Daily Archives: June 3, 2011

TGIF: “Mean Girls”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJyyhNwdQz0

I never need an excuse to post something from Tina Fey, but there is good reason this week as Sarah Palin pretends not to be gearing up to maybe announce that she might be running for the presidency she cannot win. Her cat-and-mouse is reminiscent of the manipulative passive-aggression of the Fey-scripted Mean Girls.

After the jump, in what looks like an instance of life imitating art, video of Palin’s mangled version yesterday of Paul Revere’s ride. It’s pure Tina Fey; Palin effortlessly captures the hollowed out goofiness of Fey’s impression of her:

He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and makin’ sure as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free and we were gonna be armed.

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Ruholla Khomeini and False Literalism

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SwHKql3dKc

News report on the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini

Our thread on fundamentalism continues. Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini died on this date in 1989 (born 1900).

From The Double Vision:

I am, of course, isolating only one element in Christianity, but cruelty, terror, intolerance, and hatred within any religion always means that God has been replaced by the devil, and such things are always accompanied by a false kind of liberalism. At present some other religions, notably Islam, are even less reassuring than our own. As Marxist and American imperialisms decline, the Moslem world is emerging as the chief threat to world peace, and the spark-plug of its intransigence, so to speak, is its fundamentalism or false literalism of belief. The same principle of demonic perversion applies here: when Khomeini gave order to have Salman Rushdie murdered, he was turning the whole of the Koran into Satanic verses. In our own culture, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a future New England in which a reactionary religious movement has brought back the hysteria, bigotry, and sexual sadism of seventeenth century Puritanism. Such a development may seem unlikely just now, but the potential is still there. (CW 4, 177-78)