felis_ultharus

A parent has launched a challenge with Toronto's school board to take A Handmaid's Tale off the school reading list. He's naturally playing the religious persecution card.

Of course, I can't imagine an age where it's more vital to read this book. After all, the number of extreme fundamentalist Christians in our government has been growing -- there were 70 there before last election just in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's 124-member caucus, and it's no accident that Harper removed the word "equality" from the Status of Women's mandate, or that his party tried to sneak in the idea of a fetus-as-a-person in through the back door.

It's also no accident that Harper led the fight against same-sex marriage, and that he tried to re-open the debate. It's no accident that he tried to cut funding to all films he doesn't personally agree with.

I think this novel needs to be taught in every school. I think it needs to be read by every adult. The fact that there's once again a push to have it banned shows how necessary the book is. Everyone should set aside the time to re-read this book this year.

So I'm very politically frustrated lately. The latest evil to come from the Harper regime was a couple of a tiny clauses embedded in an innocuous amendment to the income tax act called C-10 -- a resurrection of the bill from previous session known as C-33.

This ponderous bill should have triggered some suspicion because the 568-page amendment was stuffed like a turducken with amendments to close tax loopholes for corporations. A couple of tiny, vaguely-worded amendments, though -- separated by several pages -- clarify that the Heritage Minister has the right to refuse tax credit certificates to films that do not, in her judgement, suit government policy.

I'm not at all surprised that none of the opposition parties spotted them. I missed them several times searching for them -- they're on pages 352 and 356 of this document.

This detail only came to light after the bill had made its way halfway through the Senate. If it makes it through -- and the Senate only rejects a bill very rarely -- the Heritage Minister will essentially be able to decide which films get the tax credit and which don't. And since it's pretty much impossible to make a feature film in Canada without this tax credit, that amounts to deciding what films get made and what don't.

Fundamentalist Christians are already declaring victory. The rest of us are just waiting to see what the Harper government decides is acceptable art and what isn't.

I no longer want an election for this government. I want an exorcism.

I'm so sick of postmodernism -- I know anybody reading this journal is probably sick of my being sick of PoMo.

Today I read a particularly vile piece of trash called "'Singing Our Way Out of Darkness': Findley's Anti-Censorship Argument in Headhunter." It's a Postmodern treatment of it, and I've never seen the Postmodern hypocrisy laid more bare.

Starting with Stanley Fish's book there's No such thing As Free Speech, and It's a Good thing, too, Mark Cohen makes a typically PoMo assault on "liberal values" (Linda Hutcheon, bearer of the sacred flame of Postmodernism since Michel Foucault died, takes "liberal values" as one of her favourite targets as well).

From the conclusion:

An overly rigid adherence to an absolute anti-censorship position is what causes liberals, often to their own consternation and clearly to the detriment of their societies, to support the right to free expression of the most heinous of hate-mongers and pornographers. As with most difficult moral issues in our society, the blind application of principle must give way to judgement. Judgement based on tests [Whose tests? Cohen's?], such as the one measuring the risk of harm [How do you measure the harm caused by a book? Maybe if it's thrown...], should be exercised in order to draw lines in a wise manner across a spectrum of menace.

Well, Cohen, you've convinced me. I'm going to start going out and burning books right now. Starting with all your work. And Fish's. And Foucault's...

Honestly, does censorship ever work? Canada's gay and lesbian bookstores are being eaten up by the cancer that is Canada Custom's obscenity rules -- rules supported by academics who suggested certain kinds of books were harmful. Has the banning of hate literature actually stopped hatred? Did the fatwa on Salman Rushdie bring an end to his career? How many people had never heard of Rushdie before the Ayatollah dropped the world's biggest bit of advertising into his lap?

And why is it that so many of my favourite books always make those 100-most-challenged books lists?

On another subject, I was still hoping for a bit of feedback on this paragraph, here. It's a protected entry, so you have to be logged on to see it...

Current Mood: pomo'd off

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I for one do not welcome our new cultural overlords

Postmodernism can shove its phallic metanarrative up its Foucauldian lacuna

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September 2011

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