Politics or performance art?

[sabotabby]

I am still, some days, surprised that Glenn Beck is real. Or rather, not surprised that he's real, but surprised that he's real and is given air time. I mean, a lot of people, present company included, have mental illnesses, but they don't stick me on the telly.

I take these moments of befuddlement as good signs that I'm not completely cynical.

But really. I can't believe that the political discourse has sunk that low. (There's lower, of course—see Uganda, but Uganda is really the fault of American interference and it's part of the same problem.) Say what you like about the Cold War, but when I was growing up, there was a little bit of reality mixed in with the hot air. Now it's impossible to tell a well-compensated media pundit from the guy with the goiter who hangs out across from Dundas Square gibbering about Jesus.

Comments

[sabotabby]

Uganda is trying to pass a bill that makes homosexuality punishable by death. It's the fault of American fundies, of course.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Oh fuck - yes, I heard about that of course. My friend said she felt it was prevented by Western culture-imposing, which made me a bit miffed, as surely, well, personally I think many "cultural" things are evil shite, that being one of them. Anyway, as many people here pointed out in newspapers and all, the derangedly bigoted form of Christianity seen in much of Africa now was imported by British missionaries.
Many of the mental nurses in the mental hospital here are African Christians, and although some of them are very nice and clearly care about the patients, some do come out with stuff about schizophrenics being possessed by devils and about how letting Jesus in will cure all. Not good for paranoid schizophrenics, methinks, all this talk of devils and Jesus. Especially as then the patients start arguing about which of them is in fact Jesus.

Anyway, yes, Uganda, bad, eek. Would love to visit it but find bizarre sexual bigotry horrific.