http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12815760/?GT1=8199so even though it's msnbc, i posted this thread, because it seems we've reached the height of lunacy. The church is worried that people are losing faith with the vatican, etc. because of the movie (they weren't nearly as worried about the book b/c we remain a largely illiterate group of overdeveloped monkeys). They would never stop to think that perhaps catholicism is on its heels because of it's policy of not prosecuting pedophile fucking rapists within its ranks. I've not read the book, my taste for this kind of thing falls more along the lines of Foucalt's Pendulum, rather than Da Vinci Code. Unfortunately, Eco's book is almost entirely unfilmable, and no one (at least in this country) would get it.
It amazes me how much we can stray from the truth, or rather, allow ourselves to be led away from it, simply b/c the person doing the leading has a pointy hat, or a shiny robe, or because people say, respect the office, not the man. I'll respect the office when the man inside finally does something respectable.
also,
I also found this article in the latest version of Harper's (an excellent magazine) by Art Spiegelman
http://www.lambiek.net/artists/s/spiegelman.htm about the controversy over cartoons. He makes some pretty interesting points about "what's really going on"
also,
within that same magazine i found another article (it really is a good magazine) debating the law about not being able to threaten to kill, hurt, or kidnap any us president. There are people in jail for this. So this guy, Ben Metcalf, writes an article about wanting to throttle the presdient with his own hands. Here are a coulle of the juicier parts:
"...a law that deems gulity of a federal offense anyone who knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail.. any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the P of U.S... or knowingly and willfully otherwise make such a threat." Having reminded us that murder was already illegal in 1917 america (hard to believe, but true) this strikes him as the conceit of an oligarchy. "I doubt that their separation (those prosecuted under this law) from the American flock has improved presidential safety so much as it has lessened the willingness of marginally more literate lambs, the ones who publish, to test their sheperds with anything sharper than the conventionally approved tropes of the day."
"True, GW Bush is an ignorant, cruel, closed-minded, avaricious, sneaky, irresponsible, thieving, brain-damaged frat boy with a drinking problem and a taste for bloodshed, whose numerous crimes have been abetted by the moral corruption of his party cohort and whose contempt for american military lives alone warrants his impeachment, but what has it ever won us to say so? How has it profited the people for their writers to argue that a wealthy, comfortable citizen deserves a wealthy, comfortable retirement when we all know full well that he has earned confinement and conviction and perhaps even a request for that barbaric death penalty he so loudly supports? What goal, besides an impoverished gurantee of my own personal 'freedom,' is served by a refusal to acknowledge that I might easliy, and enjoyably, rid us of this man forever with my very hands?"
and my personal favorite, as part of his conclusion that "baseless threats are not prosecuted" is an asinine way to defend this law:
As long as I (that is, the corporeal, arrestable I) wish no real damage upon the president, I (the other I) should theoretically be free even to enhance the scenario at hand for the enjoyment of my public. In place of the initial question (the whole throttling thing) I might ask instead, "Am I allowed to write that I would like to kidnap GW Bush and fly him to a prison in some faraway land where his 'rights' are no longer an issue, there to put a bag over his head and make him stand for hours on one leg while I defecate on his New Testament before chaining his arms to the ceiling until he dies of a heart attack, after which I will claim he never existed?"
The writer was advised to keep this essay "satirial" as that was to be his defense "later on".
thoughts?
I'm not trolling, provoking arguments, just wonder what people think of all this, and what they think should be done, if anything. The spirit of debate is fractured in this country (us) and I doubt it's all that much healthier everywhere else in the world.
