Lèse Majesté

WTF?

Toby "boot up your ass" Keith playing at the Nobel Peace Prize concert? Are you freaking kidding me?

Religiosity = support for torture ???

Somehow, I'm not surprised:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

After all, the image of a torture victim is an icon to so many of these folks...

Random NYC notes

Definitely a New York moment... Walked out the front door of my froggy hotel this afternoon on the way to the theater, and witnessed an assault in progress just off the curb. Some guy in a suit was reaching in the driver's window of a taxi, apparently trying to strangle the driver, who was leaned back sideways in the front seat trying to kick the guy away with both feet.  I watched for a few minutes, and figured out the attacker was the driver of a black Suburban private car (limo) stopped behind the taxi. Never did figure out what caused the fracas, although the way the vehicles were stopped the taxi might have cut the other guy off. As I left he was straightening his tie out and starting to load baggage in back for passengers he was picking up at the next hotel up the street. And directly across the street was the home of the NYC Bar Association. Guess neither of them was going to need a lawyer, though, as no cops showed up. Or maybe none were called.

So I walked on down the street. A block away is an IRS office with a big electronic sign counting up the national debt (which is about to roll over to $10 trillion, exceeding the capacity of the sign. A tourist couple were standing across the street, enjoying dirty-water hotdogs from a cart, and I heard the guy say to his (presumed) wife, "I don't know why they don't have the mint just print up enough money to pay it off." With that kind of grasp of economics among the masses, is it any wonder they relected a dweeb who promised to run endless wars while cutting taxes? Or that the dollar is heading down the sewer?

On my last two trips here, I wandered into a huge street celebration in Times Square of Kosovo's declaration of independence, then a pretty ugly counter-demonstration by Serbs against that independence. Today they had a couple blocks of Broadway blocked off for a protest of the Turkish slaughter of Armenians back before WW I, calling for a recognition of it as genocide, something both the US and UK governments refuse to do in deference to their alliance with Turkey. Wonder who will be marching the next time I visit...

Perspective matters

The March 31st issue of The New Yorker had a long article profiling the woman who took many of the most well-known photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. This picture of a hooded prisoner standing on a box, naked under a poncho-like blanket, arms extended with wires attached to each hand, has become one of the iconic images of that mess. In pondering the significance of that photo and others, the author makes this observation:

Of course, the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man, tortured to death—or, more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of the savage death of Jesus are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, he must have been ghastly to behold. Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?

An interesting perspective... I've never thought of the very common piece of jewelry we see people wear, the crucifix, as an instrument of torture. But it really is. Can you imagine wearing a rack or an iron maiden around your neck? Or an electric chair? Or a bucket of water?