming, in Milgram’s terms, that his autonomous self was absent from the scene, and that he was present only as an agentic functionary, performing his assigned duty within the hierarchy with the same professional diligence he would bring to any assignment:
FS It was a matter of survival – always of survival. What I had to do, while I continued my efforts to get out, was to limit my own actions to what I – in my own conscience – could answer for. At police training school they taught us (…) that the definition of a crime must meet four requirements: there has to be a subject, an object, an action and an intent. If any of these four elements are missing, then we are not dealing with a punishable offense.
GS I can’t see how you could possibly apply this concept to the situation?
FS That’s what I am trying to explain to you; the only way I could live was by compartmentalizing my thinking. By doing this I could apply it to my own situation; if the ‘subject’ was the government, the ‘object’ the Jews, and the ‘action’ the gassings, then I could tell myself that for me the fourth element, ‘intent’ [he called it ‘free will’] was missing.
Yet Sereny does not let the schematic flow chart of such well worn defenses stand uncontested. Like a forensic anthropologist delicately yet firmly exposing the contours of a disappeared corpse, she enters into the death pit of Stangl’s conscience to assemble, fragment by fragment, the awful evidence of his guilt. There is so much to be said about this remarkable book, and the rare interlocutory skill of its author; I am sure to return to her often in months to come. For now, though, consider Stangl’s final – halting – confession, the extraordinary “farewell” exchange with Sereny whereby his “agentic self” finally gives up the ghost; for the first and only time, the former Kommandant Stangl comes face to face with the gaping oblivion of his own existential responsibility. In the interest of placing maximum focus on the power of Sereny’s interrogation, I have removed all narrative linkages, leaving only the bare transcript of their dialogue:
GS In retrospect, do you think there was any conceivable sense to this horror?
FS Yes, I am sure there was. Perhaps the Jews were meant to have this enormous jolt to pull them together, to create a people, to identify themselves with each other.
GS Do you think that that time in Poland taught you anything?
FS Yes. That everything human has its origin in human weakness.
GS You said before that you thought perhaps the Jews were “meant” to have this “enormous jolt”; when you say “meant to” – are you speaking of God?
FS Yes.
GS What is God?
FS God is everything higher I cannot understand but only believe.
GS Was God in Treblinka?
FS Yes, otherwise how could it have happened?
GS But isn’t God good?
FS No. I wouldn’t say that. He is good and bad. But then, laws are made by men; and faith in God too depends on men – so that doesn’t prove much of anything, does it? The only thing is, there are things which are inexplicable by science, so there must be something beyond man. Tell me though, if a man has a goal he calls God, what can he do to achieve it? Do you know?
GS Don’t you think it differs for each man? In your case, could it be to seek truth?
FS Truth?
GS Well, to face up to yourself? Perhaps as a start, just about what you have been trying to do in these past weeks?
FS My conscience is clear about what I did, myself. But I was there. So yes, in reality I share the guilt … Because my guilt … my guilt … only now in these talks … now that I have talked about it all for the first time … My guilt is that I am still here. That is my guilt.
GS Still here?
FS I should have died. That was my guilt.
GS Do you mean you should have died, or you should have had the courage to die?
FS You can put it like that.
SERENY WITH HER SCALPEL
GS Well, you say that now, but then?
FS That is true. I did have another twenty years – twenty good years. But believe me, now I would have preferred to die rather than this. And anyway – it is enough now. I want to carry through these talks we are having and then – let it be finished. Let there be an end.
Nineteen hours after confronting the truth for the first time, Franz Stangl was dead of a heart attack. In her epilogue, Gitta Sereny, clearly shaken by her journey into the grave corruption of Stangl’s subjectivity, offers a few tentative conclusions of the sort that do not lend themselves to neat formulae or flow charts, conclusions that remain as timely today as the day she wrote them:
I do not believe that all men are equal, for what we are above all other things, is individual and different. But individuality and difference are not only due to the talents we happen to be born with. They depend as much on the extent to which we are allowed to expand in freedom.
