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Found Poetry: Cliche Torture

January 19, 2005

“The database is lonely.
You can help!
Visit the database every time
you spend time with any of our esteemed guests.
Tell the database about what fun conversation
you and your guests had.
…I realize it sounds rather cliche,
but we have ways of making you talk.”

Text: slideshow for new interrogators, Abu Ghraib
Taken from: Doctor’s Orders — Spill Your Guts

M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks
Los Angeles Times, Sunday, January 9, 2005, M1.

See also: “When Doctors Go To War,” New England Journal of Medicine vol. 352, no. 1 (January 6, 2005): 3-6.

“…even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an
ironical distance, we are still doing them.“

Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso), 33.

from → History's Rough Draft
One Comment
  1. Montag permalink
    January 20, 2005 9:56 AM

    Wow. Reminds me of a sample from an old ‘techno’ song by Gravity, recorded voice repeating “We want Information” so persistantly and insistantly as to become creepy.

    “The database is lonely. You can help!” will now be a part of my catch-phrase vocabulary. Not to make light of the context here, which is so far beyond the pale as to approach farcical. The Zizek quote really brings it all back home, though.

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