Dick Cheney's America: Bondage Without a Safe Word:
Let us say, and why not, that you are a man, a gay man, if you will, and you love to be humiliated before, during, and after a good fucking. You're not a leather slave. That's a little too esoteric for you. And you're more hardcore than your run-of-the-mill tie-me-to-the-bedposts-and-whip-me-with-a-feather-boa game player. No, you love being disciplined, being told you are worthless, you are shit, being punished by being denied orgasm, by getting a spanking, by having to lick your dom's balls clean, by letting him jack off while watching you getting fucked by strangers, by pinching your nipples with clamps and shoving a remote-controlled anal vibrator in you and making you sit in the park while he's somewhere, occasionally turning that little probe up to eleven, making your prostate twitch and trying so goddamn hard not to get a boner because, well, because that's the task you've been given, and if you succeed, you will be rewarded with ejaculatory ecstasy, and if you fail, well, shit, that's just another word for succeeding. You are, to use a term of art, a good little subby.

But there's an understanding between you and your dom: this is your fantasy life. This is something that you willingly give yourself to, and, that, weekend over, even a delightfully long weekend like Memorial Day, you still have to put on the suit and head off to the cubicle to become the computer jockey you went to college to be. So with your dom, because you know that sometimes, in the heat of the blindfolded nut shaving or the insertion of the ten-inch dildo in your ass just before you get a cock shoved in your mouth or the ever popular "riding the love donkey side-saddle," you and your dom have established a safe word. That is, something you say if it's all gone too far, that you're bleeding more than you expected, that something's tearing that shouldn't be, that a bone is about to snap, that the noose is too tight. You wanna choose a word that wouldn't say unless you consciously thought you needed to speak it. Let us say, and why not, that your safe word is "Geneva." You say, "Geneva" whenever you need circulation back to your wrists, whenever the crucifixion play is getting too close to actual nailing, whenever the mummification is crushing your lungs.

Talk to any of the denizens of the alt community, people who get their freak on with varying amounts of pain, humiliation, dominance, submission, fluids, organic material, animals, toys, and stainless steel devices. The safe word is a contract.

Now, the problem, of course, is that there's always those who just don't wanna play by the rules, consequences be damned. For these doms, the safe word means that things are just getting interesting. The safe word is an impediment, a pathetic speed bump on the highway of spunk-spewing intensity. The dom that ignores the cry of "Geneva" thinks that your lips say "No, no," but the abject terror and excruciating pain in your eyes says, "Yes, yes." In other words, get ready to be fucked in ways that you never thought possible, for blood and vomit to be lubricants, for the darker the bruise to mean the greater the pleasure, for knives and razors and brands to make their permanent presence known on your skin. In other words, once the safe word is meaningless, anything goes and the order that you believed you got fucked under has been reduced to chaos, even as the dom believes that, truly, what he's doing is giving you life-changing experiences, either to own you or to "liberate" you.

In his speech at West Point's graduation last week, Dick Cheney said that the safe words of the United States no longer apply. As the sebaceous cyst, that puss-filled sac, that is the Vice President undulated to the dais in front of the cadets he was condemning to despair and death, he spewed his goo by saying, "As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away."

Yep, the Geneva Convention and the Constitution are merely for those with "delicate sensibilities," not, you know, absolute and foundational documents about how this nation conducts itself. They are the safe words that must be ignored for those who Cheney believes must submit. Even the logic of it is pure idiocy. It's like saying, for instance, that Scooter Libby flouted the law, but when he was arrested, that fucker was such a pussy that he believed he had the right to counsel. Why didn't he think about that when he was perjuring himself?

Some of those graduating cadets at West Point no doubt majored in Law, some of them took law courses as electives. The majors had to take LW474, the "Law of War" course, which has this description: "The ethical and historical background of LOW will be examined, including Geneva Conventions and protocols, and how LOW is enforced on international and national levels, to include prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Illustrative examples will include the Nuremberg Tribunal, MY Lai, and the Gulf War. The emphasis is on the LOW responsibilities of the junior officer."

One imagines that in this course and others, the Geneva Conventions aren't treated like a road block, like a buzzkill, like so much useless trash written in quaint terms of right and wrong. No, it's a safe word - it means that you have to stop before you go so far you degrade everyone involved, prisoners, cadets, even depraved Vice Presidents.