There is an as yet ill-defined, little-understood essential core to our being which, given this freedom, comes into its own, almost like birth, and which separates or even liberates us from intrinsic influences, and thereafter determines our moral conduct and growth. A moral monster, I believe, is not born, but is produced by interference with this growth. (…)
This essence, however, cannot come into being or exist in a vacuum. It is deeply vulnerable and profoundly dependent on a climate of life; on freedom in the deepest sense; not license, but freedom to grow: within family, within community, within nations, and within human society as a whole.
Not My Alma Mater
It is unlikely that the disgraced Jon Corzine of MF Global Holdings ever crossed paths with Sir Harry Hammersmith. Sir Harry, hedge fund manager by appointment to Her Royal Majesty, would have considered Mr. Corzine one of the little people, unworthy of his attention. Sir Harry only concerned himself with those who did God’s work, at the tippy top of the food chain. More than three years have passed since Sir Harry fell from the sky, without a parachute, headless, wearing only a pair of his own signature black loafers, the ones with the braided platinum tassels, platinum because gold is so appallingly common. He had planned to deliver a check that would make philanthropic history as the single largest gift ever made to a private college, but instead dropped from the sky as a monstrous chunk of flesh at the precise geometric center of the Plymouth Mather quad.
View from the porch
The college president, a serious and square-bodied man named Philip Dooley, suffered a nervous breakdown shortly thereafter and now resides on a small island off the coast of Maine, where he sits in a rocking chair on the leeward porch muttering Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater, Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater, Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater …
Of course, for those who witnessed the scene, it was the brutal red-crusted brands that were so deeply shocking, brands that seemed to transform the naked body of a middle-aged billionaire into a ciphered warning, a warning that revolved around the letters M,E,T,A,C,O,M. Yet a warning of what, and sent by whom? More than three years have passed, and these two most basic questions remain unanswered.
Yes, we know everything there is to know about Sir Harry and his special tea: how he brewed the tea from the pulverized bones of a vanquished Wampanoag sachem, bones stolen while he was an undergraduate from a special crypt beneath Plymouth Mather’s world renowned Stoughton Center For The Humanities; how the tea appeared to convey godlike properties to certain anatomical appendages while also swelling self-esteem to the proportions of a trophy zeppelin; and how his clients were far more invested in securing privileged access to the precious tea than they were in Sir Harry’s financial acumen. And yes, we also know that when he exhausted the Plymouth Mather trove, he purchased others on the open market for fabulous sums, bones picked from all over the world, relics of the conquered, the obliterated and the disappeared, against all international law and common decency.
King P. Tea
While the matter of King P. Tea may provide credible motive for retribution by any number of aggrieved parties, no shadowy groupuscule affiliated with the assembled terrorist demons of the universe ever claimed responsibility for this perverse dead letter. There were vague whisperings of a subversive mastermind codenamed “Moshup”, but nothing came from it.
With the exception of a few months of turbulence in financial markets while Sir Harry’s algorithms dissolved into a worthless smear and the cold turkey experienced by a tiny coterie of super rich teaheads, Sir Harry’s fall from the sky failed to produce the cataclysm anticipated by the agents of Homeland Security, leaving a good deal of egg on their faces following their declaration of martial law. Indeed, for most people, the event has receded into the realm of dim memories, save for those like Phillip Dooley who actually laid eyes upon the branded corpse. For them, the image of the headless, scorched trunk of Sir Harry continues to intrude:
Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater, Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater, Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater, Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater, Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater, Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater, Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater, Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater, Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater, Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater, Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater, Plymouth Mather is not my Alma Mater.
