|
CounterPunch
December
31, 2002
American Diary
Dr. Bill Frist, Moral Monster:
He'd Do Anything for Pussy; How They Bought Off Lott; German
Cannibal Goes Over the Top; the Incubator Returns!
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
We'll come to Tennessee's pussy hunter shortly,
but first a word about his predecessor as Senate majority leader,
that bruised son of Mississippi, Trent Lott. How was Lott finally
induced to quit the post he loved so much, and from which vantage
point he was able to guide so many millions to public works to
his home state?
A well primed Republican source confides
to CounterPunch that Lott has been promised the chairmanship
of the new senate committee scheduled to oversee the vast Homeland
Security Agency now in process of formation. So Lott be able
to continue dispensing prodigious patronage of the sort that
has brightened the eroded downtown of Jackson, Miss, with a colossal
new post office I was able to admire last spring. We may expect
numberless counter-terrorism facilities, command centers and
kindred porkodromes to enrich the concrete pourers and building
contractors of Mississippi.
As for Bill Frist, the millionaire Tennessee
sawbones, everthing you need to know about this unpleasing man
was contained in one short paragraph of a profile of Frist by
Michael Kranish in the Boston Globe Sunday magazine for October
27, 2002, covering the years when Frist was in Boston, first
at Harvard Medical School and then at Mass General.
"Frist is an animal lover who said
his decision to become a doctor was clinched when he helped heal
a friend's dog. But Frist now found himself forced to kill animals
during medical research. And his new dilemma was finding enough
animals to kill. Soon, he began lying to obtain more animals.
He went to the animal shelters around Boston and promised he
would care for the cats as pets. Then he killed them during experiments.
'It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do,' Frist wrote. 'I
was going a little crazy.'"
So now the US senate is going to be led
by the cat world's answer to Dr Mengele! A man who can do that
is capable of any infamy. Can't you just picture this oily Tennessean
cooing and clucking over the tabbies and tortoiseshells at the
shelter, solemnly wagging his head as the shelter staff counselled
him on proper cat procedures, then dragging the poor creatures
into his lab and torturing them to death. I call on the Humane
Society to demand that Frist publicly apologize for this appalling,
indeed ineradicable stain on his character, and pay substantial
reparations out of the vast fortune that has accrued from the
Hospital Corporation of America, founded by his father and brother.
As noted by Andrew Cockburn on this site,
while serving as an ardent toady of business, especially the
health care and pharmaceutical cartels, Frist projected a "caring"
image, accepted without demur by all except his former interns
at the Vanderbilt Medical Center in Tennessee, where he amassed
big bucks as a heart/lung transplant surgeon. "He was a
complete asshole," recalled one to Andrew recently. "Arrogant
and unhelpful."
Frist, Andrew writes, "has subsequently
let it be known that as a transplant maestro he 'saw"' indigent
patients. 'The equivocation is telling,' says the former intern,
himself now a distinguished practitioner. 'As far as we could
see the only indigent patients Frist saw were the ones he passed
on the street on his way to operate on rich Saudis at the medical
center."
If any further particulars are required
to convict Frist, we need only say that he has been attracting
the toadying attentions of Bono. Bereft of his two prime hosts
in Washington, former Senator Helms and former Treasury Sec.
O'Neill, the appalling Bono has been calling on Frist and dining
with Rupert Murdoch.
The SM Community
Lashes CounterPunch
The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom
complains that I have been unfair both to the Coalition and to
Jack McGeorge, the arms inspector who turned out to be a big
shot in the bondo/dom and sado-masochist "community".
Among my sins: I called McGeorge "an experienced torturer".
What's wrong with that? Torture, as defined by Dan Mitrione,
was the precise amount of pain, applied in the precisely required
amount, to acquire the precisely required result. (Mitrione was
a notorious CIA torturer, eventually captured by Uruguayan guerillas
and executed.) Surely Mitrione's complacent description of his
craft applies as a useful working definition of SM practices,
even though pleasure and not information is the objective.
