Imam Shahid Mehdi

Imam Shahid Mehdi—interpreter of Islamic law, respected Muslim scholar, and former lingerie salesman—is a Denmark-based mufti who managed to outrage both the left-wing Unity List Party and the right-wing Danish People’s Party in his host country by stating in a televised interview that Danish women are “asking for rape” if they walk the streets uncovered:

All the crimes that occur against women is [sic] because they are not covered. When they are not covered, you have no respect for them.

But Imam Mehdi chose to go a step beyond mere verbal approval of sexual assault. To illustrate his point, he decided to practice a little “Islamic outreach” on his own time to drive his arguments home:

Mehdi is accused of pulling his penis out and chasing a 23-year-old woman around in a park in Malmö in August 2012, according to the court in Malmö.

The details of the case read like some deranged outtake from an episode of The Benny Hill Show:

She bent down to pick up her dog, when the man asked about her name. She just had time to respond before the man opened his pants and took his penis out, while she was still bent down so that his penis was half a meter from her head.

“It’s refreshing to see a feminist openly admit to feeling a kinship with religious fundamentalists.”

The woman got up and ran away, and when she looked over her shoulder, she saw that the man followed her, she told police. The man gave up his project, and disappeared into some bushes.

The randy Imam is said to be respected for his knowledge of Islam. I’ll have to assume he was observing some lesser-known Koranic hadith that reads, “He who talks the talk must also walk the walk.” He also appears to be adept at the fashionable Western cultural practice of distracting one’s opponent by shouting “racism!” when one is caught—quite literally, in this unfortunate instance—with one’s pants down:

The woman managed to get away, and she called the police, who arrested the man a few minutes later. During the interrogation he refused to plead guilty and believes that the accusation is based on racism because he has Pakistani roots.

The same week that a friend sent me the story of the muff-crazed mufti, there seemed to be a slew of different sex-themed items in the news, all of which got me thinking about Mehdi’s inability to control himself in the presence of uncovered females:

• The movement to ban the notorious “Page 3” feature—cheesecake photos of half-naked girls—from the UK’s Sun newspaper has arisen again, nearly three decades after Labour politician Clare Short first attempted to have the feature banned.

• There is a movement afoot in Iceland to ban Internet pornography altogether, presumably using the same kind of filtering technology favored by other admirable beacons of progressive liberalism such as China and Iran.

• The European Union—an organization that can never resist an opportunity to legislate and regulate every damn thing under the sun—was recently looking at a proposal that would require “the EU and its member states to take concrete action on discrimination against women in advertising…[with] a ban on all forms of pornography in the media.” The unsuccessful bill was concerned with “eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU” as well as conventional pornography.

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• UK researchers conducted a bizarre study involving “white British men looking at 3D computer models” as subjects which determined a link between being attracted to voluptuous, large-breasted women and having “misogynistic and objectifying” attitudes toward women generally. The pair of typically slaphappy academics behind the study, Viren Swami and Martin Tovée, revealed their results this month in a journal titled Archives of Sexual Behavior. They speak of their research being “in relation to feminist theories, which postulate that beauty ideals and practices in contemporary societies serve to maintain the domination of one sex over the other.” On the other hand, even supporters of the rather pointless study counter that “evolutionary, inborn preferences for reproductively viable mates makes [sic] the drawing of conclusions fraught,” which I believe is dreary academic-speak for “girls with big knockers have always been popular, so what’s your point?”

• Ruminating on the proposed EU ban, Guardian columnist Tanya Gold writes that she “longs to call for the abolition of paid-for pornography, or to at least ban anything not approved by a committee of authentic feminist pornographers.” (Do they get issued authenticity cards?) She goes on to say that she sides with Saudi Arabia on the matter of censorship, and it’s refreshing to see a feminist openly admit to feeling a kinship with religious fundamentalists.

The common undercurrent to all of these handwringing, furrowed-brow examples of progressive puritanism seems to be the belief that there is a connection between observing cheesecake erotica and literal acts of sexual violence. The evidence on hand doesn’t look too good for the proponents of censorship, and one is tempted to ask Tanya Gold if she is familiar with the statistics on rates of sexual assault in conservative societies such as Saudi Arabia or India—where there are most certainly no Page 3 gals or smutty magazines to compel male beastliness—and comparative rates in freer societies such as the UK. The facts don’t much pan out in her favor, but like most busybodies and others who suffer from the totalitarian impulse, I suspect facts are not her primary concern.

This all brings me back to the strange saga of Imam Mehdi, the Islamic blowhard with a Koran in one hand and his shvantz in the other. Since the irrepressible Imam needed no more encouragement than a bare cheek or uncovered hair to set off his raging Islamic id—and since, by his own admission, such mild provocations are all his belief system requires to justify an act of sexual assault—where does that leave the handwringers who would have us believe that bare breasts on Page 3 lead to an increase in rape? If there are a lot of men out there with the same self-control issues as Imam Mehdi, then the Page 3 girl could just as well wear a parka, mittens, and a ski mask—the results might conceivably be the same for any hapless damsel attempting to walk her dog in a Malmö park without being accosted by a maniac.

I think the neo-puritans should, as the expression goes, be careful what they wish for. If the projections of the more pessimistic naysayers are correct and the UK is heading toward complete capitulation to Islam, soon you won’t be able to find any naked female faces to “objectify” on Page 3, never mind breasts.

Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un

When a fashion magazine recently sponsored former NBA star Dennis Rodman’s visit to North Korea there were howls of outrage about the morally dubious spectacle of Rodman boasting in a series of Tweets about the “epic feast” and bacchanalian orgy of drunkenness that he and his entourage enjoyed with the rotund, moon-faced dictator of a nation that has become largely synonymous with starvation.

Outrage and disgust, yes. Surprise, not so much. Dimwitted celebs rubbing elbows with fascists, dictators, totalitarians, and sundry president-for-life types has been commonplace for so long in our culture that hardly anyone is shocked by it. There are some obvious points of common ground for dictators and celebrities, including superhuman levels of vanity, a marked indifference to reality, and the uncanny ability to feel completely at ease in the presence of obvious sycophants.

In Rodman and Kim Jong-un’s case, the bonding was apparently spurred by a mutual love for basketball, a game whose appeal to a diminutive, pudgy Asian man is lost on me.

Well-intentioned or not, the much-publicized visit at least gave us the memorable sight of this particularly odd couple being photographed together—the lanky, multiply pierced Rodman sitting next to the hopelessly un-photogenic Kim, who resembles a giant matzo ball stuffed into a Mao jacket.

But public outrage will quickly slide into indifference, only to be summoned again when, who knows, maybe Justin Bieber will perform at a private banquet for Robert Mugabe. Rodman is not the first clueless celeb to fall for the allure of a power-mad despot. He likely won’t be the last. Other Mussolini types who have enjoyed cordial relations with singers, dancers, and actors have included:

• Deceased Libyan strongman, Lockerbie bombing financier, and metrosexual fashion icon Colonel Muammar Gaddafi—as well a few of his several dozen sons, apparently—shelled out exorbitant sums to have private musical performances from the willing and eager likes of Nelly Furtado, Beyoncé, and Mariah Carey, the last of whom claimed quite convincingly that she was “naïve and unaware” she had been performing for a dictator.

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• Former amateur baseball player, iron-fisted autocrat, and Army-surplus-clothing-store enthusiast Fidel Castro has had his tuchis kissed by the likes of Sean Penn and an obscure post-punk band called Manic Street Preachers, who once gave a special concert where they entertained El Presidente (a man not generally known for having any fondness for decadent Western rock ’n’ roll) with such tuneless didactic-rock crowd-pleasers as “Baby Elian” (a song about the Elián González affair that rivals “Ebony and Ivory” for sheer unlistenable mawkishness) and the wonderfully titled “Freedom of Speech Won’t Feed My Children.”