METACOM
Bullet Holes and Blinks
Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all. – Geronimo
RIGOROUS EXACTNESS
In 1897, a painter named Eldridge Ayer Burbank arrived in Fort Sill, Oklahoma to execute a series of portraits of Indian leaders held there as prisoners of war, principal among them the Chiricahua Apache known to the white man as Geronimo, once called the wickedest indian who ever lived. Burbank later gave an oral account of his experiences to a man named Ernest Royce, and the book was published in 1944 under the title Burbank Among the Indians. Journalist Charles F. Lummis contributed a Foreward, in which he states:
Mr. Burbank has in general selected very characteristic types; and his portraits are done with rigorous exactness. He nothing extenuates, nor sets down aught in malice. He neither idealizes nor blinks. From our personal point of view, his pictures are harsh – not “retouched” as we demand our artists to flatter us, but uncompromising as a photograph made in strong sunlight. Popularly, this may give a mistaken impression; for many will forget that one chief reason why an Indian is so much more furrowed and ugly than we are is because he has no retoucher to make him pretty. But scientifically this insistence upon the lines in which life indexes character, is very important.
Burbank spent a good deal of time with Geronimo, eventually completing seven portraits. In the body of the text, as told to Mr. Royce:
One day he came into my quarters at Fort Sill in a most peculiar mood. He told me no one could kill him, nor me either, if he willed it so. Then he bared himself to the waist. I was dumbfounded to see the number of bullet holes in his body. I knew he had been in many battles and had been fired on dozens of times, but I had never heard of anyone living with at least fifty bullet wounds on his body. Geronimo had that many scars.
Some of these bullet holes were large enough to hold small pebbles that Geronimo picked up and placed in them. Putting a pebble in a bullet wound he would make a noise like a gun, then take the pebble out and throw it on the ground. Jokingly I told him he was probably so far away that the bullets didn’t penetrate him, but that if he had been nearer they probably would have killed him. “No, no,” he shouted. “Bullets cannot kill me!”
Surely Geronimo’s bullet riddled torso offered powerful visual evidence of how life might index character, yet in this case Burbank turns a blind eye to the harsh and uncompromising woundscape, and the specific sort of index it compiles. In baring his torso, Geronimo offered the artist an extraordinary opportunity to paint the unvarnished truth; instead, Burbank produced a series of extenuated fantasies such as below, with our own editorial titles attached:
UNIFORM OVER WOUNDSCAPE
FANTASY IN RED
On his deathbed, Geronimo, known to the Chiricahua Apache as Goyathlay, the One Who Yawns, reportedly expressed a single regret to his nephew:
I should never have surrendered.
I should have fought until I was the last man alive.
Inscrutable Things
… all twisketee be-twisk, like him – him – Moby Dick
Harpoons, lances and iron darts lie all twisted and wrenched in the flesh of the white whale, creating a strange sort of fluid vulnerography. On a prior voyage, Queequeg took note of the whale’s twisted corkscrew body; Queequeg, upon whose own body a prophet had inscribed a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume.
Queequeq may well understand that Moby Dick’s flesh also carries a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, a theory that tasks and heaps Ahab, a theory that he believes is nothing but a mask for the most inscrutable malice; The inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.
Unable to wreak sufficient hatred by himself, Ahab winds the crew up into an electrified killing machine geared to obliterate this bloody glyph, yet in the end the wounded whale sucks him into its unfathomable depths, voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.
Melville does not spell it out quite so explicitly, but John Huston and Ray Bradbury jiggle the line, and present us with the powerful image of the mad captain bound to the whale by his own violent scrawl, his arm still beckoning to the crew, while the nib of his ivory leg points to the obscure depths. The darts and lines meant to constrain and subdue the whale in a tangle of barbed lashings will now stitch whatever remains of Ahab into the cipher’s lethal inscrutability.
This image of Ahab, his lightning self finally extinguished by the whale’s deep water sounding, his broken body hanging and waving amidst the barbs, summons another haunting image to mind, from Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Remarque describes an attack by the German soldiers, crossing through the death zone of barbed wire and machine guns: I see one of them, his face upturned, fall into a a wire cradle. His body collapses, his hands remain suspended as though he were praying. Then his body drops clean away and only his hands with the stumps of his arms, shot off, now hang in the wire.
Two more inscrutable things, hanging in a toxic fog of gas and smoke, lone survivors clinging to the wire like Ishmael clinging to Queequeq’s coffin, to tell the tale.
