The look is quite different from what I'd imagined. Gaiman's book was marketed as "better than Stephen King or your money back" and that was more or less how I'd pictured the visuals. For that matter, Stephen King is more or less the only popular author nowadays who still writes about an America that Hillary Clinton (to her cost) refused to believe still existed. What better place for the Old Gods to carry on existing, where people believe (albeit less and less as time goes by), than flyover country? Only outsiders like Gaiman still dare to venture to such a place - which is genuinely sad, because the people who live there are (in their own way) genuinely splendid.
Shadow in the book is "mixed race". In the series he appears to be just a stereotypical whining black man, which is unfortunate. By making him mixed race Gaiman both held up to scrutiny a Marxist vision of America the "melting-pot" and implicitly queried its validity in a stubbornly multicultural world. (This was before 9/11!) What gods, indeed, does a "mixed race" man worship? At the same time, he gleefully subverted the standard "magic negro" trope so familiar from King's prison drama The Green Mile (for example). Shadow is a "black" man, but he's almost the only character in the story who doesn't have magic powers.
Obviously it's always difficult to transfer a cerebral type of hero, with internal monologues and long descriptive observations and angst, from the page to the screen, but even so, Shadow in the book is much more likeable than he is in the TV-version.
The idea that female flight attendants are like völvas or Valkyries actually played out clearer and funnier in the TV-series than it did in the book, though arguably that was just a function of the executive producer source material-author (i.e. Gaiman himself) seeing that the more "important" jokes from his work got transferred over to the screen version properly.
In the late '80s Ian McShane was Lovejoy, a smug wide-boy antiques dealer who ran rings round the yuppy denizens of London's home counties whilst getting off with the daughters of the minor aristocracy. The last time I saw him he was a special guest star (one episode only) playing a smug fantasy trendy vicar in Game of Thrones. And instead of playing Prof Merriman Lyon from The Dark is Rising Sequence (the tall, ancient, kindly, otherworldly Great Uncle Merry character from the books), in the film version of The Dark is Rising he played a smug and wonderfully violent butler. And now here he is playing a smug conman version of Mr Wednesday that is nothing like the Creepy Col Sanders character from the book. But that is perhaps permissible and (more to the point) more enjoyable on telly. And an Englishman playing an American character for once works rather well, given that Mr Wednesday is, of course, not "really" American.
The mindless violence is surprisingly unnecessary, as are the four-letter words. Some things have been unnecessarily coarsened, others surprisingly bowdlerised. Making Bilquis into an internet date rather than a hooker was a disappointing example of the latter. Americans even after Game of Thrones still seemingly can't deal with a character who practices the world's oldest profession.
And on the subject of Bilquis, was she supposed to be beautiful? Was the point that she isn't but men still desire her? Or was she supposed to look younger and more beautiful at the end of her scene than she did at the beginning? In the book Bilquis had brown hands, and even in the script she has a cherry red mouth. But in our modern Marxist dualist (or post-modern) western culture, where it doesn't matter what things look like (q.v. Lily Potter's eyes in the final Harry Potter film!), and, more to the point, in an American popular culture that currently only recognises two races as authentically "American", she has to be played by a black actress.
On the one hand it feels hammy, over the top, shiny and slightly gaudy. On the other, it feels low budget, much like Auntie's revival Doctor Who series (or their dreary version of SS-GB, come to that). Miscasting can make a show feel just as cheap as shabby sets and poor dialogue can, and more specifically the problem with racial miscasting (so far Shadow and Bilquis are the most obvious, though of course McShane too is an odd racial fit, given that he doesn't look particularly Nordic) is that American Gods implicitly is all about characters from different races and cultures who, having come to America, are trying to reconcile what they are and where they're from with the world of today. With a casting director who doesn't care where people are from, either ethnically or (implicitly) geographically and "religiously", the show has arguably got off on the wrong foot.
All-in-all though, the whole thing is watchable, nay enjoyable. Early episode weirdness can be quickly ironed out, and provided it can carry on being fresh and inventive it should be able to keep its audience until the end.
The Pink Swastika is one of those amusing little books that fails to convince with its central thesis (which is basically that fascism = poofterism) but which nonetheless constantly entertains - nay titillates! - with its wealth of little known facts and circumstantial evidence. As such, it is very easy to dip in and out of it. Like everything on the Internet, what it has to say has to be double- and triple-checked (in other words "googled to death"), but a surprising amount of it stands up.