• Until his untimely demise early this week, charismatic loudmouth Hugo Chavez oversaw his remarkably corrupt (once ranked 172 out of 182 on the Transparency International Index) and brutally violent (21,692 murders in 2012 alone) basket case of a country while enjoying the fawning admiration of Oliver Stone, Naomi Campbell, and the ubiquitous Sean Penn. The brooding Penn was a particularly persistent fanboy of the oleaginous autocrat, once notoriously advocating prison sentences for US journalists who used the indelicate term “dictator” to describe Chavez.

• And let’s not forget the granddaddy of know-nothing celebs who eagerly kiss tyrant ass: Paul Robeson. An athlete, lawyer, actor, and singer of jubilant Negro spirituals, Robeson was a man who unflaggingly supported and admired Joseph Stalin, betrayed personal friends who were facing execution under the Soviet regime, and once said when questioned about the extrajudicial executions of Russian “counter-revolutionaries” and other dissidents, “From what I have already seen of the workings of the Soviet government, I can only say that anybody who lifts his hand against it ought to be shot!” Sadly, Robeson died in the US rather than in the Stalinist Russia he claimed to admire. (Well, he died in Philadelphia, a place which I’m told is only slightly less grim than Russia, so perhaps there’s some justice in the world.)

And Rodman? Apparently the former NBA star so enjoyed his raucous party time with Kim Jong-un that he can’t stop singing the strongman’s praises. He was recently seen getting forcibly removed from a New York City bar after spending hours drunkenly regaling anyone who would listen with tales of the benevolent leader’s all-around awesomeness and “waving around a signed copy of the dictator’s huge manifesto, telling everyone they should read it.” Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this whole embarrassing stunt is the sight of Dennis Rodman publicly endorsing a work of literature.

Quevenzhané Wallis

The Twittersphere got itself into a lather this week after the venerable American parody newspaper The Onion ran an unusually nasty Tweet mocking the Oscars:

Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quevenzhané Wallis is kind of a cunt, right?

The Internet—never a place that’s far off from a good group tantrum at the best of times—immediately exploded with outraged comments and demands for apologies, boycotts, and worse. Some were angry that the joke seemed to target a nine-year-old child. Others were angry that the child in question happens to be black. Some were angry at the mere usage of what newspapers demurely insisted on referring to as “the c-word.”

Then the weird part came—after ignoring the rising tide of faux outrage, The Onion issued an apology. Or at any rate, their CEO did:

On behalf of The Onion, I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting.

Then came the even weirder part:

No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire. The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again.

What mistake was that—making a joke about the vacuous nature of celebrity gossip culture that was actually kinda funny? Or just generally being in bad taste? Because if either of those are considered a “mistake” by Onion staffers from now on, the magazine will pretty much cease to exist, or else it will become a storage space for the kind of cutesy, inoffensive, neutered PC humor that the magazine generally avoids.

First off, let’s get a few things straight, at least for the hapless souls out there who need to have jokes rigorously explained to them in exhaustingly pedantic detail before they can decide whether they should be allowed to find them funny or not:

1) The joke was not at the expense of Quvenzhané Wallis.
Contrary to what every outraged anonymous commenter shouting for the joke’s writer to be drawn and quartered in the public square seemed to think, the joke was not an “attack” on the nine-year-old actress, it was a joke implicitly at the expense of the People magazine/Perez Hilton mentality of endless catty, infantile jibber-jabber about celebrities. Had the comment been posted in earnest by a private citizen on their Twitter feed the matter might be different, but it was posted in a satirical magazine, hence even the most witless reader should understand that the comment was not meant as a serious attack.

2) Nobody cares if you found the joke funny or not.
Many who demanded the apology insisted the problem resided in the joke not being amusing enough for their tastes, and even Onion CEO Steve Hannah made a point of apologizing for the joke being “humorless” (although I think he actually meant to say “unfunny”). This sort of disingenuous and evasive response is not unlike the intellectuals who declined to defend Salman Rushdie’s right not have his head hacked off with a scimitar because they didn’t really feel that The Satanic Verses was his best work. Not really the point, guys.

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Having said all that, The Onion chose to apologize, and many of us still find the decision baffling. This is a magazine that has made off-color jokes in the past about everything from 9/11 to Bosnian war atrocities and to my knowledge has never responded to previous demands for apology from members of the ever-expanding humor-free community. Some have tried to argue that the magazine finally crossed a line in making a rude joke about a child, but as Forbes magazine pointed out, they’ve never had a no-crude-jokes-involving-kids policy in place before. (And anyways, where was all this ostentatious concern about hurting a child when her parents gave her that name?) Other Onion headlines have included:

Bosnian Child Makes Fun Art Project with Mother’s Skull
God Answers Prayers Of Paralyzed Little Boy: ‘No,’ Says God
Pope Vows To Get Church Pedophilia Down To Acceptable Levels

They’ve also not shied away from using vulgar or sexist language (“Foster Mom A Cunt”) or mocking blacks (“African-American Neighborhood Terrorized By Ask Murderer”) or anyone else, so the decision to apologize strikes many as out of character and somewhat insincere.

It’s a dreary sign of the times if even The Onion seriously intends to “install new and tighter procedures” to prevent jokes in bad taste from getting through. At its best, the magazine is probably the only thing in contemporary American satire that achieves the level of classic 70s-era National Lampoon magazine—I’m referring to the Lampoon in the heyday era of comic geniuses such as P. J. O’Rourke and Doug Kenney. (Who could forget unapologetically bad taste, morbid-humor classics such as “If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he’d be President today” or the notorious “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog” cover?) Perhaps The Onion‘s decision to apologize for the first time bodes ill, and one hopes it doesn’t become, as the Lampoon did in the 1980s, a shadow of its former self.

But the world of irony and satire is a difficult one to sustain at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. In the comments section under one of the pieces about the Quvenzhané Wallis uproar, one particularly apoplectic blowhard shrieked at someone trying to defend the Onion joke thusly:

You got any kids?!!! If you do, I feel sorry for them!!!! THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SATIRE AND EVIL; AND THIS WAS EVIL.

We live in a world where people on one side understand satire, and on the other side are those who scream in all caps about the difference between SATIRE AND EVIL!!!

Let’s hope that the screamers aren’t the emerging majority I’m beginning to think they are.

Coldplay looking "gay"

A recent study from the University of Michigan finds that the ever-popular youth expression “that’s so gay” is actually harmful to gay, lesbian, and bisexual students.

According to CBS News:

Data suggests gay, lesbian and bisexual college students who heard “that’s so gay” more frequently were more likely to report feeling isolated and to suffer negative health symptoms, such as headaches, poor appetite or eating problems.

Coming from Detroit—a city whose citizens live under the constant threat of far more concrete forms of harm than colloquialisms—the study claims that the near-ubiquitous phrases “that’s so gay” and “you’re so gay” are not merely harmless expressions. The offending phrases have long been used on campuses to denote lack of coolness, insufficient fashionableness, or, in extreme cases, total and complete lameness. But now it seems they may actually pose a health threat to “sexual minorities” at high schools and university campuses.

Head researcher Michael Woodford says that the phrase “you’re so gay” is subtly hostile because it suggests “that there is something wrong with being gay.” (Apparently he’s been too busy conducting bogus academic studies to ever watch an episode of Seinfeld, or else he’d realize he’s begging for a joke with that line.) He goes on to say that “hearing such messages…can cause stress, which can manifest in headaches and other health concerns.”

