Wednesday, September 24, 2008

The table that screams

I've been meaning to finish Taxi to the Dark Side, the Oscar-winning documentary by Alex Gibney, which retells the unfortunate story of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver who was wrongfully suspected, captured and tortured in the Bagram Air Base in Kabul in 2002. The picture below, the Abu Ghraib table (which according to boinboing.net is furniture as political statement), reminded be to do so. The triumph of this documentary as well as other Oscar-nominated docus like No End in Sight which focused on the folly over the Iraq war is that it once again enmeshes us into the grisly power of US military policy, and US's foreign policy over the Iraq war in general.

The Road to Guantanamo, in drama-docu style, directed by Michael Winterbottom released in 2006, is in similar vein a depiction of the unorthodox methods of interrogation and the inhuman conditions over at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. These films show us how a crushed superpower unleashes its fury and how political logic, or even logic at the very least, flies out of the window in the midst of uncertainty in the troublesome post -9/11 era.

photo found in boinboing.net via jessicarulestheuniverse.com

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Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family, Choose a f—king big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose a three piece suit on hire purchased in a range of f—king fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the f—k you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing f—king junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, f—ked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose a future. Choose life . . . But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?

Renton, Trainspotting