The Dish

Sheep Skull

Stump of a horn, crater of an eye, dints, hollows and hairline cracks,
Grooved teeth with triple points that click in the long-dry runners of the jaw
Now the gums have gone back. Holes for drainage and handling pressure
In the open system of the head, closely packed as orchestral instruments’
Resonating-chambers and pipes. Ending abruptly in the absence of a neck.

Thoughts gather, as the flies once gathered: helping dip the sheep as a child,
Helping without helping, just greasing my hands on their coats as they passed
From one enclosure into the next. Them sensing a danger and doubling back
Against the barred gates their cumbersome bodies, the blunt of their heads.
Some drowning in only a foot of dip as the other sheep trampled them down.

–Frances Leviston

From Virginia Postrel’s article in this month’s Atlantic:

Mounting clinical evidence suggests that better design can improve patients’ health—not to mention their morale. But the one-sixth of the American economy devoted to health care hasn’t kept up with the rest of the economy’s aesthetic imperative, leaving patients to wonder, as a diabetes blogger puts it, “why hospital clinic interiors have to feel so much like a Motel 6 from the ’70s.”

A Hyatt from the early ’80s might be more accurate. The United States is in the midst of a hospital-building boom, with some $200 billion expected to be spent on new facilities between 2004 and 2014. Although more spacious and sunlit than the 50-year-old boxes they often replace, even new medical centers tend to concentrate their amenities in public areas, the way hotels used to feature lavish atriums but furnish guest rooms with dirt-hiding floral bedspreads and fake-wood desks. Hospital lobbies may now have gardens, waterfalls, and piano music, but that doesn’t mean their patient rooms, emergency departments, or imaging suites are also well designed. “Except for the computers you see, it’s like a 1980s hospital,” says Jain Malkin, a San Diego–based interior designer and the author of several reference books on health-care design. “The place where patients spend their time 24/7 is treated as if it’s back-of-the-house.”

Kabul, Afghanistan, 8 am.

The Diagram Prizes for Oddest Titles of the Year have been announced. 3rd place went to Cheese Problems Solved.  I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen took second. And the winner: If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs.

Las Vegas, Nevada, 11.15am

I posted about Philip Gourevitch’s and Erroll Morris’s superb and disturbing recent piece on Abu Ghraib here. What it shows once again is how Abu Ghraib was never, ever an exception. It was permitted, enabled, authorized and pre-meditated by Bush, Cheney, Yoo, Rumsfeld, Miller, and Addington, among many others. The techniques testified to correspond with chilling accuracy to techniques authorized by the president, for which we now have overwhelming evidence. Scott Horton reminds us what exactly some of the techniques were:

Enforced nudity. This technique is adopted for purposes of degrading and humiliating the prisoner, heightening his senses of vulnerability, weakness and shame. Enforced nudity also enhances other techniques, particularly hypothermia. Starvation. As Davis notes, when the prisoner is entitled to an MRE, he would be given one component only of the MRE. The entire MRE constitutes a reasonable food ration which is properly balanced. Giving only one part of it reflects a decision to starve the prisoner. Stress Positions. Perhaps the oldest and best established torture technique, widely used by the Inquisition in Europe, was the strapado. Hands would be fastened behind the back and the victim would be hoisted, causing severe stress to joints, frequent dislocation, and severe and sustained pain. The strapado would invariably get its victim to confess to anything, very quickly. During World War II, this same technique was widely adopted and used by the Germans, who called it Pfahlbinden. In the English of the Bush Administration, this technique is called a “stress position,” and it was widely used at Abu Ghraib.

Hypothermia.

Shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet secret police pioneered a very simple technique that had the advantage of leaving the victim’s body unbruised or bloodied, but whose physiological effects were equally if not more effective than direct beatings. In its mildest form, the victim was left with thin clothing in a cell with temperatures hovering just above freezing. A day of such treatment was generally enough to produce physical collapse. The Bush Administration, of course, not having the benefits of a Siberian winter, turns to far cruder and more brutal techniques, which Davis describes. The prisoner is stripped naked, dunked in a bath of ice water, and a window is left open to insure exposure.

For President Bush, these techniques are a part of the “Program.” More generally in the American media, you’ll hear these things referred to as “highly coercive techniques.” But they have a proper name, which is “torture.” Their use is a serious crime under international law, and under U.S. law. And that stubborn fact has driven much of the Bush Administration’s bizarre machinations relating to the Convention.

One day this president and vice-president will be prosecuted for war crimes.

If only to dismiss veep rumors. Heh. Meanwhile, the resilience of the campaign of the first serious black presidential candidate in American history, a man dedicated to racial dialogue and integration is greeted by Victor Davis Hanson as a

disastrous regression in race relations.