...went to see this movie called Milk which, as it turns out, has little or nothing to do with the dairy industry...instead, Sean Penn plays a guy named Harvey Milk who lived a long, long time ago, in an era far different from ours, when, in the state of California, pompous ignoramuses and cowardly bigots hid their hatred and stupidity behind cynical readings of the Bible and ludicrous homilies about protecting the family while pushing meanspirited ballot initiatives meant to deny basic civil rights to people based on sexual orientation....like I said, it was a long time ago....More people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, my friends, that is true perversion.
Hope will never be silent.
Harvey Milk
A blogger friend reamed me in a comment on that last post for using the word paranoid a bit too loosely in these days of ever watchful eyes....and, of course, she’s got a point....far be it from me to say that reality isn’t crazier than even the craziest among us can imagine....and yet...looking at the situation, I see concentric circles of crazed fear...with small time would-be radicals vaingloriously imagining themselves important and dangerous enough to the powers-that-be to be watched, and those very powers seeing danger everywhere, and vaingloriously imagining that they can and should watch everything....Michel Foucault wrote it is not on the fringes of society and through successive exiles that criminality is born, but by means of ever more insistent surveillance, by an accumulation of disciplinary coercion....I’ve read enough of Foucault to see that a) there’s wisdom in what he writes, and b) he’s full of crap...and can only hope that readers of this blog will think the same of me....
