Day six. Lifted my head, shook the sand out of my hair, and looked around. Picked up notebook and pencil. Started scratching out some notes. Starfish attacked me from behind — not good. Dropped off to sleep. Day seven…
Hi, kids. Thought I’d treat you to an excerpt from my journal as a castaway on this remote tropical island we’ve been calling Ben-Lostawhile. Kind of has a biblical ring to it, no? (No? Guess not.) I’ve just gotten started on this narrative, and hope to parlay it into some kind of publication — a novel, perhaps. Use a little creative license, what the hell. Just me instead of bunch of re-entry-burned bandmates. Nothing for sustenance but coconuts and coconut milk and… and coconut sorbet. A humble but loveable native islander assistant named Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Sounds about right. But I need a more literary sounding name. Like … DeFoe, perhaps. Or Pope. How about DePope? How’s that sound, Marvin?
Aside from the journal, things have been pretty quiet here on Ben-Lostawhile — quiet as a grave since we made landfall last week. Once the fires in and around the ship went out and Matt, John, Mitch Macaphee, Trevor James, the two Lincolns, and I were finished hopping up and down on the sand, clasping our smoking feet recently pan-seared on the super-hot hull of our space vehicle, we took a few moments to inspect the damage, looking for tell-tale signs of irreparability, like… well, like major navigational components missing or large breaches in the hull. We found nothing like that, but as you may remember, our engine was blown to atoms by Posi-Lincoln (whose master’s license was revoked more than a century ago, after he got tanked up and drove the monitor into a giant starfish — a lost chapter of history, to be sure), so we weren’t going anywhere fast. Or slow, for that matter.
Okay, so what did we do next? Ask yourself, “Self? What would you do next?” I think the answer might be… search the island for an affordable dry cleaner — the kind that doesn’t use that deadly chemical stuff. Surprising as this may be to you ultra-urban types, our search turned up nothing. 
Plantains. We found lots of plantains. But no two-hour shirt services to speak of, at least not within walking distance. Dejected, I sat on an overflowing chest of pirate treasure and tried to work out how we were going to survive on such an un-cosmopolitan outpost in the middle of the … well… I’m not even sure which ocean it is. The only one who seems relatively happy with this miserable exile is the man-sized tuber, who has planted himself a few hundred yards from the beach so that he can hit on this mango tree. (He’s been in space far too long, that boy.)
No, we haven’t given up. (Except for sFshzenKlyrn, who drifted off just moments after our arrival — as only he can do.) Who knows… maybe I can write my way off of this island. Worth a shot. Day seven. Sun burning hot through the palm leaves. A mast appears on the horizon. Nah. Too easy.
We’re talking about grabbing people in the middle of the night and dragging them off to some “dark site” (perhaps the basement of a suburban home, who knows?) with no legal recourse. We’re talking about lashing people to boards and holding them under water. We’re talking about beating them senseless and fucking with their minds until they don’t know their own mother’s name. And we’re also talking about shipping them off to third countries where they’ll get even worse — the full spectrum of coercive technologies, modern and medieval. Some of the Republican leadership in the Senate framed this as a battle for American “values,” though they appear to have caved as of this writing. They had also raised a more practical question of leaving our military people at risk of ill-treatment and our leaders and commanders at risk of prosecution for violations of international law. 
In fact, the worse their treatment the better, and if Bush can convince them that ill-treatment somehow makes them more safe, that’s better still. These base instincts are the same ones that inspire snickers at stories of prison rape, a staple of late-night television comedy monologues. Prisoner abuse constitutes the ultimate dehumanization, placing someone in a position of utter powerlessness, then systematically depriving them of dignity, basic physical security, and in some cases, life itself. Ugly as it is, prisoner abuse reflects a strand of our culture that’s as American as apple pie. Think about Abner Louima, the Haitian fellow who was beaten and sodomized with a nightstick by Rudy Giuliani’s NYPD. America’s mayor, wielding America’s nightstick. It’s in the blood, my friends. 
Sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip; that started in Colombo, aboard this fucking ship. This is (A) 110 pounds of mashed potatoes; (B) George Washington, our first president; (C) the ballad of 
In fact, seconds before impact, we blacked out, all of us, cold as whitefish on a bialy. (Mmmmmmmm. Whitefish.) Where was I? Oh yes — when we came to, we were on the beach of this picturesque made-for-television desert island somewhere in the South Pacific… or North Atlantic… or Western Indian… actually, I’m not entirely sure where we are. We could be on a Hollywood back lot for all I know. Wherever we are, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so long as you have your north and south straightened out and your eyeglasses aren’t on upside-down. (Or perhaps you’re built upside-down. Does your nose run? Do your feet smell?)