Overheard Starbuck

"These days real men swagger a little when they hear the word 'torture'."
---"Is it because they think they could take it just enough to prove they're as tough as the next guy?"
"No, real men never put themselves in the place of the victim, detainee, minority, suspect, woman, etc.. It's bad mojo. It can give you the 'yips'."
---"Is it because these men think they have what it takes to be torturers themselves? To use on men and woman detainees whatever violence might prove necessary to get the information that'll save the homestead--long before the 24-hours is up?"
"Real men don't role play that much. I think most of today's men see torture as another tool, another powerful weapon in our military's arsenal. Men like tools; being the first in the neighborhood with latest. If the terrorists are fighting a new kind of war, it goes without saying our security forces need new weapons to fight them with. And we got them, before all the other so-called world powers. The President, the Courts, Congress, the Pentagon and our Christian conscience agree that torture is an effective weapon against this enemy."
---"Are you suggesting if terrorism became less of an threat--by what means, I couldn't guess--then torture as an American institution, within its venerable institutions, could disappear altogether, like a bad dream?"
"Hell no. Torture's gonna be with us a long time. Long after Bin Laden's mummified body is torn apart by desert jackels and long after AlQaeda turns into just another third world street gang and it leaders' books wind up on the Times Best Sellers list. Torture American-style will be exported to every country in the world...wait until the research from the past thirty years on the electromagnetic altering of the human brain begins to leak from the university labs."
---"And we'll see for the first time who the enemy really is."
"That doesn't sound right."
---"Well, lots of things will never sound right to lots of people ever again."
"Huh?"
---"I'm sorry I think I started channeling Bette Davis trying to recite a T.S .Eliot poem."
"Does that happen alot"?