Where's that kind of life that you would want to stay awake for?
Terminal onlignity was reached at the point in the night where I encountered a take so bad, I was left misquoting Robert Bolt's Thomas More to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch. A Man for All Seasons (1960) falls in a class with Anouilh's Becket (1959) where my distance from the Christian conscience of their protagonists has never prevented me from loving the arguments of the plays, so that fragments of their language have been shot through my own for decades and thus when I see the claim on the internet that not visibly rejoicing in the murder of a CEO is flashing a red flag of complicity with the incoming administration, apparently my brain responds with its best approximation of "And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?"
spatch. A Man for All Seasons (1960) falls in a class with Anouilh's Becket (1959) where my distance from the Christian conscience of their protagonists has never prevented me from loving the arguments of the plays, so that fragments of their language have been shot through my own for decades and thus when I see the claim on the internet that not visibly rejoicing in the murder of a CEO is flashing a red flag of complicity with the incoming administration, apparently my brain responds with its best approximation of "And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?"
no subject
I personally can't rejoice in this man's murder, even though he made lots of money for his shareholders with a new AI system to review health claims--one apparently designed to favor denial, harming countless families. He may also have been personally corrupt, making millions off insider trading. Still, he was a husband and the father of young children. I remind myself of the drops of wine removed from the glass at Passover.
I not only see assassination as morally wrong, I see it as a political mistake. Here I'm looking at it from the perspective of a historian and supporter of democracy. When a radical assassinates a reactionary, the result is typically increased political support for repression. Assassination has generally only been an effective political tool in the hands of reactionaries, because the murder of charismatic reform leaders can disrupt their movements. And at a fundamental level, assassination is an anti-democratic form of political action.