Monday, August 8, 2022

J'Accuse...!

"The Degradation of Alfred Dreyfus" by Henri Meyer

Remember Mario Savio and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement? Libertarianism creates strange bedfellows. The recent referendum in Kansas was a resounding victory for abortion rights but advocates in that heavily Republican state framed it as an individual rights issue. The word "abortion" wasn't used in the campaign. On the other side, feminists who usually identify as left have become identified with Christian fundamentalists who don’t regard pornography as free speech. From a free speech perspective, the #MeToo movement is right wing particularly in the "blacklisting" which recalls the McCarthy era. Ian Buruma, the editor of The New York Review of Books was purged when he invited a Canadian journalist who'd been #MeToo'd to defend himself. What about Zola’s defense of Dreyfus, J'Accuse...!? Has that been removed from the canon along with Courbet’s “The Origin of the World?" Is forcing someone to wear a seatbelt or mask, both invasions of privacy, tantamount to legislating the fate of an unborn fetus? Abortion rights advocates would say it's mixing apples and oranges.You make someone wear a seatbelt for their safety and similarly protect a woman who's physical and mental health are endangered by unwanted pregnancies (some of which are the result of rape or incest). Still, whatever the reason and however it was framed, it’s good news that 70% of Kansans voted for the right of women to control what goes in their bodies. 

read "God Bless Pig Latin America" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to "Hear Comes the Judge" (1968) by Pigmeat Markham




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