Falstaff and Torture Part 2. (the silly part)… or How does Mark Steyn do it?!?

(I’m in week two of my 2005 blogging and a clear pattern has emerged. I write a serious post and then a silly follow up. After I write the silly one I find it unworthy of the first one. The weird part is that I think of the silly post first, and then write the serious post just to set up the silly one. There is probably some deep metaphysical correlation between this pattern and my life; something to do with underachievement or fear of failure or fear of success; but I don’t care to thresh it out. Anyway, the fact I’m writing an apologia for this entry BEFORE I write it bodes ill. Read on at your own risk. Better yet don’t read it at all.)

My last entry http://harkonnendog.blogspot.com/2005/01/falstaff-and-torture.html ended with:

You can’t exactly make a list of what is and isn’t torture. Or, rather, you can make any number of lists… but you can’t make a definitive list. Any interrogation is a dynamic dialogue (ask any parent trying to figure out whether or not their kid cleaned their room). No manual can cover every possible scenario- and if such a manual could be written nobody could use it. It would dwarf the U.S. tax code, for one thing. U.S. questioners require an intuitive guideline that does two things.

1. Covers all scenarios.

2. Stops the MSM from attacking people who use it. (This is especially important. If the MSM has stopped interrogation once it can do so again. Therefore the protocol used during interrogation should be designed to…well, to make people who say the protocol allows torture look silly.)

My idea is this: if Falstaff – yes, that Falstaff; fat; licentious; cowardly; huge-hearted; gregarious; scheming; one could go on forever- could hang with it, then it isn’t torture. Imagine trying to torture Falstaff by humiliating him. Hamlet you could humiliate. Falstaff grows greater with every deprecation, like the dreaded MotherofallEvil ship from The Last Element grew fat on ‘nucular’ missile strikes like Sally Struthers on Tasty Cakes on South Park or blah blah blah blah blah… Shall I even post this? I suppose I could post it to record, for posterity, (rofl!) how a dreadful idea cannot be saved from inherent…er, dread.

Okay. Given that, I’ll continue.

So. Have all the intelligence operatives read about Prince Hal’s beloved fat mentor in King Henry IV parts 1 and 2. Bring in the great Shakespearian critics- especially Harold Bloom. Once these operatives have mastered the nuances of Falstaff’s greatness instruct them that they may do whatever they imagine Falstaff would bear with (blahblahblah… shall I continue? Really?) his characteristic panache. (Oh this is awful. This will teach me not to try and get cutesy-stupid again.)

Falstaff would easily overcome all the “tantamount to torture” torture. In other words, no amount of humiliation or mild discomfort would really bother him at all. He is, simply, too large to bother with trifles. No doubt he’d bitch, but he’d enjoy the bitching. (Contrast this to Hamlet, the greatest whiner in all of Western literature, who doesn’t even enjoy his bitching.)

Ugh. If you read to this point I salute you and apologize. Well, I don’t apologize all that much. I mean you’ve probably heard The Titanic theme song forty times, so you’ve built up a callous. Right?