So what’s the solution for all those gay students taking Advil and leaving their shawarma platters unfinished because of all this horrifying stress? 

Woodford issued a press release that answers the question:

Policies and educational programs are needed to help students, staff and faculty to understand that such language can be harmful to gay students. Hopefully, these initiatives will help to eliminate the phrase from campuses.

Woodford isn’t clear about how exactly one might go about “eliminating” a slang expression from common usage. Fines? Public flogging? Plainclothes Speech Police handing out tickets whenever they hear somebody call a pair of shoes “gay”? It would be a daunting task for the enforcers of correct speech.

“That’s so gay” is one of contemporary slang’s more durable pejorative phrases. And until fairly recently, no one with an IQ larger than their hat size needed to have it spelled out that in certain contexts the term has nothing to do with sexual orientation. 

In my high-school years, “gay” was commonly used to mean unfashionable, tacky, or uncool. But while most of the cultural effluvia from my high-school years have gone the way of Spandau Ballet, using “gay” as a synonym for “unhip” or “annoying” seems to keep creeping back into common usage with remarkable staying power. “Cool” would seem to be the only other term that has successfully passed through several generations of high schoolers without losing its popularity. (A small achievement, perhaps, but when was the last time you heard anybody use “groovy,” “nifty,” or “Daddy-O” in a sentence?) Is there just something about calling annoying things “gay” that instinctively feels right, especially to young adults?

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Many of us who recall the phrase from youth were surprised to see it making headlines again over the past few years. In 2007, California school authorities disciplined a Mormon schoolgirl because she used the dreaded phrase “that’s so gay” in retaliation against peers who teased her about her religion. Her parents subsequently filed a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds, which they lost. In 2010, Anderson Cooper had his crinoline petticoats all twisted because of a movie trailer in which comic actor Vince Vaughn uttered these menacingly hateful lines:

Electric cars are gay. Not homosexual gay, but my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay.

Cooper denounced the dialogue as “unacceptable” and huffed and puffed like some PC version of an affronted Victorian damsel hearing the word “testicles” spoken in public. But apparently Vince Vaughn and his screenwriter are a good deal more clever and astute than Cooper, because the joke’s point is that “gay” has two meanings in contemporary parlance—“homosexual” and “uncool.” By drawing attention to the distinction, the joke is by definition not “homophobic,” a subtlety apparently lost on Cooper in his rush to be righteously outraged.

I don’t recall anybody in high school ever being brought up on hate-speech charges when they described a homework assignment or a lunch-hour detention as being “gay.” In college, I can recall even openly gay students who would often, and without self-conscious irony, use the term “gay” as a good-humored way to deride things they found trite or ineffectual.

So what changed? Did the nineties, that monumentally dreary decade of identity politics and Kurt Cobain and women in army boots, turn everybody so hysterically sensitive to language that we can no longer even distinguish between two basically unrelated meanings of a commonly used word? (And when did the homosexual community gain exclusive rights over the term “gay,” anyhow? After all, they stole it from the happy community.) Slang, especially youth slang, is as natural and uncontrollable a phenomenon as the weather—how is it possible to police such a thing, assuming policing it is even desirable?

The Totalitarianism Lite crowd who sternly use words such as “eliminate” and “eradicate” regarding disapproved language may have a tough time with this one. Some slang terms disappear, forever to be derisively consigned to history’s dustbin, while others seem to keep coming back into fashion, and “gay” appears to be one of the latter. Calling certain things “gay” just feels right, and more establishment options such as “insipid” or “weak” look, well, insipid and weak in comparison.

Imagine two hypothetical conversations:

VERSION ONE
Q: Do you like the band Coldplay?
A: No, I find their music distastefully fey, tacky, insipid, and uninspiring, lacking in both energy and forcefulness to a degree that I find quite off-putting. They’re a bland and mainstream group whose artistic vision is, from my perspective, singularly limited and unoriginal.

VERSION TWO
Q: Do you like the band Coldplay?
A: No, their music is totally gay.

Which response might strike a young adult as being more evocative and succinct? 

Somebody should tell the people behind the University of Michigan study that being totalitarian, self-righteous, and priggish about language is, all things considered, pretty gay. That’s electric-cars, parents-chaperoning-the-dance gay, assuming they can even understand the difference.

Here are my experiences with airport security at various spots around the world during the past several years.

CHICAGO
It is a hot day in early September, and I’m standing at O’Hare in a line of approximately one hundred tired and exhausted passengers after a nine-hour flight from Europe. We are going through the eighth or fifteenth level of the interminable security procedures that are now mandatory everywhere—shoes removed, belt removed, pockets emptied, all for the umpteenth time in the past few hours. The majority of the passengers in line with me are Asian, and many appear to have only a rudimentary grasp of English.

The security official is a morbidly obese Caucasian twenty-something who looks like Penn, Teller, and Gérard Depardieu all stuffed into the same undersized jacket and pants. His shirt is untucked. He has visible tattoos, an eyebrow piercing, and wears Converse sneakers. America has devoted immeasurable time and money to tightening its borders post-9/11, yet it still has no problem employing airport officials whose attire would seem informal even at an OWS protest.

He is scrutinizing someone’s passport for what feels like an eternity with the furrowed-brow intensity of someone trying to read Anna Karenina with the book upside down. When the increasingly impatient and irritable crowd surges forward slightly, he looks up and bellows, “Yo! Don’t bum-rush me, people!”

The passengers look befuddled. They likely don’t have the slightest idea what “bum-rush” means. Their English might well be perfect, but maybe they are still adjusting to a country where airport security officials dress like homeless vagrants who use hip-hop slang from 1986.

DETROIT
I am forced to present my Canadian passport to a gentleman of apparently Mexican origin. Reminding him about the other country that borders the USA—the one where people are generally allowed to cross the border without getting shot—probably doesn’t help. Within seconds it becomes clear that he has quite the tortilla chip on his shoulder and isn’t shy about taking his resentment out on everyone in his line. (The Chinese couple several spots ahead of me are visibly in tears as he holds up the line berating them.)

I reach the front of the line and offer my passport. “Who told you to get into this line?” he bellows. When I point to the uniformed woman who directed me into the line, he insists that her uniform is the wrong color for directing people into lines. He’s lying. A quick survey of the room reveals all of the staff are wearing the same color uniform. He appears to take great delight in prolonging my interrogation for what feels like an hour. My suffering is slightly softened by the fact that I’m being yelled at by a guy with a Ricky Ricardo accent.

ROME
I fly into Ciampino Airport on a sweltering day in early May. The tanned and surly border official wears his hat at what male homosexuals might refer to as a “jaunty” angle. Distracted by the blonde standing behind me, he barely grunts while pretending to read my passport. He winks at the blonde while dismissively waving me through. He is straight out of ethnic-stereotype central casting. So long as you bring an attractive female companion, you can apparently waltz into Italy unscathed holding a suitcase stuffed with crystal meth and Kalashnikovs.

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WARSAW
The Polish female officers in the airport are needlessly over-attractive for the job’s requirements—they’re needlessly over-attractive for almost any job that requires clothing. They recall the icy-blonde fembots from Austin Powers. Some of them even have guns, albeit not jutting out of their brassieres. The dour, taciturn officials of both sexes are as friendly as Slavs tend to be—which is to say, not at all. Still, their listlessness makes it Europe’s most efficient border crossing in my experience. I pass through the security gate after a curt acknowledgement of my passport.

