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The Big Picture is honored to have been added recently to the blogrolls of these weblogs:
Chrenkoff
Dave Munger
PoliBlogger
Speaking My Mind
The Iraq War Was Wrong Blog (A very funny parody of leftwing blogs)
The Spoons Experience
To the owners of these sites: thank you!
For years much of pop culture has celebrated the most horrible actions, including cop-killing, drive-by shooting, drug-dealing, etc. etc. My joke is that for 10 years, the black guys have been singing about shooting each other, and the white guys have been singing about shooting themselves.
Currently one play and one book advocate and encourage assassination. From Victor Davis Hanson:
The 2002 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Nicholson Baker, is due out with Checkpoint an extended dialogue on killing (in a variety of strange ways) George Bush. Last year, comedian Rick Hall played to full houses in the U.K., performing his newest composition, Let’s Get Together and Kill George Bush. A so-called pacifist group announced its sponsorship of a rather violent-sounding off-Broadway guerilla comedy entitled, Im Gonna Kill the President.
Pop culture has paralyzed criticism by pretending that such criticism is an infringement on its freedom of speech. This is nonsense. We love freedom of speech. But we’re not big fans of advocating murder. We want to have matches to light our barbecues, but we protest against terrorists who use them to burn down buildings.
From Zell Miller’s speech at the Republican Convention:
For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest.
It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag, who gives that protester the freedom to abuse and burn that flag.
When pop culture promotes heinous things, what is to be condemned is not the freedom of speech our great country provides, but the abuse of it, that advocates harm to the very country that provides that freedom.
I think we can all agree that speech that advocates murder is an abuse of freedom of speech.
Such abuse of freedom of speech must be put down, not by outlawing it, but by protesting against it.
Update 9-10-04. Welcome, Carnival of the Vanities readers! This site is proud to have this article included in the latest Carnival of the Vanities, hosted this week by Encyclopeteia.
