In an article published today, April 24, 2009, at Big Brass Blog, contributing writer Father Tyme tells the reading audience that MSNBC political commentator Keith Olbermann has pledged to donate to charity the sum of $1000 for every second that Right-wing FOX News torture apologist Sean Hannity sustains what is known as the "interrogation method" called "waterboarding." Earlier this week, Mr. Hannity stated on national television that he would actually volunteer for the treatment.

To the purpose of making this idea a real television event, I hereby volunteer to spearhead the waterboarding exercise on Sean Hannity.

No, I'm dead serious. I want to make sure that proper procedure is followed. It seems that the mainstream media sages have all settled on how waterboarding is done, and that method I've heard described and seen being simulated is most decidedly not the only way this particular "enhanced interrogation method" can be carried out. I would be terribly disappointed if the brave Torture Boyz we pay to do the real deal do not know all about the creativity and variation that are essential parts of the horror.

Context is hugely important, too: a prisoner who has been mistreated prior to the waterboarding, who knows his life will get no better after the waterboarding, and who is convinced that more waterboarding and other forms of violence against him are a certainty is a man who will surely become bent of mind as well as of body. As days stretch to weeks, weeks stretch to months, and months stretch to years, the concept of "will" becomes meaningless. Survival becomes an autonomous process separated from conscious thought, which itself, at best, reduces to encoded scripts, rituals, and other devices of mental defense in the all-consuming hopelessness of the situation. Training helps; so does fanatical dedication to cause. Essential features of up-bringing, blood, and beliefs play in, too.

People recover from such life-changing experiences: some reconstitute their highest cognitive, emotional, and empathic skills phenomenally well; others, not so well. At worst, only the shell of a human of high-order thinking, feeling, and other-connecting abilities endures.

Mr. Hannity can get waterboarded, and I want to help; but he and all the others who think they might be okay for the experience would remain, in the incidence of this form of torture, clueless.

They just would. When the show is over, they get to go home. They know they're not captives, and they know their handlers are not out to kill them.

Fortunately for them, they thrive in the protective enclosure of false light. Unfortunately for the civilized among the populous, the Right-wing cowards who listen to the false bravado of fellow Right-wing cowards will be emboldened to carry on under the delusion that they are — in their sniveling individual lives and the putrefaction of their collective pack — something other than unrepentant, clueless cowards who will run from any fight that is not staged and flee from any battle that is not a mere simplistic simulation of real life, death, and the bravery that compels warriors to risk the former in the blood currency of the latter.

To Sean Hannity: Contact me, son. I know a waterboarding method that will rock your world. Let me do that one to you.

Yes, you're going to be stripped naked, and then mocked and otherwise humiliated; but that's not the worst of it, junior: you don't get a blindfold. That's what makes this waterboarding technique so cool. You, yourself, get to watch the action. Some people have said they actually see themselves while it's happening.

Ten seconds in; then I pull you, ask you a question you will most definitely not want to answer on national TV, and if you don't tell me what I want to hear, you get 10 more seconds.

I promise, that first 10 seconds will be the longest of your miserable life. The second 10 seconds will make the first 10 seem like a walk in the park. We'll let the viewing audience do a call-in vote on when we stop if you haven't already cracked on one of the first two pulls. Most definitely, you're not the one who decides the parameters of this game. You have to be powerless, just like the detainees to whom we do these things. Maybe even if you tell me what I want, I'll tell you you're a liar and keep at it. That's how it works with state-sponsored violence.

When we're done, I'll share with you something really important. Even though you might be shaking, even though you might be blubbering like a baby, even though you might be soiling yourself, I'll tell you the big news, and I'll say it like this, right in your ear, just the way the drill sergeants used to tell it to all the boot camp trainees to tear them down so they'd die on command like so many pack animals:

"You, Sean Hannity, ain't nuthin' but a pussy."

But, then again, Sean, you and your fellow Right-wing authoritarians already knew that, didn't you?

I'll be seeing you down by the watering hole, boy.