I'm thinking of getting a new tattoo. Scroll down, it's the third shot on the left. Same one I mentioned a post or so ago. I have it save to my hard drive as "Iqon".
I am so ashamed, so deeply and utterly ashamed.

These fucking shitheads talking about how "oh, those soldiers were never trained in Geneva convention rules." What the fuck kind of logic is that shit? What kind of special training do you need to know "don't rape the prisoners with broom handles" or "don't pee on the prisoners" (that's the Brits, second from top as of 9:30 PM, May 3). "Don't force prisoners to blow each other" just to me seems a kind of given; i don't think I'd need any "special training" to know not to do that.

Look, I can even give leeway toward, say, a group of marines who beat the motherfucking piss out of a guy they catch launching rpgs at them. I can totally understand that, the same way I understand (even if I don't condone)a cop beating the shit out of someone resisting arrest. Shit happens; tempers flare; people go overboard.
But this: these are captive people, people totally forced to submit to the will of their captors. They have no power. They have no defense. It is the moral equivalent of kicking a lame dog.
What the fuck is wrong with people? What the motherfucking fuck??

I remember when I was very young, the year we lived in Maryland. My father had just gotten hired by IBM and I think he was training before we moved to Newport for his job at the navy base. I must have been 3 years old. It's difficult to visualize our home then, but I think it was a rental development a step or two super low-income housing. My folks were friends with the people across the way, and I used to play with their three daughters. The oldest and I were about the same age; her name was Carolyn, I forget her sisters' names.

One day Carolyn and I were playing "ambulance" with the cat carrier, one of those boxes you use to take Mr. Whiskers to the vet. This was the same summer the horse at the farm that abutted the devo bit my sister's hand, the same year that Bad Jimmy from the devo next door shot at me with a BB gun and called me a "fucker" when he missed.

First I played the driver. Carolyn sat in the the coffin-style cat box and i dragged the box along the sidewalk making siren noises.

Then it was my turn to be the patient. I sat in the box and tucked my head down like I was sick. Carolyn closed the box on me, forcing my head between my legs, and locked the box. And then she abruptly got bored, and left me there in the midsummer sun. She just left.

I couldn't move. I couldn't get the lid offbox. I could barely breathe and my back hurt. I couldn't sit up and my face was forced into the floor by the lid. This was in summer in Gaithersburg Maryland. I thought I was going to die. I was terrified. I remember struggling to get out of the box, and alll I succeeded in doing was tipping the box over on its side. It was so hot and smothering.. oh man, just writing about it is bringing on a panic attack, I was panicking and began to hyperventilate. I don't know what month it was, but summer temperatures average in the high 90s. I don't know how long I was trapped; eventually, Carolyn bumped into my dad, who asked where I was. "I locked him in the cat box," she said, "he's in the parking lot," which (thank God) prompted him to rescue me.

I look at that guy in that hood and it's like some sort of medieval shit and I get that same feeling for him. It's just fucking monstrous and makes me want to puke.