Once again, let me share an angry parable (with a timely tweak). Some of you don't think it's appropriate and I know that. But I do. So here goes (with a hat tip to Pat Sajak, of course).
Today is the one-year anniversary of one of the most shocking events in the history of American pop culture. I am referring, of course, to the shocking murder of filmmaker Michael Moore. It took place shortly after the release of his film Submission, which set out to prove that President Bush and his White House are totally controlled by the radical Religious Right.
In broad daylight, on a city street, Moore was attacked and slashed to death by a fundamentalist Christian, who shouted that Moore deserved to die because of his blasphemy and sins against unborn children. As a final symbolic act, the fundamentalist stabbed the fimmaker one last time, using the blade to pin to his chest a copy of a Four Spiritual Laws pamphlet.
Total fiction, of course. But how would this story be covered by the mainstream press? Do you think we would see MSM coverage of this event on its one-year anniversary?
I think we would.
This brings me, of course, to the one-year anniversary of the murder of Dutch filmmaker, political gadfly and liberal icon Theo van Gogh. If you search for his name today at Google News, you will find some coverage of this story -- in the foreign press. I read about this story again, of course, in The Wall Street Journal. For some reason, this act of terrorism remains a "conservative media" story on this side of the Atlantic. The essay by Francis Fukuyama ("A Year of Living Dangerously: Remember Theo van Gogh, and shudder for the future") begins this way:
One year ago today, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh had his throat ritually slit by Mohamed Bouyeri, a Muslim born in Holland who spoke fluent Dutch. This event has totally transformed Dutch politics, leading to stepped-up police controls that have now virtually shut off new immigration there. Together with the July 7 bombings in London (also perpetrated by second generation Muslims who were British citizens), this event should also change dramatically our view of the nature of the threat from radical Islamism.
This sounds, to me, like a newsworthy topic.
Now that you think about it, so does this story, which I first read about through another commentator on the political right, sort of. That would be Andrew Sullivan. The pope is talking about it, too. That's two very sharp, and diverse, guys.
Once again we are talking about a shocking crime -- the beheading of Christian schoolgirls in Indonesia. Alas, this appears to be a conservative news story, too. If you want information you need to go to foreign news sources or to Christianity Today. An online news story by reporter Deann Alford informs us:
In what one Indonesian human rights activist describes as the latest attack in an ongoing terror campaign against Christians of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, three teenage girls en route to school through a cocoa plantation were beheaded Saturday morning, apparently by Muslims. ...
Two of the girls' heads were found near a police station five miles from the village of Poso. The head of the third was left in front of Kasiguncu village's Pentecostal Church of Indonesia (GPdI), eight miles from where the bodies were found in the cocoa plantation.
Read these stories and weep. Or don't read them. I wish you could pick up your local newspaper and have that choice.