ALL TWISKETEE BE-TWISK
The Mean Maxima
I
In the pilot study for Stanley Milgram’s famous Obedience experiments, the subject could dimly perceive the victim “learner” receiving his measured voltage of electric shock through silvered glass. The visible discomfort of the victim appeared to unnerve the subject, a behavior that Milgram wished to explore more deeply. To better understand the impact of proximity on the subject’s propensity to deliver maximum volts to the body of the victim, Milgram designed four different scenarios:
In Experiment 1, the victim sat in a remote location, invisible to the subject. At 300 volts, the victim was instructed to pound on the wall. After 315 volts, the pounding would stop.
In Experiment 2, the ability to perceive vocal feedback was added to the scene. No more pounding, just yells and other audible responses from the victim.
Experiment 3 made the relationship physically proximate, and the victim was in the same room, visible as well as audible.
Finally, in Experiment 4, physical contact between the subject and the victim was required for the delivery of the shock, via forced placement of the victim’s hand on a shock plate.
In all four experimental situations, the role of the victim is performed not by an actor but by a volunteer who usually works as an accountant. He has been trained by the psychologist Milgram to simulate gradually increasing distress.
The results are summarized in a graph recording mean maximum shocks throughout the proximity series, data that indicates a significantly reduced willingness to inflict pain as the physical relationship between subject and victim becomes more close. 
II
Inside a different sort of laboratory across the Atlantic in London, at roughly the same time that Stanley Milgram was meticulously accumulating his proximity data, another researcher with a deep interest in the interplay between human conscience and the behavior of bodies in tight spaces observes the young Glenda Jackson using her hair as a whip. The researcher’s name is Peter Brook, and he is in the midst of rehearsing the Peter Weiss play, Marat/Sade, for its English language premier.
The setting is the asylum of Charenton, and the script indicates a “many stranded whip”. Brook has decided to take this idea and make it part of the actor’s body. Patrick McGee receives the whipping; Brook observes the rhythms of Jackson’s lashings carefully, as that rhythm will provide a sort of narcoleptic metronome for one of the most important speeches in the play. Jackson will play the asylum patient who in turn plays CORDAY, with McGee playing SADE, who serves as both director and victim within the scene. In the 1967 film version, here is how the experiment played out:
III
The basic scenario unfolds as follows:
A pudgy middle aged man sits on a chair in a small room. Across the room, a teenaged girl stands still, wearing a dirty apron to cover her naked body. She looks scared. The man is talking to someone on the phone. He claims to be a police officer. Or a director of Homeland Security. Or an agent of the Permanent Emergency.
The voice on the phone claims the girl is a thief. Or a terrorist. Or a sympathizer with the terrorists. Or a law abiding protestor who carries within her the potential for future violence. He tells the girl to take off the apron; he needs to inspect her. He tells her to come closer, so he can see. He tells her she is hiding something from the law. In a body cavity. He tells her to jump up and down. She looks terrified.
He tells her to perform jumping jacks. Nothing falls out from her body cavities. So he tells her she needs to come closer. He needs to have a closer look. To make sure she has no secrets. She now trembles with fear, weeping.
He inspects her, touches her. He tells her to call him “sir”. She refuses. The voice on the phone tells him she is a bad girl. Disrespectful of his authority. He must spank her, to restore her obedience.
The man spanks the girl, tentatively at first, until he gets the feel of it. Then he spanks with abandon, producing bright red welts – hand prints – on her flesh; her painful cries fill the room. The man is very close now, groping her, using her. He is not a pudgy puppet anymore. He is his own man, serving his own needs. He forces her head into his lap. The search is now officially over; the rape has begun. The voice on the phone goes mute yet the caller listens intently, satisfied with how the basic scenario has played out.
The victim is no longer in the room. She has gone somewhere else. Somewhere she can be safe. Somewhere, she will survive.
Conclusion: There are certain conditions in which the inverse relationship between proximity to the victim and the propensity to inflict pain does not apply. Under these conditions, we can expect to see an intensification of abuse as the victim is stripped of corporeal privacy and sexual autonomy. Let us call these conditions TORTURE.
O THIS ITCHING, THIS ITCHING
Desperado Philosophy 
