Revealed: The Root Cause of Abu Ghraib!
In what just may be the most moronic piece yet to come out of Iraq war, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker implicates the Farrelly Brothers–makers of There's Something About Mary and the greatest Amish/bowling movie of all time, Kingpin–in the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Snippets:
The images from Abu Ghraib, now irreversibly tattooed on the Arab brain, were every frat-house cliche magnified. The human pyramid, males mooning, masturbation, bags over heads. What we saw, at least in part, was "The Farrelly Brothers Do Baghdad."
How else to explain the giddy photographs of young soldiers mugging for cameras and giving the thumbs-up sign beside humiliated prisoners, naked and masturbating? Another Farrelly movie, "Dumb and Dumber," comes to mind…
The Farrelly Brothers—kings of the gross-out comedy film genre characterized by scatological humor and raunchy sex jokes—are convenient touchstones in the larger discussion about the debasing of American culture. In their side-splitter for the developmentally arrested, "There?s Something About Mary," the male star gets his genitals stuck in a zipper. Later when he pleasures himself, he misplaces his "issue," which subsequently becomes hair gel for "Mary."…
Such is what has passed for culture for many of the kids now populating our military. My point: There?s not much difference between what those soldiers enacted in Abu Ghraib for digital cameras and 15 seconds of instafame back home and what America?s increasingly debased culture embraces as good harmless fun….
To the [American soldiers in the pictures], it seems, Abu Ghraib was just another photo op, an after-hours party sans grown-ups to inhibit their jaunty trip through a Heronymous Bosch garden of perverse delights. Farrelly, farrelly, farrelly, farrelly, life is but a dream.
We can?t blame America?s culture entirely, but as we?re trying to change the hearts and minds of others, we might take a closer look at our own. You can?t steep a teabag in sewerage and expect it to taste like Earl Gray.
It may have taken almost 150 years, but we've now finally moved on from the "I was only following orders" defense pioneered by the commandant of the notorious Andersonville prison camp during the Civil War and cited by war criminals ever since. We can all look forward to the military tribunal of Lyndie England, the Madame Defarge of the U.S. military, in which she and her codefendants plead overexposure to Me, Myself, & Irene.