FRANKFURT
Frankfurt Airport is a dark, dreary, foul-smelling place, sort of like the airports of Warsaw or Moscow but with alarmingly less attractive female staff. The official at my gate, a woman who could be the unholy love child of Ayn Rand and Steve Buscemi, hollers at everyone in German to board the plane, then to not board the plane, then to board more slowly, then to hurry up, then to slow down, then to start a new line and begin all over again. Frau Blücher barks her commands with that distinctly German blend of good cheer and tactfulness that makes even the simplest travel procedure feel as though you’re being herded onto a cattle car to Auschwitz.

LONDON
For all the derogatory things one can say about their cuisine, their climate, and their dentistry, the English at least have the right idea about how to make airport travel’s humiliations slightly more bearable. The security at Heathrow are so excessively polite that being fondled, grabbed, and patted by them is almost enjoyable, and I mean that in an entirely non-homoerotic way. As the agreeable man in uniform gives me the once-over while groping for suspicious bulges, it’s one long litany of “terribly sorry” and “forgive me, dear sir” and “frightfully sorry about all this bother.” I feel like apologizing for having carelessly allowed my scrotum to wander into the path of his hand.

WASHINGTON, DC
In stark contrast to Chicago and Detroit’s abrasiveness, DC’s security takes a different tack in trying to stop bomb-hurling fanatics from boarding planes. Let’s call it the stupid-question method:

Are these your bags? Did you pack them yourself? Did anyone else help you pack these bags? Are you certain that nobody but yourself packed these bags? And these bags are definitely yours, right? Did you pack them yourself?

It goes on and on with such mind-numbing repetition that I find myself wondering if I did in fact allow a swarthy Middle Eastern gentleman wearing aviator sunglasses and a keffiyeh to help me fold my underwear but had somehow forgotten about it in all the day’s excitement. 

But perhaps this approach isn’t as stupid as it initially appears. Like the East German Stasi or Russian KGB agents who could supposedly interrogate an innocent suspect until the poor fellow would admit to anything just to make them go away, this may be the future of airport security—weeding out potential terrorists by boring them to death.

Does being an early childhood educator turn you into a meddlesome nitwit, or are meddlesome nitwits instinctively drawn to careers in early childhood education?

It’s a tough call. One recent example of the WE KNOW WHAT’S BEST FOR YOUR CHILDREN brigade overexerting itself involves a report on UK schools that are attempting to enforce a ban on best friends. In UK newspaper The Sun, educational psychologist Gaynor Sbuttoni noted an increasingly common policy used in several UK regions whereby “teachers tell children they shouldn’t have a best friend and that everyone should play together.” Apparently schools in Surrey, Kingston, London, and other regions of the damp ’n’ dreary isle are attempting to make it official school policy that children only play in large groups and thereby avoid the distastefully intimate and counterrevolutionary scourge known as “exclusive friendship.”

Some have argued that the rationale is to reduce bullying in schools, while others have claimed that schools merely want to “save the child the pain of splitting up from their best friend.”

I guess it’s never too soon to wean children from outdated concepts such as “freedom of association.” Besides, the next generation of English toddlers has a lot of work to do if they want to keep up the fine English traditions of rioting, looting, burning down businesses, and destroying public property—all of which are performed with greater efficiency by large groups than by individuals. (Ever try to set fire to a police car and loot an entire shop’s worth of plasma-screen TVs with only your best mate for backup? You totally need a bigger group to do it.)

Does anyone actually believe that bullying can be prevented by enforcing friendship as a group activity? Anyone with an ounce of sense—i.e., anybody with enough sense to land a better job than “preschool educator”—knows that bullying is fed by precisely the sort of herd-mentality conformity that forcing kids to play in large groups would facilitate. Bullies usually have the larger group’s approval. Having a best friend can actually be the best shield against bullies—sometimes all it takes is one kindred spirit to give someone the confidence to stand up to bullying.

As for the equally inane argument that children must be protected from the pain of a friendship coming to an end—kids, losing a friend is the least of the problems this life will throw at you. Family members will pass away and loved ones will die; you’ll be fired from jobs and likely embroiled in an acrimonious divorce by the time you’re thirty. Falling out with your fifth-grade best pal over who gets the bigger piece of a Snickers bar will hardly be the harshest thing life throws at you. Better to learn early that life will be one long litany of disappointment than enter the adult world with any illusions.

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Elsewhere on the making-childhood-even-more-confusing-and-painful front, Stockholm’s Egalia preschool has instituted an elaborate and highly controversial plan to ensure gender neutrality in children’s education. This involves everything from discouraging kiddies from playing with gender-specific toys such as plastic guns and Barbie dolls to removing “Cinderella” and other traditional-subtext fairy tales from the bookshelves (to be replaced by trendier materials on gay couples and single parents). It even involves forbidding the kiddies from addressing each other with gender-specific pronouns:

Instead they refer to them as “friends,” by their first names, or as “hen”—a genderless pronoun borrowed from Finnish.

(Ingrid Bergman, Ingmar Bergman—what’s the diff? Here we go again with the whole “everybody is my friend” shtick. Being buddies with the entire planet is a neurotic obsession with these progressive types.)

The project’s harebrained utopianism might sound ridiculous—equal parts Zamyatin and The Three Stooges. But the notoriously glum Swedes seem to be eating it up. The state-funded preschool boasts a long waiting list for admission requests, presumably from middle-class parents who can’t wait to show off their impeccable progressive credentials by boasting of how they allowed the state to start mind-fucking their children practically from the get-go.

Speaking in defense of the Swedish education system’s valiant battle against reality, Egalia director Lotta Rajalin—whose flaxen hair and pert nose suggest she still shamefully embraces stereotypical social constructs regarding Swedes’ appearance—denies that the school is doing any harm to children’s developmental psychology. She says that Stockholm’s budding young Max von Sydows and Liv Ullmans are well aware of their biological gender but are being indoctrinated into thinking less conventionally about social roles.

Think about it. A gender-neutral race of blonde-haired, blue-eyed, high-cheekboned, joyless automatons listening to an endless loop of ABBA songs while manufacturing difficult-to-assemble furniture. It’s either a dystopian sci-fi nightmare scenario or the recipe for the future master race. It’s possibly both.

As the more linguistically astute among you may have already guessed, “Egalia” is the Swedish word for “equality.”

What’s the Swedish word for “delusional”?

In late January of this year, an event occurred which may have dramatic implications for our conception of human dignity, our understanding of the individual’s place in society, and perhaps even for the eternal dream of achieving the brotherhood of man on Earth.

Or to phrase it less portentously: A bunch of drunken frat boys put a dwarf in a harness and hurled him across the floor of a strip club and onto a mattress.

For those unfamiliar with it, dwarf tossing is a competitive pub sport which involves the hurling of little people by bigger people. The dwarfs involved are willing participants and are financially compensated for their efforts, while the throwers get to test their physical strength by measuring how far they can toss said dwarfs. (A less popular variation is “dwarf bowling,” which involves throwing or pushing a willing dwarf—often tied to a skateboard—down the alley toward a set of tenpins). The sport of dwarf tossing is commonly frowned upon—frequently by advocates in the heighted community rather than dwarfs themselves—and its legality varies according to the national home of the dwarf in question.

January’s event took place in the cheerfully sleazy border town of Windsor, Ontario–a city which already has an unsavory reputation for its strip clubs, massage parlors, and garish casino culture—and it attracted a considerable amount of sternly disapproving media attention. Canada’s major national newspaper The Globe and Mail ran an article by history professor John Sainsbury arguing that when we degrade one dwarf we degrade them all. With toothache-inducing levels of condescension, Professor Sainsbury called Windsor “the dwarf-tossing capital of Canada” and sniffed haughtily that, according to one’s ideological bias, “Windsor is now either a bastion of libertarian resistance to the nanny state or a miserable backwater of moronic culture.” (You get no bonus points for guessing which view the esteemed professor shares.)

