During the first several years of my hearing him play, NoC house-poet Wes Houp mainly covered old and older blues songs. A lot of “Don’t Pity Me,” “Back Door Stranger,” “Take Me Back,” and, because he knew I spent my high school years in Alabama, a Leroy Carr song that went something like, “Them Alabama women, they look just like the section men.” This last song delighted my wife, a Georgia native, to no end. (You can hear Wes do some of these songs on a 2005 Red Barn Radio show that is probably archived somewhere.)
“Torture me light blues,” written sometime early in the U.S.-declared Global War on Terror, is among the first crop of original songs I can remember hearing Wes play. The song is a ripped-from-the-headlines farce of the Torture Memos, a series of George Bush-era legal decrees that came to define the acceptable parameters for treating combatants swept up in our new wars.
The most famous of these memos, sent August 1, 2002 by President Bush’s Assistant Deputy Attorney General John Yoo (currently on faculty at UC-Berkeley), redefined such outlawed tactics like waterboarding, prolonged sleep deprivation and binding in stress positions as merely “enhanced interrogation,” not subject to the international standards for torture outlined in the Geneva Conventions. Other memos would authorize the illegal rendition of suspected terrorists from the soil of other nations, warrantless surveillance, and the opening of Gitmo Prison on the island of Cuba to hold terrorists indefinitely and without official charge.
(Editor’s Note: NoC cannot confirm the provenance of this audio copy, which was alleged to have been smuggled sometime in the mid-Aughts from the house-poet’s former Wilmore residence.)
At the time, say 2004, it was easy to conscript “Torture me light” into an anti-Republican worldview. The War on Terror, the Iraq War that complemented it, the post 9/11 Homeland Security surveillance apparatus, the abduction and permanent detention of other nation’s citizens without charge—all playfully referenced in the song’s enthusiastic embrace of a “torture me light” war-and-rendition policy….these were Republican ideas, George Bush goons!, generally (if belatedly) contested by Democrats both in office and out on the streets.
But nearly two decades later, the Global War on Terror now slouching into the Age of the Biden, Gitmo still going, the Obama drone program (with its own doublespeak memos) succeeding illegal rendition and enhanced interrogation, the country’s surveillance apparatus led by CIA Democrats like Adam Schiff (chief inquisitor of RussiaGate) and Democrat-donor companies like Facebook and Twitter—and, a final knee-capper, George Bush, the signer of the goddamn “Torture Memos,” a genuine war criminal, reintroduced as an anti-Trump statesman and unifying Joe Biden supporter, Wes’s song seems more prescient than ever.
“Torture me light” began life as a ripping satiric farce of the Bush era. As the country shuffles into our “nothing will fundamentally change” Joe Biden moment, its second life plays more like a tragic bummer.
Michael Benton
A song that tapped in to the angst and disillusionment we were feeling during the Bush administrations insane and absurd “war on terror.”
I remember that night when the picture with T-Bone and Farhad was taken 😀