Cruel and Unusual Punishment? It's a Small World After All.....

On the face of it, it makes us laugh - Sesame Street used for torture?  But it isn't as funny as it might seem.  A friend of mine some years ago had an elementary age daughter; her grandmother gave her a toilet role holder from Disneyworld that played "It's a Small World" every time someone removed a sheet of TP.  I suspect it might have been intended as a device to help parents potty training toddlers.

But the darned thing wouldn't shut off.  It would go on playing, and playing and playing.  The smallest vibrations from someone walking through the hallway outside the bathroom could set it off, resulting in adults tip toeing around in their own home, for fear of triggering "It's a small world after aaaaaaaalll" for an hour.  It has been more than a decade since I babysat the child who dearly loved the gift from her grandparents, and I still cringe any time I hear this piece of drivel.  It has come to represent for me every nightmarishly garish gimcrack piece of cheap plastic garbage mind-numbingly mass produced to dumb down minds, eliminate critical thinking and genuine creativity, play to the lowest possible denominator of taste, and to cause us to contract diabetes through our ears.  When hearing this tune, for even the briefest moments, the least intense physical response I have it to throw objects, up to and including my shoes, at the source of the sound.  The random relentlessness of the tune, which was doubly loud when echoing off hard shiny bathroom tile, was what made the experience so insidious.  It gave a different dimension to the term 'domestic' terrorism.  If Disney tuneless doesn't do it for you, remember for just a moment what it was like the last time some slacker pulled up next to you with an over-amplified vehicle vibrating the ground with the sound of something stupid.  Yeah, like that.  Or think of the worst neighbor you've ever had, in terms of intrusive and inconsiderate, or ill timed sounds.

image from tmz

Volume was also part of the torture process using Sesame Street and other music at Guantanamo.  Volume can be painful, and even damaging, going way beyond simply being aggravating.

You can watch the full Al Jazeera documentary and other video of audio torture here.

The Huff Po covers it:
Torture By Sesame Street At Guantanamo Bay: Al Jazeera Reports
In 2008, reports surfaced that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had been tortured by songs such as Metallica's "Enter Sandman" and Drowning Pool's "Bodies."
Now, a new documentary from Al Jazeera shows that detainees may also have been subjected to musical torture of a softer variety.
According to the report, prisoners at the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base were forced to wear headphones blasting music from Sesame Street on repeat for hours or days on end.
Christopher Cerf, the award-winning composer of Sesame Street, was stunned to learn how his music was being exploited.
"My first reaction was this just can't possibly be true," he told Al Jazeera. "...Of course I didn't really like the idea that I was helping break down prisoners, but it was much worse when I heard later that they were actually using the music in Guantanamo to actually do deep, long-term interrogations and obviously to inflict enough pain on prisoners so they would talk."
This isn't the first time that music from Sesame Street has been used to break the will of prisoners. In 2003, the U.S. reportedly used the soundtrack to soften up Iraqi POWs.
Sesame Street, an educational children's television series, has been on the air since 1969.
Watch the full report from Al Jazeera in the video above. Below, check out some of the tunes reportedly used at Gitmo.