Leopard’s Lounge, the popular Windsor “peeler” club which held the event, previously hosted a dwarf tossing extravaganza back in 2003 which led to a local MPP’s unsuccessful attempt to outlaw the sport. The repeat event early this year boasted a capacity audience, with a seven-page-long reservation list filled up weeks in advance.

“OK,” I hear you say, “so a roomful of tracksuit-clad knuckleheads go to a low-rent strip club to throw around a four-foot-eight dwarf named ‘Tripod’ while he’s wearing a blue baby costume with a baby bottle and bonnet as props. That’s some kind of freak show outtake from a Jodorowsky movie, but it’s not necessarily an issue with wider social implications.” But dwarf tossing is far more widespread than you may have imagined. Little people are being thrown around all over this great big world. Consider the following:

In New Zealand, where the sport is legal, some English rugby players aroused controversy by apparently taking part in a dwarf tossing competition in their free time between Rugby World Cup matches last fall. The incident attracted some quasi-celebrity-based notoriety because of the alleged involvement of Mike Tindall, a player who recently married one of the Queen’s granddaughters, Zara Phillips.

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In Florida, where the sport has been banned since the 1989 death of an improperly tossed dwarf, state legislator Ritch Workman has been working to overturn the ban. While admitting that he finds dwarf tossing “repulsive,” he went on to argue that in the present economy, all the ban does is “prevent some dwarfs from getting jobs they would be happy to get…why would we want to prevent people from getting gainful employment?”

More seriously, diminutive actor Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) took a moment during his recent Golden Globes acceptance speech to draw attention to the strange case of Martin Henderson. Like Dinklage, Henderson is a tiny thespian who appeared to be on the verge of a promising career as an in-demand TV and movie dwarf. Then came that fateful night out celebrating his birthday last October. While minding his own business standing outside a pub, Henderson was grabbed for no discernible reason and violently thrown by a man that newspapers describe only as a “hooded thug.” Henderson is now confined to a wheelchair and blames his ordeal on the rugby players’ shenanigans and the subsequent media attention given to dwarf throwing.

The above cases, along with the event in Windsor, would seem to suggest that the huge ethical dilemmas surrounding every tossed dwarf aren’t going away anytime soon. The issue is so compellingly insoluble that it once found its way to the United Nations—in the 1990s, a Gallic dwarf named Manuel Wackenheim took his case there in an effort to overturn a ban on the sport which, he argued, unjustly interfered with his right to earn a living. The little fella’s spirited defense of individual freedom was dismissed first by France’s highest court and then by the UN Human Rights Committee, who ruled that dwarf throwing was not only an affront to the dignity of dwarfs but an incitement to public disorder. 

This gargantuan ethical dilemma cuts to the heart of the perpetual tug of war between individual liberty and the responsibility we bear to whatever larger collective to which we grudgingly belong. Proponents of individual freedom can convincingly argue that the anti-tossing crowd’s busybody moralism accomplishes nothing besides depriving self-determining little people of their livelihood. Meanwhile, nanny-state advocates can just as convincingly argue that such undeniably freakish spectacles bring mockery, humiliation, and degradation to not only the dwarfs themselves but, by extension, to the larger pint-sized community and, heightening the issue even further, to all of us. The giant tragedy that befell little Mr. Henderson would seem to support the “monkey see, monkey do” line of thinking already used by those who argue that pornography leads to rape or that violent video games cause random street violence. So are they right? Is it possible that rubber-stamping the government’s approval onto every tossed dwarf’s disproportionately large head could lead members of the height-impaired community to be abused by members of the brain-impaired community?

There are no easy answers to this puzzle. And those of us who suffer from both an irrational fear and loathing of dwarfs and an implacable disdain for the kind of ball-cap-wearing morons who would pay to toss them around or to watch them being tossed–well, we are surely in no position to answer these profound ethical queries. But on the general subject of exploitation, the final word should go to an anonymous midget-hurler who attended the Leopard’s Lounge event. When confronted by a hand-wringing Toronto Star journalist about the ethical implications of taking part in a dwarf toss, he shrugged and said, “I feel no more socially guilty than when I normally come out of a strip club.”

It is sometimes said that death comes in threes, and the weekend before Christmas 2011 saw a striking trio of public figures meet their ends. Either due to a strange cosmic alignment or our creator’s bravado display of quirky humor, the past weekend’s three deaths present a baffling mix of character studies. If there’s a case to be made that God—if there is a God—has a wicked sense of humor, one need look no further than the fact that he decided to strike down two such notable examples of a worthwhile human life—and a worthless one—on the same weekend.

Based purely on my own biases, I’ve decided to organize this trio of the recently deceased into the always dependable categories of good, bad, and ugly. Depending on your political, religious, or cultural perspective, you may be inclined to rearrange my categories.

THE GOOD: VACLAV HAVEL

Apart from a few cranks in cyberspace, it’s difficult to imagine that many would bear any ill will toward one of Europe’s most seminal figures of the past century. His name commands almost universal admiration and respect, and his CV reads like it was designed to land him a place between Gandhi and MLK in the secular-saint sweepstakes: Leader of the Velvet Revolution. Father of pro-democracy movements in the dark days of Central European totalitarianism. Prisoner of conscience. Playwright. Nonviolent political agitator. He may also be the only man in memory who could lay claim to having both discussed literature with the likes of Milan Kundera and Philip Roth and partied with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger—all while helping to bring down communism. Havel was nothing so drab as a saint—he was a dude.

He was also remarkably selfless, insofar as it’s possible for any man in public life. He recommended Aung San Suu Kyi for the Nobel Prize at a time when he might have won it himself. He organized a petition of writers in defense of Kundera when the author was facing accusations of being a commie informant—this, in spite of the well-documented disagreements between the two men.

I affectionately recall some footage I saw on BBC years ago. Havel comes onto the presidential palace’s balcony to greet a cheering throng with his tousled hair, a Rolling Stones tongue-logo T-shirt, and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. In striking contrast to every military-jacket-festooned-with-medals blowhard ever to stand on a balcony and wave at their constituents, Havel yawned, gave a curt-but-friendly wave, and walked back inside with a shrug that said, “That’s all very well, but I’ve got a chick waiting in here, so could you keep the noise down a bit?” He reminded me of Groucho Marx as the Freedonian president in Duck Soup and may be the only major world leader in history who usually looked as if he’d just rolled out of bed.

He changed the world but was resolutely unpretentious while doing it.

Memorable Quote:
“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

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THE BAD: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

I mean “bad” in the cool-bad kinda way here, as opposed to the Stalin/Hitler type of bad, which we’ll get to in a moment. Like anyone who prides themselves on being a contrarian, Hitchens was a loose cannon who within the space of seconds could be heroically defiant and articulate, then infuriatingly self-important and pompous. A lot depends on whether you agreed or disagreed with his take on a topic. Some prefer the early “Trotskyite popinjay” and detest his latter-day warmongering neocon persona. Oddly enough, it was his wildly divergent (some would say inconsistent) views that allowed him to feel at home among all ideological types. Some conservative commentators would enlist him as one of the most articulate defenders of the Bush regime while they politely ignore his strident atheism. Others who wanted a gleefully unapologetic opponent of religion on their side might have been happy to ignore his pro-war or generally more conservative sentiments. There were plenty of sides to choose from: some to like, others to hate.

