Staledating: Or, How Dating Can Be Almost As Fun As Getting Waterboarded!

Staledating. This is what happens when the entire non-courtship feels like amicable divorce. Or, let's get serious, Guantanamo. He is the interrogator and you are Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and society has implicated you in the hijacking death of its high school girlfriend and his high school girlfriend was hijacked by some douchebag band dude once, and you will gladly assume credit for that and her death if it makes your interactions more amusing, since that is all you have; this is the fate you chose when you moved here. "Come on," he tells you, every time you meet. "You want a boyfriend. Everyone does. It is human nature. Look at you, you look so haggard. You want to stop this. I could stop this. Any time, just admit to me that that you desire a house and a lawn and a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes just like everyone else in the world, admit to me that the ideology of the hegemony is superior or it would not have claimed hegemony to begin with, and that history should have ended already, and I will hand you the keys to your freedom." Ah, freedom.

Freedom makes you long for fried potatoes, some of which he'll bring you from the MP canteen if you let him win a few rhetorical rounds. "Philosophically, I suppose I am also seeking love," you allow. But that soon becomes irksome. You remind him that he would, were his society less inculcated in materialism, probably take eternal life with 69 virgins or whatever the stupid legend has it. No, he knows he knows nothing of the pain suffered by your people at the hands of his, their tragic marginalization and disenfranchisement at the hands of Dudes like himself, just as you know that, in his position, you would probably be a little rougher about flouting those Geneva Conventions. He used to dream of "cracking" a high-level suspect like yourself; but "cracking" is probably apocryphal; no one in this wing of the prison has ever seen it happen and now everyone's curiosity has receded into a quiet unacknowledged acceptance of the fact that everyone there is seeking the same thing: Death.

(With virgins.)

Alleged 9/11 Mastermind Due In Court [Washington Post]