First Post of the New Year: Terror, Fun
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Here's the critical outlook for you. It takes a good minute to understand that this "open forum" has something to do with a pending legal case against an entrepreneur who broadcasts Puerto Rican cockfights over the web. As one begins to read the text, a video window comes to life, relaying the same information, but interspersed with the entrepreneur's other interest, which is chicks with guns-- or, as he puts it "cultural sports." A citizen (citizens on Yahoo News are given avatars in the form of bug-eyed anime heads) contributes this helpful bit of commentary from "yuvaraj s": "PATHS MAY BE DIFFERENT.BUT EVERY RELIGION TAKES US TO THE GOD. JUST RIVERS IN NO. MAY BE MANY. BUT EVERY RIVER FINDS ITS OWN ROUTE TO REACH THE SEA."
Is the article/articles/whatever critical of cockfighting? What part of open forum don't you understand? This is objective journalism, here. Yet the tone manages nonetheless to be hectoring and moralistic. A sort of uncanny moralism that doesn't require any specific morality. So its as if the guy is being interrogated by a legal interrogation machine set on its loosest Libertarian setting--that'd be neutral, it it were a car--in which value exists but can take any shape it wants, which is always true, but in this case is explicitly true (see above comment from "yuvaraj s" or "jk poet's" more explicit commentary, "to harm any creature is an offense to God.") One almost begins to sympathize with the mouth breather at the center of the controversy, who, powered by the self-confidence of a man who has probably actually gone to Puerto Rico and had his back slapped by exotic Men of the capitalized sort, who, having then had a truly trancendant form of self-congratulation--the sort of "real" experience unavailable to Americans since the founding of the Republic--decided it could make him "real" too, which is to say, rich. There he sits, then, knowing what he knows, knowing he is real, but attempting to defend him self against a tiny digital camera, the neutral unreal wimp interrogating him. "It's funny that a human can kill an animal, but it's okay...but an animal kills an animal, that's not okay."
I haven't really attended to this blog since the beginning of 2007, which, in spite of an uptick in publications, or perhaps because of said uptick, I consider something of a lost year. So, back in. Mouth-breathing ideologues versus neutral blobs of light and color. I'll try to remain in the breach for as long as I can hold out.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:49 PM,
