Waterboarding Mrs. Peel
In a 1967 episode of the British adventure series The Avengers, the village of Little Storping In-The-Swuff has found a stimulus for its sagging economy. For a large fee, you can lure your enemy to the town, commit murder, and the population will assist you in covering up the crime.
When secret agent Emma Peel learns of the conspiracy, she is captured and repeatedly dunked into the town pond until she reveals who will be looking for her when she is missing. To avoid drowning, she provides "faulty intelligence," which results in her being rescued by her partner John Steed.
Like Little Storping, America has turned to various nefarious means to compensate for its economic decline: mortgage fraud, public gambling to raise tax revenues, and bribing tyrants and fighting wars to keep the oil flowing. To reduce the economic burden of a family, Little Stick In-The-Womb (the abortion clinic) offers a place where the unborn can be killed, the corpse disappears and everyone pretends nothing ever happened.
Ultimately, the nation turned to torture to maintain the illusion that all is well in "Murdersville."
When this program first aired, I never would have imagined that the thug tormenting Mrs. Peel would now be considered a role model by right-wing pundits. Still, I am a bit puzzled by the opposition of liberals to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In San Francisco, America’s most progressive city, myredbook.com lists 385 providers for such punishment as verbal and physical humiliation, trampling, stretching, face slapping, hair pulling, spitting, choking, kicking, cigarette torture, whipping, caning, flogging, bondage in electric chair, and nipple, cock and ball torture.
Those are just the paid providers, not the hundreds or even thousands of voluntary practitioners of torture and humiliation in San Francisco. I would think these progressive residents would want to share their advanced lifestyle with the backward people living in the Islamic world.
