Please Don't Play It Again, Sam

According to "The Chronicle of Higher Education,"

In a rare display of social awareness, the American Musicological Society has publicly denounced the use of music in physical and psychological torture. The core of the March 2008 statement reads, "We, as scholars and musicians who devote our lives to sustaining musical cultures throughout the world, protest the contamination of our cultures by the misappropriation of music as a weapon of psychological torture."

(Complete article here.)

Using music as torture opens a whole new set of possibilities for those WMDs that we've been looking for in Iraq. Rumor has it that the military gave no more than a cursory glance at that big box of old Barry Manilow 8-track tapes in Saddam's palace. Nobody had any second thoughts about the "Collected Works of Donovan" and only smiled at the stack of Tiny Tim LPs. Now it appears there may have been something more sinister at play.

Torture by music seems benign on the surface, but consider that I know more than one person who would turn in his own mother on the threat of having to hear "It's a Small World" one more time.

Walt has been known to happily get off the freeway for a real meal in a restaurant on threat of having to listen the original cast recording of "The Last Session" one more time (or worse, Steve Schalchlin singing the songs from the show.)

The possibilities are endless.

If music replaces waterboarding as torture for our prisoners, does that mean that the decor in prisons will be changed?

Prisoners will now be issued iPods that can't be turned off. Guards will carry boom boxes as they make their rounds. Florence Foster Jenkins will become the ultimate weapon at Guantanamo Bay.

Why didn't I know that music could be used as punishment when the kids were young? Think of the opportunities I missed. "If you kids don't clean up your room, I'm going to play my Judy Garland records!"

Oh nooooo! Not that. Anything but that! Life could have been so much more pleasant and less stressed.

I shouldn't give Walt ideas, but I figured out how to keep me on the treadmill. Hook it up to a machine which plays only atonal, modern, "splat" kind of opera (or Wagner's Ring Cycle) that can only be silenced by walking on the treadmill. Stop walking, the music starts again. I'd look like Calista Flockhart in a matter of weeks.

The thing that's really ironic about all this is that you must read this entry by Steve to see the other side of this issue!

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From Judith Jackson: "Both American Idol and Biggest Loser are down to their final four tonight. Maybe someday they will combine the 2 shows, and we'll know it's over when the Fat Lady sings..."