"I mean, The New York Times actually had an interesting case recently where they described a detainee who was afraid of the dark, and so he was purposely kept very much in the dark"
About this Quote
The line lands like a casual aside, but it’s actually a scalpel. Mayer starts with the disarming cadence of conversation ("I mean") and the faint praise of institutional gravitas ("The New York Times... had an interesting case"), then pivots into a detail so blunt it curdles. That whiplash is the point: she’s showing how easily atrocity can be smuggled into public discourse when it’s packaged as reportage, as a "case", as something merely notable.
The most cutting move is her repetition of "dark". In ordinary language, being "kept in the dark" is a metaphor for ignorance. Mayer forces the phrase back into literal reality: darkness as a designed instrument of harm, calibrated to a person’s vulnerability. The subtext is a critique of bureaucratic cruelty, not the hot-blooded kind but the managerial kind, where fear becomes a lever and suffering becomes a protocol. "Purposely" does heavy moral work here; it strips away any alibi of chaos, necessity, or accident.
Contextually, Mayer’s reporting sits in the post-9/11 ecosystem of detention and interrogation, where euphemism ("enhanced", "stress positions") competed with public fatigue and partisan defensiveness. By anchoring the claim to the Times, she’s not outsourcing credibility so much as indicting the fact that such details are knowable, published, and still absorbable. The intent is to make the listener feel the obscene banality of it: a human weakness turned into a method, and a democratic public trained to hear it as just another story.
The most cutting move is her repetition of "dark". In ordinary language, being "kept in the dark" is a metaphor for ignorance. Mayer forces the phrase back into literal reality: darkness as a designed instrument of harm, calibrated to a person’s vulnerability. The subtext is a critique of bureaucratic cruelty, not the hot-blooded kind but the managerial kind, where fear becomes a lever and suffering becomes a protocol. "Purposely" does heavy moral work here; it strips away any alibi of chaos, necessity, or accident.
Contextually, Mayer’s reporting sits in the post-9/11 ecosystem of detention and interrogation, where euphemism ("enhanced", "stress positions") competed with public fatigue and partisan defensiveness. By anchoring the claim to the Times, she’s not outsourcing credibility so much as indicting the fact that such details are knowable, published, and still absorbable. The intent is to make the listener feel the obscene banality of it: a human weakness turned into a method, and a democratic public trained to hear it as just another story.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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