Mr. Snicket, Alabama would like a word with you

I think the “satire/irony is dead” meme is getting a bit tired. Where did that one get started anyway?

Also, why no preview button here on the walls of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria?

And don’t anybody even think about making any tasteless jokes about “race to the bottom”. As soon as I hit the “post” button I thought, “maybe I should have worded that differently…”

This would ban books about King James and J. Edgar Hoover. And, depending on what percentage of Evil Content is allowed, it might bar all history textbooks currently in use. Even if they don’t mention what Alexander the Great (among others) did in bed.

I presume the Old Testament would get the classics exemption.

Wall of the hinterlands from the coasts, an’ give’em subsidized budweiser, guns and crystal meth. The problem should sort itself out in a decade or two.

I suppose that _To Kill a Mockingbird_ would have to be banned, as well. After all, Truman Capote is one of the main characters.

How appropriate.

Since King James was gay, I gues the King James Bible is right out. Rep Aleen wants to ban the Bible!!!! Godless Heathen!!!!

The primary symptom of the death of irony: The fetishization of sincerity.

With Tom Lehrer, I think. When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Prize for Peace, Lehrer retired as a performer; “It was at that moment that satire died … There was nothing more to say after that.”
Ah, yes, now I think I remember that. I wasn’t aware that that was where it had started. I always remember, years later, when asked why he no longer wrote songs about politics, he said, “I feel a little like a resident of Pompeii being asked for some humorous comments on lava.”

Ridiculing the seriousness and activism of the religious right is up there with group masturbation on the big list of politically effective strategies and techniques.
The religious right assumed power in the US, dominant power, while smarter more sophisticated people giggled at their buffoonish superstitions and illogical pronouncements.
Yuk yuk.
Bush got re-elected while you guys were snickering at his constituency.
Yuk and yuk.
What is Rep. Allen really concerned about?
Social decay? Do we have social decay? Huh? Do we?
Possibly Rep. Allen has misdiagnosed the problem, possibly homosexuals aren’t to blame for what’s wrong. Possibly it’s the fault of less-easily identified spineless assholes, who’d rather self-gratify with cheap yuks than confront the dire truth. Cowardice is more to the point.
Allen’s right about there being a problem, and he’s right that the children of Alabama are threatened, seriously threatened. Right there your laughter and ridicule become inappropriate.

Back in the late 1980s, I worked with a white woman from Alabama who was in early 50s. She once said that every time she thought be able to tell people she was from Alabama without being embarassed, “some durn fool would do something” to make the state a laughing stock all over again. Having seen first the state Chief Justice Moore make a “durn fool” of himself over displaying the Ten Commanmants and now this ever greater idiot, you can certainly sympathize with her!
She also said once, “I do not know why the Good Lord ever created the state of Mississippi, ‘less it was to give folks from Alabama somebody to look down upon!”

In New Mexico, “Thank God for Mississippi” is the state motto.

“Books by any gay author would have to go…”

I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but doesn’t this seem a little, umm, 1930s-Germany-esque? I mean, there seems to be some kind of family resemblance between the social stigma attached to homosexuals now and that attached to Jews for most of the past 2000 years, at least in Europe.

However, I am too ignorant of history to make such broad generalizations without a historian around to set things straight…Is there a historian in the house to comment on this assertion?

B.Freed-
If my point was to call attention to the self-satisfied nature of a solid majority of what should be, and considers itself to be, the moral opposition to the stridently vocal and increasingly severe intolerance of the not-insignificant portion of the American electorate Rep. Allen is this week’s lightning rod for – and it was – then you’ve proved its apposite nature in spades.
I repeat, in so many words:
George Bush is enjoying his second term. The damage he’s done is nearly irreparable. Scorn away, impotent twits!
I elaborate, using new words:
We’re witnessing social decay that Caligula and Louis XVI would be familiar with, and, aside from a few lone voices here and there, the only clear public support for attempts to achieve a healthy environment for the young – most of whom seem to have been fluted away into the mountain caverns of a techno-Hamelin, following a glittering tune of inhuman and decidedly non-parental seduction – are coming from the congregations Allen would recognize as his own.
As cbl timidly remarks, though not in so many words:
This thing is going somewhere, somewhere dark.
My point – you better catch that drift while you still can.
What Allen misreads as a homosexual agenda is something much less natural, but that doesn’t make his concern inaccurate. It’s the target, the causative force he’s missing; he’s not mistaken about the threat. His concern deserves respect, and needs immediate redirection.
In that context, snarkiness is just complacency with a nihilist hard-on and nowhere to put it.

I wonder if artists and musicians are also to be banned as producers of entartete Kunst. Farewell to Michelangelo and Leonardo, as well as Byron and Whitman, Proust and Tchaikovsky, Bernstein, Copland and Sondheim.

All books can be indecent books
though recent books are bolder
for filth, I’m glad to say,
is in the mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed
anything is lewd
I could tell you things about Peter Pan
or the Wizard of Oz – there’s a dirty old man!

Freed- You tell me.
It’s absurd no matter how you look at it; from the stage. Or the cockpit.
But the imminent threat’s not diminishing, it’s building. If that doesn’t concern you I’d suggest you might be more complicitous than you’re willing to admit.
More fun is pretending there is no threat. No threat! Nothing wrong! Things have never been better!
For who? Not Allen’s people.
Also tell me whether or not Allen’s wrong in his assessment that the children of his constituency are in danger. That doesn’t bother you too much though does it? They’re expendable, ignorant, bigots. Away with them!
That he himself presents a danger to what he’s trying to protect, in his misguided attempt to do something about it, doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
Scorn is still the hallmark of cowardice. That it’s so common now is an indictment of the age.
We need, as Rep. Allen does as well, tighter terms, more accurate descriptions.
“The Jews” is meaningless, and it allows thugs to hide behind the innocent – “See? All the same! Innocent!”
No. Not all the same.
And it wasn’t what I meant at all.
But it’s a great way of stopping what little debate there was.

Dear M. Moran:

Cracking a few jokes on a website is not the same as “doing nothing.” Christ, even the most Dedicated Of Activists can’t be on Hyper Sincere Mode all the time. That’s how people burn out.

In other words, please step down off your high horse.

And by the way, what exactly IS the threat Allen is rightfully responding to? You’ve said it isn’t homosexuality, so what is it? This cryptic stuff is bullshit.