Susan Wright, writing on behalf of the
NCSF, notes in a petulant letter of complaint that "McGeorge
is an activist and a leader in the SM-Leather-Fetish community
who educates about safe, sane and consensual sexual expression
for adults." His qualifications as a "leader"
were proudly invoked by Jonathan Krall, a friend McGeorge dispatched
as his emissary, to be interviewed by Slate. Two lines from the
Slate piece: "He [Krall] says he has known McGeorge for
more than 15 years through his very public participation in various
S/M clubs. In the process, Krall believes, he's routinely witnessed
the 'leadership qualities' that will make McGeorge a fine arms
inspector.
I think Wright was mostly pissed off
by my derisive remarks about the semantic career of the word
"community", in the course of which I jocularly yoked
the BDSM community to the "cannibal community".
Cannibal Community
Roiled By German Mensch Muncher
The cannibal community is in fact agog
over some pretty far-out activities by two of that community's
members, one being well masticated pre and post mortem . There
have been abundant rep[orts in the German and British press,
but not much here, beyond a brief, demure report on CNN.
Meet first Bernd Juergen B, who finished
up on the terminal end of a consensual cannibal relationship.
According to police reports he wrote out his will and had it
officially recognized by a notary on the morning of his disappearance
March 9, 2001. In the will, he left most of his estate including
a penthouse apartment to his live-in partner, a fellow named
Rene.
Then Bernd Juergen B had told his boss
at Siemens he was taking that Friday off "to attend to some
personal matters". He was last seen at a subway station
in Berlin. He took a train some 300 kilometers from Berlin to
an old house near Kassel. Reason for trip? Bernd Juergen B had
responded to one of 80 adverts that read: "Gay male seeks
hunks 18-30 to slaughter." The advertiser meant this literally.
Armin M was also a computer technician
and until recently had a job with a software firm in the Rhine
Valley city of Karlsruhe, 30 km south of Rotenburg. He lived
with his mother in the 17th century half-timbered manor house,
staying on there after her death three years ago.
"He was a mama's boy," a neighbor
later told reporters. "He was totally fixated on his mother,
who he said never let him date girls. After she died, he began
to thaw out."
After some initial pleasantries the couple
got down to business. Armin cut off Bernd's penis, sauteed it,
and the two ate it. The proceedings were videotaped by Armin.
Police who later watched the tape are, according to the press,
now undergoing psychiatric counselling. "The victim appeared
to be fully aware of the situation", one investigator told
the press. "Videotape material definitely shows both him
and the suspect engaged in eating his own flesh prior to his
death." The video shows the victim willingly allowed himself
to be castrated before both men engaged in eating his severed
flesh.
Then Armin M removed body parts for later
enjoyment and buried the rest. Police found frozen human flesh
and skeletal remains, and a cellar which had been renovated into
a makeshift slaughterhouse, complete with trough drains and meat
hooks.
The best account I've seen was by Roger
Boyes in the London Times for December 14.
Armin M, it turns out, was a former sergeant-major
in the German army who later worked for the council in Mainz.
In the old house the cops found 50 videos that are said to be
worth thousands on the "very specialised market for cannibal
acts". After snacking on the hors d'oeuvre of Bernd's penis
they set forth for for the slaughtering room, where Armin M switched
on the camera, then stabbed Bernd Jurgen B to death. He then
hung the body upside down on a meat hook, allowing to allow the
blood to drain, and later cut and wrapped the flesh for freezing.
Boyes quotes the head of the Criminological
Institute in Wiesbaden, Rudolf Egg, as saying "modern cannibals
use[d] deep-freezing to extend and ration out their pleasure.
Primitive cannibals used to eat their victims all at one go soon
after killing. "If he really derived pleasure from eating
a man", Egg continued raptly , "then he could not possibly
eat everything in a single day. And he obviously did not want
to eat rotten meat. So he froze the body parts; the act of eating
then took on the aspect of a ritual and could be drawn into his
sexual fantasies." Thank you, Rudolf.