On one hand he was British, but on the other, he can be forgiven for that because he was resolutely pro-American. He could be an undeniably entertaining debater—funny, aggressive, and sharp-witted. But he had the sort of petulant, tediously argumentative, high-school-debate-club personality of a man who thinks that even the subject of whether chocolate is tastier than vanilla can be settled by argumentative means, with a firm winner declared at the end.

Love him or hate him, I think most would agree that he could be an enlivening change of pace from mainstream journalism’s conformist, platitude-wielding hordes. And if you’ll allow me to modify W. C. Fields: Any man who hated Mother Teresa and Michael Moore equally couldn’t have been all bad.

Memorable Quotes:
“Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.”

“The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.”

THE UGLY: KIM JONG-IL

God bless the Guardian—only the UK’s premiere left-wing paper could bring themselves to describe the thuggish Li’l Kim with flattering adjectives such as “mercurial” and “enigmatic” in their obituary piece. I’m only somewhat disappointed they didn’t add something nice about his stylishly coiffed hair.

Kim Jong-Il was in many respects the anti-Havel. One did tremendous good while seeming to have little interest in the world’s spotlight or the trappings of power; the other presided over endless military parades in his laughingstock, basket-case, Stalinist dirt-heap of a country while placidly watching vast swaths of his population starve to death.

Memorable Quotes:
“We oppose the reactionary policies of the US government but we do not oppose the American people. We want to have many good friends in the United States.”

“You are worthress, Arec Barrwin!”

As the world struggles to make sense of Anders Breivik’s ugly, senseless slaughter and largely incoherent online manifesto, you might have thought that the Islamist fringe would have enjoyed having the heat taken off them while the world’s attention shifted to extreme Christian-based fanaticism. You’d have thought wrong. Instead, at least one small-but-belligerent group has taken it upon themselves to promptly demolish whatever upsurge in public sympathy they might otherwise be enjoying by forcibly reminding the public that there will always be Muslims who love to act like bat-shit crazy loons at the merest provocation.

Case in point: Muslims against Crusaders (MAC), a nut-fudge fringe group based in the UK, recently instigated a campaign to introduce “Shariah-controlled zones” in various parts of London. A lively and colorful series of stickers and flyers suddenly appeared on buses, streetlamps, and shop windows in various areas of the city, warning pedestrians and drivers that, Rod Serling-fashion, they were now entering…The Shariah Zone. “Islamic Rules Enforced” explained the posters somewhat menacingly, aided by a series of helpful pictograms illustrating the zone’s banned activities—gambling, pornography, alcohol, music, concerts, drugs…it would seem easier to list the activities in which a hapless visitor would be allowed to engage upon entering the designated areas. As far as I can tell, men are still permitted to be clean-shaven when wandering into said neighborhoods and ladies may be uncovered, but hey, it’s still the early days.

The zones are the brainchild of Anjem Choudary, the British-born blowhard who leads the banned militant group Islam4UK (apparently, there isn’t a hadith that forbids annoying SMS-language on grounds of it being “un-Islamic”) and who has commented that the campaign is part of a larger plan to “put the seeds down for an Islamic Emirate in the long term.”

“We now have hundreds if not thousands of people up and down the country willing to go out and patrol the streets for us,” Choudary says, “and a print run of between 10,000 and 50,000 stickers ready for distribution.”

Nothing says “cultural outreach” like thuggish, self-appointed guardians of religious morality patrolling the streets to intimidate and harass ordinary citizens. The Breivik fallout has led to soul-searching and hand-wringing in Europe’s ongoing debate about the merits and demerits of immigration and multiculturalism. Attention-seeking charlatans such as Choudary and MAC seem determined to prove Breivik’s more paranoid beliefs—you know, the “total Muslim takeover of Europe and the known world” sort of stuff—to have some basis in reality. If I were conspiracy-minded, I might think that Choudary and Breivik were social-media buddies who played poker together on Wednesdays.

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You can watch the MAC’s recent press conference on YouTube, with Choudary playing an Islamic Moe to his associate stooges—ineffectual, fussy Larry (Abu Rumaysah), frazzled Shemp (Sayful Islam), and portly, dopey-faced Curly (Abu Izzadeen). It’s easy to laugh at MAC’s self-importance and fake piety—they are, after all, state-benefit-collecting conmen (Izzadeen lives with his wife and three kids off state welfare handouts, which he wittily refers to as “the jihad-seekers allowance”) whose outspoken contempt for their host culture would land them in prison or worse if they were to try it in Iran or Saudi Arabia, and they know it. Their previous zany hijinks include calling for the decapitation of British soldiers serving in Iraq and burning poppies on Britain’s Remembrance (Memorial) Day. Such cartoonish provocations seem so painstakingly engineered to shock mainstream English culture’s straights and squares that they’re hardly worth getting upset about. It’s like the Islamo-retard version of Marilyn Manson doing the Devil sign at a ladies’ Sunday-tea get-together.

Still, vigilante religious police are no laughing matter in many underdeveloped parts of the world, and they’re hardly anybody’s idea of the kind of vibrant, exotic, super-authentic cultural import for which the West should be clamoring. Reports suggest that the British Constabulary is outnumbered—they take down hundreds of Shariah-zone warnings every day, only to have hundreds more appear the next day. If the Shariah zones take root and turn out to be more than an attention-getting media farce, much of their success will depend on whether people are willing to tolerate them. That would seem to include not only moderate Muslims—many of whom likely emigrated from elsewhere precisely to avoid having religious thugs dictate every detail of their dress and behavior—but also the native population.

The Brits I’ve met while living and traveling in Europe tend to fall into two distinct camps. Group A are self-loathing, chinless uber-wimps who express a self-abasing level of contempt for their own nation, culture, and history that borders on the pathological—while they fawn obsequiously over every other culture in the known universe. Group B are shaven-headed, tattoo-faced yobs whose levels of cultural sensitivity and open-mindedness hover at a level somewhere near Himmler’s.

So it will be interesting to see whether this conflagration-in-the-making catches fire. Will the Brits keep to their traditional preference for a quiet life—avoiding eye contact when entering Islam-dominated boroughs, dressing “their” women modestly, and preemptively submitting in the name of tolerance, diversity, and respect? Or will working-class yobs, enraged at being denied the right to a pint of lager in their own neighborhoods, react with the equally quaint British tradition of “glassing” their opponents and other such thuggish violence? Will women cover themselves modestly to avoid harassment in certain designated (and presumably ever-expanding) areas? Or will they take the risk of letting their full British “slag” hang out openly?

Thankfully, those of us who don’t live in Britain won’t need to find out firsthand. A multi-ethnic, religiously diverse tapestry’s rich delights always seem more entertaining from a safe distance.

Adolf Hitler

Hitler is all over the news again. These past few months, you can’t throw a rock without it careening off the head of a public figure who put his/her foot in it by saying something about Der Führer—often something surprisingly complimentary, which only increases the Ick Factor for much of the general public.

Some of the more newsworthy examples:

JOHN GALLIANO
For the heterosexual males in the audience, John Galliano is a famous fashion designer. He is currently being tried in France for an incident in which he drunkenly slurred “I love Hitler” to some random bar patrons for no discernible reason and went off on a subsequent tangent of racist and anti-Semitic insults. He appears to have had not one but two separate incidents of the same nature. The diminutive fashionista now faces a €22,500 fine for “public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity.”

