Holy… Shit… Harper’s… Oh… My… God…
If you haven’t already read the June issue of Harper’s—yes, Harper’s—you might want to rush out and get one before the whole staff is shipped off to Gitmo or their offices are firebombed.
This month’s Notebook column, “On Simple Human Decency,” by Harper’s literary editor Ben Metcalf, is… stunning. Brave. Nuts. Anyone who thought the anti-Bush rhetoric would cool once Lewis Lapham stepped as Editor down has another think coming…
Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the President of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?Let me be clear that I have no wish to perform such a deed in fact…. I seek only to gauge what level of discourse is still acceptable in this country by asking, in the hope that I might someday participate in that discourse, whether I am free to posit that it would probably be great fun, and a boon to all mankind, if i were to slaughter the president of the United States with my bare hands?
….In place of the initial question I might ask instead, “Am I allowed to write that I would like to kidnap George W. Bush and fly him to a prison in some faraway land where his ‘rights’ are no longer an issue, there to put a bag over his head and making him stand for hours on one leg while I defecate on his New Testament before chaining his arms to the ceiling until he dies of a heart attack, after which I will claim that he never existed?”
It’s not just idle, sensationalistic threats—Metcalf’s essay has a point, but I’m not going to reproduce his despairing nut graph here. Go buy the mag. And I can’t link to the essay, unfortunately because it isn’t up on the website yet—hell, I’m surprised that their website is still up at all. So if you want to read this… this… freaking brilliant, terrifying, breathtaking piece (and you do want to read this piece), then you’ll just have to march your butt down to Bulldog or Steve’s Broadway News or the newstand in the Pike Place Market and buy a copy of Harper’s.
And just in case Metcalf’s take-no-prisoners-but-one essay, which kicks off the issue, wasn’t shit-kicking enough, the issue includes an essay by Art Spiegelman on the Danish Mohammed cartoons—and unlike the issue of Harper’s in which Lapham condemned the cowardly American media for not showing the cartoons, this issue of Harper’s shows them all—each and every one. Twice. It also includes Spiegelman’s entry for Iran’s deny-the-Holocaust cartoon contest. (Both of Spiegelman’s parents survived Auschwitz, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus, a comic novel about his father’s experiences during the Second World War.) Spiegelman’s Holocaust-denial comic is… it unnerves me to say… grimly hilarious.
If someone can print bad things like that about our president then there's no way the press is censored everyone, no need to worry about that...
And if you want to vote out Bush to really show those S.O.B. Republican's who's in charge then stand up and vote him out!
We have jobs waiting for all of the Bush administration at Halliburton and they'll make ten times what they made in government. So go ahead and vote out whoever you like!
Now everyone put on your liberal slogan t-shirts and repeat after me...George W. eats his own potty and he's a bad person who picks his boogers!...he eats his own boogers!
That's right let it all out. Just as long as you keep driving your SUVs to the corporate store to buy magazines printed on dead trees...you can say whatever you like!
Isn't free speech a gift?