Showing posts with label satire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label satire. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Defending Domestic Rights


A "modest proposal" for defending domestic freedoms...

AMERICANS FOR DOMESTIC RIGHTS


Domestic choices are deeply personal and often agonizing. Imagine how much more traumatic these choices must be when the government threatens to invade every home’s privacy and condemn responsible household-heads as a criminals for personal choices made within private households!

As Americans our domestic rights are profoundly important to us. Our homes become expressions of who we are. For many years American adults have enjoyed domestic freedoms. The autonomy of our domestic space is personal and sacred. We have assumed our homes to be as safe from desecration by outsiders as our own bodies. Many American adults even allow minor dependents to develop within the inner-sanctum of their domestic space. Each adult chooses how to manage his or her own home environment, and all such choices are deeply private. Americans appreciate the diversity of domestic expressions individuals choose for their lives.

In recent years, however, domestic rights foes who aim to usurp individuals’ private domestic choices and replace them with state-mandated moral codes have been gaining a foothold in government. Every American’s domestic freedoms now stand in jeopardy! Right now there are opponents of domestic rights in Congress who seek to label men and women’s personal choices as “morally intolerable” and “child abuse” and use that excuse to give the government the right to invade your private domestic space. Their anti-privacy agenda even goes so far as requesting that neighbors and health care workers become informants, reporting individuals’ personal home choices to governmental agencies that would have the authority to invade your home if your domestic choices on the management of your pre-adults doesn’t conform to official state-legislated morals.

Moralist zealots and political special interests seek to thwart the private choices of responsible adults and subvert your domestic freedoms to the alleged rights of dependent domestic minors, although the law does not recognize them as developed enough to be adults, and study after study has established that most minors (particularly the younger pre-adults) are incapable of self-sustainment independent of a domestic environment.

As the government ominously threatens to legislate puritanical morality and restrict even more domestic freedoms, many Americans do not speak up because they themselves would not choose to roughly handle or terminate their own domestic minors. What well-meaning Americans must realize is that criminalization of any adult's choices in the inner-sanctum of his or her own home is a violation of the privacy and domestic rights of every one of us! If we stand by silently the Constitutional right to privacy, the right to own property, the freedom to choose, and the protection against unlawful searches and seizures will be completely eroded in order to legislate the scruples of religious fanatics, social extremists, and special interest groups.

Please stand up for your courageous fellow Americans who even today face public humiliation, confiscation of their private homes and minors, and even imprisonment for exercising their right to make difficult domestic decisions! Educate yourself and those around you about your constitutional domestic rights and the ongoing crusade by politicians and special interests to restrict those rights. Let people know that you trust American adults to make domestic choices without government violating their homes. Write your congressman or congresswoman to let them know that you support domestic rights and urge them to oppose any legislation that would allow the government to dictate the personal choices of men and women in the privacy of their own homes. Join Americans for Domestic Rights today and let you voice be heard!



My home.
My choices.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Monty Python and the Modern World

Perhaps the Brits have the most interesting take on the world in which we live. And now for something completely different:




I just figured out what makes Monty Python so much better than any other light comedy. How sad it is! Beneath all the silly absurdity there is a deep, brooding sadness. What makes all the stupid jokes and acts funny is that it is so self-conscious. An idiotic joke is told and immediately it is ridiculed for its idiocy, then the ridiculer is himself revealed as another bad joke. The show becomes fluid as one skit flows into another, as the characters try to escape each ridiculous skit looking for one that is finally funny, but none of them ever work. The result is hilarious. They make fun of their own inability to make anything really funny. It is like watching an obese person make fat jokes; you laugh even harder because of how pitiful it is. You laugh because you are embarrassed.


Monty Python is the ultimate modern comedy. Ancient Comedies ended with joy and celebration. Monty Python mocks the whole idea of joy. It mocks the idea that a man could be whole or wise.


I had previously tried to explain my deep appreciation for Monty Python humor by saying that it is good satire. The problem is that it isn't good satire. (Anyway I couldn't figure out how satire that mostly focused on British society before my birth would be my favorite comedy.) Satire is never as funny as this. Satire has hope. Satire takes the moral high ground as it laughs at the wrongs of the world. Monty Python is a satire of a satire of a satire ...an endless labyrinth of ridicule. They may laugh at the world but not from a vantage point of wisdom. These modernists are most acutely aware they have no access to wisdom. They demonstrate the absurdity of the world, then they laugh at the absurdity of their own demonstration. In the end the joke is on you. You laugh at yourself. You laugh at the absurdity of yourself. You don't laugh because you are happy; you laugh because you are self-conscious.


Monty Python is more than simple comedy. It is a visual demonstration of the philosophies of despair. Generations before last century wouldn't have understood or laughed. We laughed harder than our parents. Most likely future generations will laugh deeper than us. They may laugh so hard that they cry.




*For more Monty Python you really should see The Spanish Inquisition Show, The Silliest Sketch Ever, or the Philosophy World Cup.