I'll bet there's music I could play right now that would make you want to change the station.

Not that I actually want to drive you away…but, as an experiment, if I play this:

[CLIP]

Hard to take for very long, right? Or, try this:

CLIP: Alban Berg

...and if I turn that up louder...and louder…

All right, I'll stop. The point is, certain works of art can be painful to experience. And of course, pain, like beauty, is in the eye and ear of the beholder. It reminds me of the movie Clockwork Orange where Malcolm McDowell is tortured and rehabilitated by being forced to listen to his favorite music, while also being forced to look at horrific pictures.

[CLIP Clockwork Orange]

I bring this up because I can't stop thinking about a story I read not long ago concerning the Spanish Civil War.

According to evidence recently unearthed by a Spanish art historian, Sixty-five years ago this spring, the Republicans in Spain- the leftists who were fighting Franco -- created special torture chambers for prisoners….rooms with surfaces that werecovered by the squiggles and disturbing imagery of surrealism and other 1938 avant garde art. In other words, jail cells decorated by some third-rate Miro or Salvador Dali that were meant to freak out fascist prisoners.

They called it ''psychotechnic torture.''

As torture goes, it sounds pretty humane. Although if that's as tough as the good guys could get, no wonder the fascists won the Spanish civil war.

I was reminded just last week of this episode when I read about some of the "psychological operations," or "psy-ops" that our forces are using right now in Iraq.

The US military admits that while interrogating captured members of the deposed Iraqi regime, they have played the song "Bodies" by the band Drowning Pool.

CLIP: Bodies

According to an American sergeant who was involved in the program, quote, "These people haven't heard heavy metal before. They…they can't take it."

But it isn't just heavy metal and other deliberately unsettling music that our military intelligence people are using unsettle the captured Baathists.

What could be worse?

According to Newsweek, I swear to God, the interrogations of some of the thugs and war criminals in Iraq have been accompanied by music such as this:

CLIP: Barney the Dinosaur

I love you/ You love me/ We're a happy family/With a great big hug and/A kiss from me to you/ Won't you say you love me too?

Torture?

Yes, of a kind.

And probably more surreal than anything any artist in 1930's Spain ever dreamed up.

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