The internet, especially the Twitter-ized portion of it, can lead to some fascinating juxtapositions, such as when my Twitter feed recently puked up a real Pablo Picasso quote tweeted by Fake Pablo Picasso about the dignity of making art, just underneath a tweet from the very real Donald Rumsfeld.
Then there are the Jerry Sandusky rape joke days. The internet erupted with Sandusky rape comments following his conviction on 45 of 48 counts last Friday. Some were jokes of the drop-the-soap varieties, and others appeared to be very sincere wishes that he receive poetic justice once he changes into his orange jumpsuit. Here are six, all in one screenshot:
So rape, far from being a universally awful act, turns out to be multivalenced: there are plenty of people who have no problem with the act when it's used as an instrument of intentional justice as opposed to the satisfaction of a perversion.
Thus do we shift the crime from the act to the person. It's not the rape that was the problem with Jerry Sandusky, it's Jerry Sandusky who was the problem; rape was merely the externalization of his evil. But as we're good people, when we wish it upon somone, the act is an expression of orderly retribution, not immorality. Similarly, we have no problem with murder when it's an instrument of punishment, because it's killing bad people, nor do we have a problem with torturing terrorists for the same reason.
| Related: Like Charles Manson, Al Qaeda, Jerry Sandusky Changes Our Culture |
Believing that some people deserve to be on the receiving end of death/rape/torture inherently promotes us to the position of deciding who is deserving, not in the legal sense but the moral one. The glorification of extrajudicial punishment affirms our basic arrogance that we can accurately discern who the good and bad people are. In Sandusky's case, it's pretty clear we got it right; other times, not so much. Keep following the logic that it's the person and not the act that warrants punishment and you end up in some very bad places.
Same basic thing, via Mr. Destructo:
There are plenty of people who don’t mind normalizing the notion that rape has some form of positive utility—thus legitimating the savage attitude pervading any discussion of the Prison Industrial Complex: that systematic torture is acceptable, that all human rights are forfeit, and that nightmares befitting third-world justice aren’t a poisonous bug but a feature.
Leaving aside the irony of embracing rape as a means of punishing it, it points up how unsurprising widespread tolerance of the abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and Bagram really are: for a depressingly large number of citizens, the torture that already exists in American prisons is merely value-added.
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