One Year Ago: A Public Torture

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Raymond Johansen allowed himself to be tortured one year ago today, August 16, 2015, in solidarity with Saudi writer Raif Badawi.

Johansen was hit 50 times by a friend, Tony Clenaghan, with a thin cane, a switch, in Trafalgar Square, where corporal punishments once upon a time were held in public and frequently, but not since the 1830s. Johansen had difficulty walking afterward and even expressed confusion as to where he was upon speaking with a reporter. (Video below.)

When a caning is administered it sometimes does not look as severe as one thinks a beating would look; even one of the words we employ minimizes the severity: “lashes.” In writing about the Saudi Arabian writer Raif Badawi, who was sentenced by Saudi Arabia in 2014 to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison, I have run into the shallow poverty of available analogies. All language is analogy, metaphor, and I have wanted the words to be sufficient to convey the pain of judicial corporal punishment, but they do not. They can not. Raymond Johansen’s action last year pumped life into the analogies, however.
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Today in History: August 14

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister and their staffs met for a secret conference on board the USS Augusta in Placentia Bay in Newfoundland the first week of August 1941. The result of the meeting was a policy statement signed by the two leaders called the “Joint Declaration by the President and the Prime Minister,” but by the end of August it was being referred to in the press as the “Atlantic Charter.” It was published seventy-five years ago today.

The nations that eventually signed it—the Allied nations of World War II—used it as a basis for creating the United Nations.
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Today in History: August 13

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The first episode of South Park aired on Comedy Central on this date in 1997. It remains the only episode created entirely with paper cut-outs.

Despite its high ratings (a 1.3 at 10:00 p.m. on a basic cable channel that was less than 10 years old in 1997 was quite a solid performance and amounted to almost one million television sets tuned in), the episode did not win its creators a long-term contract for the show. Within a month, however, the program had doubled its viewership, by the end of the season it had quintupled its viewer numbers, and a hit was born.
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