Friday April 18, 2008

IN THIS VERSION, SALLY BOWLES CAUSES THE HOLOCAUST. Talk show host Dori Monson denounces a Nicaraguan art installation in which a dog was starved. His conclusion:

You want an example of the slippery slope of an art world where anything goes? This is just an extension of the moral depravity of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe with his bullwhip in the anus... of Andrew Serrano with "Piss Christ"... when you have acceptance of works like those, it is not a tremendous moral leap to starving a dog.

Well said, comrade! When nothing is true, everything is permitted! I feel empowered to graduate from my occasionally obscene writings to a killing spree. Who's with me? (If you feel unqualified because you only swear recreationally, in the manner of the Wizard of Oz I'll give you some hokey-looking certificate, and then we can go hit the homeless encampments.)

As I've noticed before, these people really don't understand the idea of consent.

UPDATE. When Matthew Yglesias made the Obama-Jay-Z connection, I thought: oh no, soon they'll be demanding Obama identify and explain the 99 problems of which a bitch is not one! Sure enough, here comes the thin end of the wedge: Stop The ACLU brings up the Jay-Z thing, then suggest that Obama gave Hillary the finger, something he clearly learned from his gangsta rap homies. And since, as we have seen, engagement in obscenity leads to a reckless disregard for life itself, it's only a matter of time before Clinton makes a citizen's arrest, claiming there's a guy in Allentown who swears the man who shot him looked just like Obama.

UPDATE II. Well, that got around. RedState commenter: "It might not have been intentional, but if it was, it makes me like him more. Although I'd still use it to trash him in the general election." Laugh about it, shout about it, when you've got to choose/Either way you look at it you lose.

UPDATE III. As some commenters point out, this dovetails nicely with the Yale miscarriage artist whose possibly hypothetical stunt incurred the wrath of seriously underqualified art critics all along the reactionary fringe. My favorite, from a commenter at a well-known libertarian site: "And we come to the crux of what I hate about art." Well, yeah: as we have discussed before, the instinctual reaction of propagandists to anything more complex than a Morning Memo will always be High Boorishness.