MEGAN FOX
The actress was allegedly fired from her job on the set of the new Transformers movie after Steven Spielberg objected to her comparing director Michael Bay to—you guessed it—Hitler. I hate to make light of such a lapse in taste, but this would appear to suggest that Spielberg is the last person on Earth who hasn’t been notified that comparing bossy and dictatorial people to Hitler has been commonplace for the past, oh, five decades. (Why is it invariably Hitler? Why never, say, Nicolae Ceausescu? What’s Ceausescu—chopped liver?)

LARS VON TRIER
Von Trier had already made a name for himself not only as a director of difficult films but also as a wind-up merchant even before this year’s Cannes-troversy. Having previously been accused of fairly routine stuff such as misogyny and anti-Americanism, and perhaps sensing that these first two accusations weren’t nearly inflammatory enough to garner further media interest, he took a stab at praising Hitler during this year’s Cannes Film Festival. After a bizarre, rambling, and seemingly tongue-in-cheek monologue which culminated in the statement, “OK, I’m a Nazi,” he was banned by the festival and declared persona non grata. The festival organizers then issued a press statement that outdoes Von Trier’s original outburst for sheer incoherence:

The Festival de Cannes provides artists from around the world with an exceptional forum to present their works and defend freedom of expression and creation…[and] profoundly regrets that this forum has been used by Lars von Trier to express comments that are unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity that preside over the very existence of the Festival.

Got that? The Cannes International Film Festival defends freedom of expression and is deeply distressed to see that Von Trier has used the festival to express himself freely. Or as The Clash more succinctly put it:

You have the right to free speech/
As long as you aren’t dumb enough to actually try it.

So is the problem that there’s suddenly an inexplicable resurgence in Nazi chic rearing its swastika-tattooed head in the entertainment industry? Or is it that people who would ordinarily take a rather blasé attitude toward darker verbal provocations suddenly turn very serious when Hitler is the subject?

The answer may be somewhere in between. Don’t assume that I’m trying to defend Hitler, who caused so much devastation and misery. Von Trier’s comments were ill-considered and rather stupid. The only thing that might possibly be said in his half-hearted defense is that the director speaks English with all the ease and comfort of an amputee trying to use a prosthetic limb for the first time, so it’s possible that this was a case of black humor being lost in translation.

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But I suspect that if he had spoken well of almost any other mass-murdering maniac in history—Stalin, Ted Bundy, Vlad the Impaler, you name it—the board would have defended the Danish enfant terrible on free-expression grounds. Perhaps they would have even lauded his commitment to being “transgressive” or “edgy” or some other fashionable buzzword that invariably gets trotted out when an artist does or says something indefensibly dumb.

But as with Cameron Diaz’s Mary, there’s something about Adolf, isn’t there?

A little perspective is in order. Mao Tse-Tung is believed to be responsible for the deaths of anywhere from 40-70 million people. Even assuming that the lowball figure is correct, that’s quite a feat. In whatever corner of hell he and Hitler are currently breaking concrete with sledgehammers, Adolf is probably either feeling like an underachiever or giving Mao a fist bump and a “Respect, G.” Yet praise for Mao as a great visionary leader has been weirdly commonplace in recent history, notably in the figure of former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn. Admittedly, she was forced to resign after she praised Mao during a high-school graduation ceremony. But the fact she ever thought it remotely appropriate speaks volumes about our inequitable standards in deciding which mass murderers are acceptable to praise. Try to imagine giving a high-school graduation speech that mentions Hitler, even ironically, as an inspiring figure for young graduates to emulate. Even G. W. Bush wouldn’t have been that tone-deaf to common mores when speaking in public.

American academic and standup comic Noam Chomsky has notoriously defended Pol Pot’s genocidal regime on a number of occasions. (This would appear to have some strange self-flagellating wish-fulfillment subtext for Chomsky, seeing as the Khmer Rouge was known for slaughtering intellectuals, academics, and even anybody who merely looked smart by virtue of wearing glasses). Che Guevara didn’t live long enough to achieve the impressive Stalin/Hitler body count he was probably gunning for, but he still killed enough people that you might be forgiven for wondering why every Hollywood hunk from Benicio Del Toro to Gael Garcia Bernal seems to be lining up to play him in ponderous biopics.

Examples of the public’s indifference toward fawning praise of homicidal maniacs doesn’t end with epic-level political murderers. Axl Rose used to wear Charles Manson T-shirts in concert and got his band to record one of the cult leader’s tunes. But so far as I know, the only thing that killed Axl’s career was the fact that he looked even stupider in cornrows than any other white person in history who’s looked stupid in cornrows. His open admiration for a man who convinced his followers to stab a pregnant woman 16 times and slosh around in her blood like demented kindergarteners appears to have had little to do with the matter.

It’s too early to tell if the likes of Von Trier or Galliano will suffer from permanent reputation demolition as a result of their ill-considered outbursts. But in the meantime, it seems reasonable to demand that there be a coherent punitive standard applied to those who say dumb things in defense of murderers, tyrants, despots, cult leaders, or sundry resentful short men with complexes. Either singing killers’ praises (ironically or not) is deeply immoral or it isn’t. And either free speech protects the right to say irresponsible and unpleasant things or it doesn’t. If nothing else, having a solid rule in place about this sort of thing might help prevent the Cannes Film Festival board from uttering any more idiotic public statements.

On April 20th of this year, a group called the BCHRT (British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, a sort of maple-syrup-flavored version of a Stalinist show-trial committee) fined stand-up comedian Guy Earle $15,000 for offending a lesbian woman, Lorna Pardy, from the stage at an open-mike comedy night back in 2007. The owners of the club which hosted the offending performance were also fined $7,500.

Earle is alleged to have responded to some drunken heckling from Pardy and her Pard-ner with a series of aggressive and apparently homophobic insults. Depending on your taste, the counter-heckling was either: A) abusive and not very funny; or B) abusive and rather amusing, albeit in a none-too-sophisticated, frat-boy sort of way. In any event, it’s apparently now a legal matter in Canada to determine if jokes are amusing or not. And if that sounds to students of Eastern European history like something out of Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, or Kundera, it pretty much is.

If you have a month or two to spare, you can read the 107-page verdict online. In summary:

Earle has been ordered to pay Pardy $15,000 for injury to dignity, feelings, and self-respect.

Zesty and Ismail [club and owner, respectively] have been ordered to pay Pardy $7,500 for injury to dignity, feelings, and self respect.

Under this system the complainant needn’t pay the legal fees for their case, while the respondent pays out of their own pocket. Earle couldn’t afford to fly cross-country to attend his phony-baloney Vancouver show trial (he was living in Toronto) and rather sportingly offered to testify by videoconference. The court rejected his offer.

Being a Canadian citizen myself, I feel obliged to quickly explain to non-Canuck readers that the BCHRT is not actually a real court, lest you get the idea that Canada is some kind of Third World, police-state, Belarus-style shithole where people get arrested and sent to work the salt mines for making fun of the Great Leader’s mustache. Earle and his lawyer initially refused to even acknowledge the Tribunal’s legitimacy, and the British Columbia Supreme Court itself argued that the case should not proceed until it was determined that the BCHRT had jurisdiction over the matter. But proceed they did, and now, after four years of hearing evidence that Earle’s vulgar taunts about strap-on cocks amounted to “sexist and homophobic” insults which caused Pardy “emotional distress,” the Tribunal awarded her this generous handout.

Earle is hardly anybody’s idea of a redneck, homophobic bigot. If anything, he’s a self-described liberal who seems genuinely bewildered at the way those on his “side” have been so eager to throw him under the bus as punishment for what appears to be nothing more than drunken insult-slinging between a comic and an unruly audience. Granted, Earle’s putdowns were not at Don Rickles’s level of heckler-flattening sharpness. Many observers and even fellow comics were eager to dismiss Earle as not being worth the effort to defend because they didn’t find him funny. They argued that better comics would know how to handle obnoxious audience members without resorting to crude dick jokes. Perhaps they were thinking of subtler, gentler putdowns along the lines of George “Would somebody just put a dick in that guy’s mouth, please?” Carlin or Richard “I’ll slap you in the mouth with my dick” Pryor.

