Is sodomy with a stick worse than death?

After all, police killing citizens is not what put the "New" in New York. This is the city where in the early 1970s officer Robert Torsney shot 10-year-old Clifford Glover in the head after Glover encountered Torsney outside the building where he lived and asked if there was trouble inside. This is where a group of police officers shot 24 bullets and killed Louis Baez in 1984 in response to his parents' summoning police to help them subdue their mentally ill son.

Where but in the Big Apple was 69-year-old Eleanor Bumpers shot to death by a gang of officers who surrounded her but found no other way to subdue an elderly, overweight grandma brandishing a kitchen knife? And these are only the murders by police that made headlines. There are plenty more. In every one of those cases, and hundreds of others, the victim paid the ultimate price, death.

Yet the response to the Louima case suggests that, contrary to old adages and common belief, there is a fate worse than death, and that is loss of manhood. Not to minimize Abner Louima's terror, pain, suffering and humiliation, but he is, unlike so many victims of police brutality before him, alive. He still breathes, kisses his family goodnight, awaits the birth of his third child. Even the possible life sentence is more a reflection of outraged manhood than even-handed justice, given how infrequently rape and murder are punished with life sentences -- not to mention the fact that I'm not aware of any cop spending his life behind bars for the crime of killing someone in his custody. But maybe a case like that escaped me.

What the black community's response to the crimes against Abner Louima seems to say is that for a black man, nothing is worse than having something shoved up your ass -- not even death. It is chilling, and heartbreaking, that black people too have come to devalue black lives. Just as scary is the embrace of patriarchal, racist and homophobic notions of manhood -- and by its absence, womanhood -- in the ranking of crimes against those very same black lives. Thus, we are able to sustain our outrage at the sadism of Louima's torture, as well as the magnitude of the number of bullets -- 41 -- fired at Amadou Diallo, but it's hard to get it up when it's just a plain old, home-grown African-American killed by police firing one or two or 12 bullets.

But this primal horror extends beyond the black community. After all, it was the taboo nature of the crime against Louima that made white cops break their code of silence and tell on Volpe. Their candor is welcome, but it would be nice to see similar honesty in cases of police killings, not to mention the routine beatings and abuse meted out by the men in blue.

Just as porn freaks need more deviant stimulation, dope fiends demand more potent dope and violence aficionados are constantly upping the ante, so Americans are constantly upping the price of our horror, compassion and outrage. After the school shootings in Georgia, an acquaintance remarked to me that "he didn't even kill anyone," as if somehow the lack of dead bodies make the kid's crime not only a failure, but passé. Likewise with police brutality. It ain't enough to simply be shot and killed by out of control cops over some bullshit -- no one gives a damn. At the millennium we need a bigger hit, say 41 bullets plus, or the living death of manhood assaulted.

The irony is that with his plea, Volpe may very well have consigned himself to the same hell of assaulted manhood he visited upon Abner Louima, that fate worse than death. "The brothers are definitely waiting for his motherfuckin' ass," says a friend who served hard time. "The only hope, if you want to call it that, is that the Aryan Brotherhood is waiting to worship his ass."

In the end, inside prison and out, it all comes down to that same tired dick thing. And until it becomes a human thing, we'll all continue getting fucked, one way or another, like it or not.

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