German columnists have been blaming Hollywood,
specifically The Silence of the Lambs and its prequel, Red Dragon,
thereby occluding more humble local fare, namely Rainer Werner
Fassbinbder's Tenderness of the Wolves, gaydom's an swer to Jaws
many years ago. The Teuton scribes are also sprinkling slurs
on thr cannibal community at large, with the mass-circulation
tabloid Bild expressing concern that cannibals could be here,
there, everywhere. "They are invisible behind their glasses,
their hairstyles, their families, their work, their seemingly
unblemished innocence."
Boyes reports that cannibalism "hits
a nerve" for a whole generation of Germans who "remember
the desperate eating of human organs during the Nazi invasion
of the Soviet Union, when the three-month siege of Stalingrad
saw the starving storm troopers eating the bodies of their dead
fellows, though presumably they avoided dead Russians as untermensch
and therefore unfit for Aryan consumption.
The Incubator
Returns!
So onward into 2003 we go, amid INS round-ups
of undesirable aliens in southern California and the grand hunt
for Saddam's "material breaches", which could be a
song out of Gilbert and Sullivan. As Hilaire Belloc wrote in
his Ballad of Lord Lundy, "the press is squared, the middle
class are prepared."
Back in January of 1990, I was the first
journalist to question the charge, promoted by Amnesty International,
that Iraqi soldiers had taken over 300 babies from incubators
in Kuwait tossed them on the cold hospital floor, leaving them
there to die.
In the end of course the incubator atrocity
turned out to have been concocted by Hill and Knowlton, with
its main witness being the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador
to the US. The story was the best advertisement from that war
of the old line about truth being the first casualty.
You can't keep a good lie down. As FAIR
recently reported, CNN did a retrospective on Iraq's 1990 invasion
of Kuwait and aftermath and guess what, there was the incubator
atrocity, large as life, without a blemish to its name.
Most such news "management"
is entirely voluntary.
Die Tageszeitung, the Berlin daily, got
a world class scoop just before Christmas by getting hold of
the 1,1000 page document lodged by Iraq con concerning its overall
relationship with weapons of mass destruction. With its habitual
servility the UN allowed the US to censor this report before
it was handed out to the members of the Security Council.
Swiftly excised were the corporations,
mostly from the US, UK and Germany that supplied Iraq with nuclear,
chemical, biological, and missile technology, prior to 1991.
Such shipments, encouraged by the relevant governments, were
illegal under the terms of solemn international treaties and
laws. US corporations included Honeywell, Spektra Physics, Semetex,
UNISYS, Sperry Corp, Rockwell, Hewlett Packard, Dupont, Eastman
Kodak, American Type Culture Collection, Bechtel , and others,
24 in all. In addition, US government departments for defense,
energy, trade, and agriculture, were designated as suppliers.
A big story? You might think so. The
European press ran good coverage. Amy Goodman did an excellent
report on Democracy Now, as did IndyMedia outlets. I heard a
good report on CBC radio. The London Independent ran a story
by Tony Paterson of December 18. But in the main corporate US
press? Nothing that I could find, at least for the week following
the first story in TAZ.
Yesterday's
Features
Bruce Jackson
Saddam
Delenda Est!
Jonathan Swift
How 9/11
Helped Democracy Evolve Toward Perfection
Vijay Prashad
The Jihad International, Kashmir
and Secularization
Salim Rashid
Pat Robertson's
Evangelical Propaganda
Kurt Nimmo
The FBI Monekywrench Alert
Anthony Gancarski
Clinton
Boisvert: Sorry with a Capital S
Tom Stephens
A Meditation on the Nature of Evil
Mitchel Cohen
What We
Say Goes: How Bush Sold the Bombing of Iraq
Leah Harris
It's the Occupation, Stupid!
Annie C. Higgins
Occupying
Time: Israeli Soldiers and Palestinian Youths
Abu Spinoza
War Crimes: Us and Them
Linda Belanger
Words Hurt, But Tanks Kill
Adam Engel
Call Me Johnson
Richard Procter
The Power of Audacity
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|