Pointing Fingers

The Devils Wear Prada, as the Pope Gets Harder

Italian comedienne, Sabrina Guzzanti, is facing a five year prison sentence for making a joke about Pope Benedict XVI. Roman prosecutor, Giovanni Ferrara, invoking the 1929 Lateran Treaty between Italy and the Vatican, makes any insult toward the Pope equal to insulting the Prime Minister. Guzzanti, in a gag about Italian teachers being vetted by the Vatican 20 years from now, exclaimed in her punch line, clearly lost in the translation: "But then, within 20 years the Pope will be where he ought to be — in Hell, tormented by great big poofter devils, and very active ones, not passive ones."

The 1929 Lateran Treaty, enacted by Italy’s Fascist government, makes it a crime to criticize crooks like Silvio Berlusconi or pansy Popes in Prada slippers and satin dresses. You could probably call them fascists or Nazis though. They wouldn’t regard such characterizations as insults.

911: Just For the Taste of It

"Things Go Better" was published on Annoy.com on September 11, 2002, on the first anniversary of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil, inspiring a slew of hate mail and threats. Still fresh in the memory of many, few understood the intention of the piece.

The accompanying text, a reworking of The Gettysburg Address titled The Forgettysburg Redress envisioned the inevitable crass commercialization of September 11th, imagining the nauseating prospect of the government packaging fear, and companies making money off the tragedy, slapping their brands onto anything resembling twin towers, from key chains to currency.

"We are met on an already abused symbol of that war. We come to desecrate a portion of it, as a neatly packaged placation for those who never died here, creating pitiable tokens for those who live. This may, in pop psychology, give “closure”. But, in a truer sense, we aggrandize -- we embellish-- we cheapen, this ground -- The ordinary people, living and dead, who struggled here, are trivialized, lost beneath our superior power to dehumanize and brand."

Sarah Palin and Me: Burning Books, Drowning Babies and Biting Tongues

 

Despite my horror over Sarah Palin’s apparent attempts to censor books, I find myself shelving an image that I created for an editorial relating to the Republican strategy for this election. Why? Not because the image is remarkable, but because it is remarkably simplistic.

A few years ago, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek listing of items on the supposed Gay Agenda. At the time, I predicted that the danger in even posting it, was that homophobes with ill intentions would misappropriate it, or use it out of context as a weapon. Organizations like Concerned Women for America. Needless to say, although it took longer than predicted, Concerned Women for America’s Matt Barber and notorious homophobe, Peter Peter LaBarbera from Americans for Truth wrote Unmasking The ‘Gay’ Agenda and Quotes: Hating Jesus, and Selfishness Redefined respectively. Presenting my satire as a candid assessment, and me as a hateful, dangerous homofascist persecutor.

But there is too much at stake in this election for me to publish an easy to replicate graphic that could be shared easily, and most certainly could and would be taken out of context. So I will wait. And bite my tongue and postpone my criticism for some of the organizations that fail to anticipate how font, placement, positioning and subliminal association need to be factored into thinking before mass distribution of a message, image or graphic.

So instead, I present a childish, irrelevant distraction, lest anyone ponder the above paragraph too much. Doesn’t Sarah Palin look remarkably like Andrea Yates? Remember that small town values, religious mother from good old Texas? They both had five children. Well Palin still does, and Alaskans have been ordered to pray for her eldest son, Track – about to be shipped off to do God’s work in Iraq -- so he should be fine. Yates believes God told her to drown all her children, so she did. Was this Track’s choice? Or did God tell Palin to sacrifice Track, the same way her daughter Bristol sacrificed her childhood?

 Palin’s church, The Wasilla Bible Church, supposedly less extreme than her previous Assemblies of God venue of prayer, is currently promoting an upcoming Focus on the Family conference in Anchorage to “cure homosexuality” or pray the gay away, likely to be about as effective as her abstinence only sex education was in preventing Bristol from getting knocked up.

Vote.