---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote :
Gary Larson is one of my all-time favourites. To constantly and consistently
turn out those surreal cartoons of his that catch one off guard and leave you
chuckling in a good frame of mind show that he has a hotline to the Creative
Intelligence running the show.
He certainly seems to have a feel for how seriously anyone should take religion.
I believe he was the first syndicated cartoonist to feature god, and he got a
lot of stick for it. It didn't bother the letter writers that he portrayed the
great man as dignified with a flowing beard and light emanating from his halo,
just by featuring the creator in a humorous setting he had blasphemed and his
career nearly came to an early end. But then it did almost every week as
nervous editors, scared of controversy, sought to censor the "offending" items.
To be sure I'd have to dig out my copy of Larson's kinda biography The
prehistory of the Far Side - where he details all his early battles to stay
unmoderated - but I think the below is god's first appearance in a panel
cartoon. Hard to believe that cartoons like these were ever considered
contraversial by anyone:
But then there are a lot of people who would kill you still for portraying an
image like this of a holy figure, religious people can be fucking nuts I
shouldn't have to tell you. They fear other people being different to them to
the point that they will chop your head off. Saudi Arabia has executed 100
people this year for crimes like witchcraft and having opinions contrary to
those of the religious authority. One guy got 10 years in jail and 1000 lashes
for daring to suggest that religious societies stifle free speech and keep you
in a self-perpetuating circle of fear. Nice of them to underline his point by
punishing him like that really. Doubt he's seeing the funny side though.... the
lashes are administered 10 a week.
The UK minister for that sort of thing was asked in the commons what she
thought about Saudi Arabia's shockingly medieval approach to crime and
punishment and said that the UK supports free speech but isn't going to object
to the Saudi's because the punishment gets the approval of the majority of
Saudi society. The hell it does. Maybe it didn't occur to her that maybe people
don't object for a reason?
And it's nothing to do with the massive amounts of weapons we sell them, oh
no. Or that our respective "royal" families are very good friends. Society
seems to be held together by such slender threads. We used to bullshit that the
reason we do trade with hideous foreign regimes is so they can be exposed to
our superior values and then change their societies once they'd seen the light.
I can't tell if that was just a sinister or self-deluding joke or not. But now
that China holds all the trump cards I can't help feeling we're going to be
sorry for not demanding social justice in countries we trade with before we
ship them advanced weaponry systems.
