Cartoon Wars

Every week, I sit in a contemporary cultural theory class, listening to the professor discuss and debate the supremacy of modernity versus post-modernity, all very abstract and tidy and nice and ultimately useless. Or is it?

That very battle is right now being played out on the streets and in the media vehicles, in the minds of everyday people, as a battle between respect for the supremacy of religion (aka meta-narrative par excellence) and the need for the supremacy of free speech (aka post-modernist splintered individual positioned rationalities).

What the heck am I talking about? Have you been following the Cartoon Wars here, here, here, here and here....? I have. Throughout this last week, I've read about what's been going on, with shock, disbelief, annoyance, anger and a certain mounting sense of bitter pessimism roiling within me.

I'm at the point where there are no words that come to me to express the totality of what I am feeling, of how disgusted I am with the world in general, the posturing, the prostituting of ideals, the threats, the capitulation to a culture of fear that is gradually spreading a black plague of ideological junk over this earth.

Since I can't seem to come up with any coherent sentence to describe my feelings, allow me instead to direct you to Ibn Warraq's column that presents one decidedly western and unapologetically passionate and yet critical view. Then go on over to the All Things Beautiful blog and wallow/flounder/submerse yourself in a dizzying series of clearinghouse-style snapshot views on what is happening, why its worth paying attention to and how serious it could end up being for this earth.

Oh woe is definitely us these days.