It’s an awesome outrage. Of course, some dinosaur Republicans might try to blame Obama.
“I am Charlie.” Screen grab from Charlie Hebdo‘s website,
January 7, 2015. Image from BBC News Europe.
This massacre is an awesome outrage, even to liberals and conservatives alike, although some dinosaur Republicans might try to blame Obama. It’s a horrendous violation of semantic principles, such as “The menu is not the meal” and “The map is not the territory.” As an atheist, I perceive the irony of those assassins shouting “God is great” to justify their insane act in the name of a deity that I believe doesn’t exist.
And what could happen in America? Security guards protecting the Onion offices? Treat Funny or Die as Islamic marching orders? Invade the cyberspace of NBC for broadcasting Saturday Night Live until it morphs into Saturday Night Dead, if it’s not already deceased?
Religions continue to rationalize their dogma, from birth to death — and then comes the hereafter for these Muslim murderers where all those virgins supposedly waiting to greet the Muslim murderers in Nirvana are busy reading Lysistrata.
OMG has declared war on LOL.
∗ Paul Krassner, The Rag Blog‘s David Hamilton, and French-based journalist Steve Weissman were Thorne Dreyer‘s guests on Rag Radio, Friday, January 16, 2015. The topic: “Blasphemy, Satire, and Charlie Hebdo.” Listen to the podcast here:
[Paul Krassner edited The Realist, America’s premier satirical rag, and was an original Yippie. Krassner’s latest book is Patty Hearst & the Twinkie Murders: A Tail of Two Trials, available at paulkrassner.com.]
I met Paul when he came to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Abortion was illegal – it was a very dark corner in the otherwise colorful world of exploration and creativity in the early 1960’s.
I can’t recall how it happened that I had become a member of the “safe abortion” underground (my term, now, no such tag then) and girls learned they could come to me, and I could give them contact information. Paul knew of another besides the famous Pennsylvania M.D. The lore was that his daughter had died from a “back alley” procedure.
I was flattered when I ran into Paul on 8th St. in the West Village a year or more after he spoke at Antioch, and he remembered me.
Could any of us have predicted the Roe v. Wade decision, or the persistence of the anti-abortion/choice faction into the 21st century? (Or how important it remains, now that my own daughter is already pre-menopausal, but her daughter, my only grandchild, is only 4. Or how increasingly obscene it feels to have congressmen focused on female reproduction. It’s about power. It’s about something quite intense like profound distrust, or distaste?, for women and the complexities of sex and pregnancy and birthing.
Anyway, I now can’t recall if it’s really true that there was/were state government efforts to legislate that female welfare recipients abort a pregnancy. And didn’t a court – the Supremes? – forbid it?
It occurs to me that Paul may be one guy who will remember – at least something I can use to research it.