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Human-rights commissions’ original purpose was to prevent real injustices (i.e., people being denied employment or housing because of their religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.), and this seems an entirely civilized and reasonable justification for their existence to most people. But somehow they’ve managed to metastasize into a Kafkaesque body, accountable to no one while policing the nation’s comedy clubs to ensure sensitive heckler-management techniques.

How did they become so grotesquely distorted from their original (and basically sane) purpose? One possibility is that, in our highly bureaucratized and wildly litigious society, there are increasingly melodramatic possibilities for self-pity opened up by an ever-expanding definition of “victimhood.” Pardy apparently claimed with a straight (no pun intended) face that she had suffered “post-traumatic stress” as a result of the incident, a phrase which I’d previously thought was normally reserved for shell-shocked war vets.

And then there’s the fact that Canadians don’t enjoy the same speech protections as our American counterparts.

That last one came as a surprise to me. Because of our historical ties to the soggy, soccer-hooligan-infested ex-empire known as Britain, it seems we have a somewhat less officially enshrined tradition of free speech than the Yanks. Having slept through most of my high-school history classes, I’d always assumed that Western democracies were on the same page about this sort of thing. Speaking on the differences in American and Canadian culture regarding free speech, Canadian writer Susan Cole once argued:

We don’t have a First Amendment, we don’t have a religion of free speech….[We] respect diversity, equity, all of the values that Canadians really care about. Those are the things that drive our political culture. Not freedoms, not rugged individualism, not free speech. It’s different, and for us, it works.

Notice the heavy dose of the plural pronouns “we” and “us” in the above fragment. One is sorely tempted to give Tonto’s classic stone-faced reply: “Who’s this ‘we,’ Kemo Sabe?” Ms. Cole has no more right to speak on all Canadians’ behalf than Avril Lavigne or Wayne Gretzky do, but she’s decided for us by proxy that “we” don’t really care about free speech—it’s only another goofy American export, like Jerry Springer and super-size Big Gulps. Her attitude is typical of Canada’s political/cultural elite.

Students of social history will someday look back with bewilderment and wonder how a civilized First World nation such as Canada could actually hold show trials that would be the envy of China or Iran and recalled nothing so much as Eastern European and Russian jokes from the mid-1900s. As an old Soviet favorite from the 1950s goes:

A judge walks out of his chambers laughing his head off. A colleague approaches him and asks why he is laughing.

“I just heard the funniest joke in the world!”

“Well, go ahead, tell me!” says the other judge.

“I can’t—I just gave a guy ten years for it!”

Philip Roth

Even as a septuagenarian, Philip Roth can’t seem to stop offending the kind of people who make it their business to be offended all the damn time. The latest case in point: the very public and ill-tempered resignation of feminist writer Carmen Callil from the Man Booker Prize committee in protest against the award going to Roth. Huffing like Margaret Dumont in an old Marx Brothers movie, Ms. Callil declared that “I don’t rate him as a writer at all” and questioned whether anyone would still read his novels in twenty years’ time. She opined that reading his novels can make a reader feel as though Roth were “sitting on your face and you can’t breathe,” causing earnest literary critics across the world to giggle uncontrollably.

Roth has long been derided and disliked by the feminist literary community for his unreconstructed phallocentrism, if that’s even a real word. Ms. Callil quickly went into damage-control mode after her initial comments were seen as being needlessly ungracious by claiming that the real issue was not Roth’s alleged misogyny, but his American citizenship. Writing in Britain’s Guardian, she clarified that she felt the prize should have gone to a non-North American contender. She argued that Roth’s reputation as a walking penis did not inform her decision, but instead her concern that a more culturally diverse set of writers be acknowledged.

Roth has been an amazingly enduring figure of contempt for public morality’s righteous defenders for over half a century now. His ability to piss people off remains admirably constant, from the Eisenhower era’s uptight, bow-tied arbiters of good taste to today’s politically correct apparatchiks. When his volume of short stories detailing lower-to-middle-class Jewish American life in the 1950s (Goodbye, Columbus) was released, he was denounced from synagogue pulpits (or whatever they call pulpits in synagogues) and spat at by rabbis on the streets because he had dared to portray Jews as flawed, ordinary humans rather than icons of righteous humility. Apparently unfazed by the hostility and outrage that such a comparatively mild book of social observation aroused, he unleashed Portnoy’s Complaint, which ups the ante on community-offense matters considerably:

…weep for your own pathetic selves, why don’t you, sucking and sucking on that sour grape of a religion! Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews! Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass….

If this passage—part of the teenaged Portnoy’s frustrated rant against his oppressively close-knit family—was Roth’s idea of offering an olive branch to aggrieved community members, one can understand why he never pursued a career as a diplomat. Feminists didn’t much care for the book or its sex-crazed protagonist either, and there was plenty to offend mainstream Catholics and Protestants as well as Jews. But perhaps the ultimate offense was simply to serious literary and intellectual types who couldn’t believe that Roth would turn his back on his early novels’ earnest, Jamesian drama and choose instead to write a book about overbearing Jewish mothers, teenage masturbation, and threesomes while seeming to use the words “cock” and “cunt” 20 times per page.

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As the conservative 50s gave way to the permissive 60s and 70s, Roth maintained an uncanny ability to offend the squares, although who exactly comprised “the squares” changed with the decades. In 1995’s Sabbath’s Theater, Roth is acutely aware of the cultural shift that has seen the humorless, uptight moralists and censorious busybodies moving from the right to the left. His protagonist, the aging and (of course) oversexed protagonist Mickey Sabbath, finds himself on the wrong side of morality’s righteous defenders in two very different decades. First, in the 50s, the lecherous young street puppeteer is arrested for removing a coed’s breast from her blouse during a public performance; the morally outraged here are devout Catholics and indignant policemen. Then in the PC nineties, he loses his job at a university for gross sexual harassment of a girl decades his junior; this time the villain is a stridently feminist Japanese Dean of Students. Ruminating on his past and present, Sabbath caustically observes:

When I got written up in The Nation for taking a tit out on the street I was their noble savage for a week. Today they’d excoriate my balls off for so much as thinking about it, but in those days it made me heroic to all right-thinking people.

Mickey Sabbath has watched as Western society has changed over the past 50 years, but he has always maintained his place as an outsider—a cynical observer of the overconfident self-importance that often attaches itself to defenders of the status quo, an unbuttoned (in every sense) character who is too exuberant and undisciplined for his own good. The near-seamless switch from conservative to liberal orthodoxies, and the role of the hapless individual floating on the tides of these changes, is a theme that Roth comes back to often in his later works—notably The Human Stain, in which a light-skinned black man goes from having to endure brainless racism (and thus trying to hide his racial identity) to being victimized by a particularly brainless strain of Clinton-era campus political correctness.

So there is something oddly cheering about seeing Roth, now in his seventh decade in publishing, still managing to annoy a Booker judge so much that she’s willing to storm off a committee in protest because she finds his work offensive. (Or rather, she simply doesn’t think it’s very good. No, wait, it’s because he’s American. I lost track.)

Roth is almost old enough to be your granddad’s granddad yet still has the capacity to get under self-righteous people’s skin as effortlessly as he did 50 years ago. You’d have to be stone dead not to find this amusing and a bit awe-inspiring.