"I seek only to gauge what level of discourse is still acceptable in this country by asking, in the hope that I might someday participate in that discourse, whether I am free to posit that it would p

I SAY...

"As long as I (that is, the corporeal, arrestable "I") wish no real damage upon the president, I (the other "I") should theoretically be free even to enhance the scenario at hand for the enjoyment of my public. In place of the initial question I might ask instead, "Am I allowed to write that I would like to kidnap George W. Bush and fly him to a prison in some far-away land where his 'rights' are no longer an issue, there to put a bag over his head and make him stand for hours on one leg while I defecate on his New Testament before chaining his arms to the ceiling until he dies of a heart attack, after which I will claim that he never existed?" Here, though, taste, if not simple human decency, again rears its delicate head: I doubt that I could bring myself to read such a thing, let alone write it."

http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Fall05/csmith/poster.jpg

haha!

it's a good piece.

i'm sure people wondered whether literature was impoverished in any way by not being able to write graphically about drugs and sex innit.

a) a college student,
b) an alcoholic failure,
c) head of several failed oil companies,
d) general manager of a baseball team,
e) governor of texas?

and should we not be upset that some of the things discussed in this article are being actually done to real fucking people in our name, with our money by bush's government? hi?

i think people talk about bush's real crimes all the time, esp. here.

there's an old poster out West… I recall, that said, "I seek only to gauge what level of discourse is still acceptable in this country by asking, in the hope that I might someday participate in that discourse, whether I am free to posit that it would probably be great fun, and a boon to all mankind, if I were to slaughter the president of the United States with my bare hands."

emphasis added.

http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/appendix7.html

it has only been a crime to threaten the president since 1917. how many people knew that Teddy Roosevelt was once shot by an assassin???

"The attempt on the life of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 further demonstrated the broad scope and complexity of the protection problems facing the Secret Service. Giuseppe Zangara was a bricklayer and stonemason with a professed hatred of capitalists and Presidents. He seemed to be obsessed with the desire to kill a President. After his arrest he confessed that he had first planned to go to Washington to kill President Herbert Hoover, but as the cold climate of the North was bad for his stomach trouble, he was loath to leave Miami, where he was staying. When he read in the paper that President-elect Roosevelt would be in Miami, he resolved to kill him."

"On the night of February 15, 1933, at, a political rally in Miami's Bayfront Park, the President-elect sat on the top of the rear seat of his automobile with a small microphone in his hand as he made a short informal talk. Fortunately for him, however, he slid down into the seat just before Zangara could get near enough to take aim. The assassin's arm may have been jogged just as he shot; the five rounds he directed at Roosevelt went awry. However, he mortally wounded Mayor Anton Cermak, of Chicago, and hit four other persons; the President-elect, by a miracle, escaped. Zangara, of course, never had any chance of escaping."

Corbett was then himself arrested for disobeying a direct order. However, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton quickly dismissed the charges, saying: "The rebel is dead. The patriot lives." Boston Corbett received $1,653.85, his share of the reward.

Some one hundred years later the Smithsonian Institute acquired the derringers and tested the weapons in an attempt to find the cause of the miss-firings. Both guns discharged on the first try. The odds of both derringers miss-firing in 1835 were calculated at one in 125,000.

I hate this idea that we'd rather Bush than Cheney as President. Let them put their worst face on, someone people wouldn't want to have a beer with in a million years.

(Though I'm sure that reading time would always be exciting.)

Or here for that matter...

http://static.flickr.com/22/33346263_f8b6d0f736.jpg?v=0

I haven't read the article, but I'm interested in the teleology involved in classifying certain types of speech dangerous or harmful. It kind of reminded me of something else...

[cut/paste from an old paper of mine]

In the review of [Catherine MacKinnon's] Only Words published in the Nation magazine, Carlin Romano begins:
“Suppose I decide to rape Catherine MacKinnon before reviewing her book. Because I’m uncertain whether she understands the difference between being raped and being exposed to pornography, I consider it required research for my critique of her manifesto that pornography equals rape and should be banned. I plot and I strategize, but at the last minute, I chicken out. People simply wouldn’t understand. Nonetheless, when I sit down to write I still believe that understanding her support for pornography censorship requires raping her, so I do the next best thing: I imagine the act.”

MacKinnon responded that Romano, the reviewer, did indeed rape her in writing and publishing that review.