Posts from — April 2010

South Park recently aired two episodes in which the prophet Mohammed is depicted—or, perhaps more accurately, not-depicted. The conceit is that the litigious celebrities who have been the butt of the comedy series’ jokes want access to Mohammed so that they can take his “goo”, which would mean that they would acquire the Power To Not Be Ridiculed. At one point, Mohammed is supposedly ferried around in a bear suit (to avoid accusations of depicting him—though this makes no sense within the reality of the show itself), but it is revealed that in fact it is Santa Claus in the suit. This, of course, cleverly anticipates any extremist reaction: Mohammed was not represented as a bear, nor even as being dressed as a bear, yet there will still be controversy around his role in the episodes. At other times, Mohammed is covered with a giant “CENSORED”. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, its creators, have hinted that Comedy Central have censored more than was intended. The extent of this is unknown, but it seems certain that the censoring of Mohammed was deliberate on Matt and Trey’s part, since when Mohammed’s goo is transferred to Tom Cruise, the recipient is censored as well. The comment is clearly on the seeming arbitrariness of who can be made fun of. [Read more →]

“People, it’s time to tell the truth! This is a great crime! A conspiracy of Tusk, Obama and Putin!” Thus shouted one man through a loudspeaker in Warsaw when the coffin of Maria Kaczyńska, the Polish president’s wife, was being carried through the streets. In itself, this was unusual—if not necessarily the theory expounded, at least the public voicing of it in such a time of national mourning—but what followed was perhaps even more so. A white-shirted member of the public pleaded with the man to calm down, put away the loudspeaker, kneel on the ground and pray to God for forgiveness. The bewitched conspiracy theorist did so, after which he silently left the scene of the crime, loudspeaker in hand. [Read more →]

It is often surprising to see how true and applicable is George Orwell’s aphorism that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Sometimes one discovers what was directly in front of one’s nose only after walking away from that place, and seeing it floating mid-air from a distance. Fr Aidan Nichols, writing in the Catholic Herald, does make some interesting points in his article “The March of Nonsense on Stilts”, but where he fails, it is exactly in the aforementioned blindness to the obvious. [Read more →]