Scary news (repeated)
I’m inclined to say that Batman Begins kicked several different kinds of the proverbial ass.
On an unrelated and much scarier note, last month there was an art exhibition at Columbia College in Chicago, which had, among other things, a picture of President Bush with a gun to his head. Although this was simply an art show, and it had already done quite well in Pennsylvania with no complaints, the Secret Service payed a visit to it, and started asking a lot of questions about the artists, their families, etc. In protest to this, another publisher/artist began to make collages of Bush with guns, as a symbolic protest to the Secret Service’s inquiries. He, too, became the subject of a Secret Service investigation. Although they apparently didn’t try to coerce him, they did strongly suggest that he “retract” his art. I find this absolutely frightening – the government is now doing covert investigations into anyone that disagrees with them. This is also not the first time I’ve seen something like this, and I suspect that there are many, many more instances out there that I haven’t found yet. Does anyone have any ideas about how to stop this sort of thing? Who is in charge of this? Who can I write to/talk to/contact in another way to try to stop this from happening again? I find the whole thing mildly terrifying, and much more fascist than I would like to think my country is capable of.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALAN!!!!!
That was totally unrelated to your topic, but meh, you know how it goes. Hope you’re having (had) an awesome bday, and doing lots of terrible things. On the topic of your…topic, I thought BB was overall pretty good though it did drag on for a while. And the secret service investigating artists – infuriating! History always tends to repeat itself. You’d just think people would learn from it once in a while. Gah.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! See you soon soon soon. Love and hugs!
I echo Julia’s off-topic birthday congrats. I shall have to birthday toast you a week late, I fear. Hopefully Mr. AssProctor Extraordinaire remembered to pass on my best wishes last night. In the form of a shower, perhaps?
That’s what the secret service is supposed to be doing; they did this under Clinton, too.
What would bother me is other government agencies doing the same thing; if we called the artists terrorists, for example. At “strongly suggest” is fun, because that’s more like a license to ignore them. It means “you haven’t done anything wrong, but you’re pushing it”.
Well, sounds like a reason to keep pushing.
I guess the part that scares me is that if they’re actually required to follow up on everything that is reported to them (as they claimed), it seems like it would be trivially easy to bring the whole organization to a standstill by just flooding them with false/insignificant tips like this one. I’d like them to do a good job, and I’d like them to focus on the important things (like stopping assassinations, not art shows), so I hope that they’re not actually required to look into everything reported to them. However, this implies that they looked into this because they actually thought this was a serious security problem.I honestly think that this artwork clearely did not pose a threat to anyone, and I don’t think it should have been looked into in such detail. I guess it reminds me of the thought police from 1984, in that what they were really investigating was obviously just a peaceful person who disagreed with the current regime.
The other thing I find really scary about the Secret Service is that it’s secret. If the FBI or the police try to coerce you, you can file a complaint with the people in charge. If the Secret Service does something like that, not only can you not file a complaint, but you cannot even really get anything out of them, because everything they do is classified. It reminds me of this comic, except that the paperwork is classified and will never be seen by the public.