As I say, what the authors have to say about Nazism wears somewhat thin at times. The National Socialist German Workers Party did indeed have it roots in the barmier imaginings of a group of shell-shocked Bavarian veterans of the Great War. And apart from the fact that they were all ex-soldiers there was nothing particularly "rightwing" about them - at least until they were infiltrated by the security forces (in the person of a former Austrian corporal by the name of Adolf Heidler) and had their ideology re-modelled along the lines of Prussian Imperialism. But the presence of the notorious pervert Ernst Röhm amongst the luminaries of the early Nazi Party does not imply that the Party was a "gay" political movement, nor do its early meetings in gay nightclubs. Nor, for that matter, does Heidler's (a.k.a. Hitler's) former sideline career as a Viennese rentboy!
Where the authors are on more solid ground is with the modern "Far Right", not to mention the modern "gay rights" movement. Although the "Gay Movement" has clearly drifted towards the Left in recent years, it has in its time had a significant following on the Far Right - and conversely there is hardly a single Far Right political party in Europe today that has not had more than its fair share of gay sex scandals.
As it happens, for a long time I had assumed that the honourable exception (if that is the right phrase) to this general rule was France. Whatever one may think of Jean-Marie Le Pen (and I'm not terribly keen, I have to say) he is at least a man's man - or rather a lady's man, if you see what I mean. Unfortunately the French Right, albeit less so than the French Left, is hilariously split: monarchists here (split into legitimists, Orleanists, and ooh-la-la!), nationalists there, Gaullists and republicans and who-knows-what, pro-Americans, anti-Americans, McDonald's-bombing farmers and cinema-bombing Roman Catholics - and even the odd integrist and traditionalist kicking around. It takes all sorts!
Where the really funny stuff happens, apparently, is on the Nouvelle Droit. David Irving, who is always good for a laugh, has an old news story about a young French student called Michael Caignet in his archive.
ON January 29, 1981, Michel (Miguel) Caignet, a 26 year old doctoral candidate in English-German linguistics, was just leaving his residence in Courbevoie to attend the university when he was accosted by four individuals in the vicinity of his apartment. He was at once knocked to the ground and held down while one of his four assailants poured sulphuric acid over his face and his right hand.
Mr. Caignet had once belonged to FANE (the Fédération d'action nationale et européene) and been a revisionist. He had been denounced by the daily VSD.
As a result of the acid attack his facial features were so hideously disfigured that only two newspapers dared to publish a photograph. The identity of the main participant in the attack, Yves Aziza, a medical student and son of Charles Aziza (a pharmaceutical company employee at Montreuil) was known to police within one hour of the assault. But the French police, and French justice, allowed Y. Aziza, in circumstances of which the outrageous details are well-known, sufficient time to flee to Germany and then Israel.
At the Justice Ministry, a Mr. Main, (a director attached to the Office of Criminal Investigations headed by Raoul Béteille), adopted a sarcastic tone as he explained why it took all of 14 days before a criminal investigation into the matter finally began. ... Among Y. Aziza's accomplices one noted the name of Daniel Ziskind, son of Michèle Ziskind and sister of Jean-Pierre Pierre-Bloch, and the son of Jean Pierre-Bloch himself.
OK, most of those Jewish names don't mean much to me. But Michel Caignet was to go on to further notoriety by becoming the founder-editor of Gaie France - which, as the title perhaps suggests, was a rightwing French nationalist gay magazine. Which promoted pederasty!
In 1998, a gay newspaper in Amsterdam reported on the sorry fate of Gaie France:
Last spring the case against French publisher Michel Caignet was finally brought to a close. A Paris court barred him for life from ever publishing again, and sentenced him to serve two-and-a-half years in prison for his role in selling gay videos that allegedly showed actors under the age of eighteen, but over the age of fifteen having sex. Caignet's license to distribute his magazine Gaie France was already revoked in 1993, but Caignet ignored the censors' warnings and continued publishing under new titles. The convictions brought to a close an investigation that began with nation-wide raids in April 1996 against people on Caignet's mailing list. The day the trials opened there were more raids, this time involving some 2500 French police, who conducted 710 searches around the country. Of the 673 persons whose home were searched, 210 were charged with a crime, and 20 were kept in jail. The involvement of Caignet with porn with minors doesn't surprise someone who's familiar with the history of Gaie France. The magazine has always been controversial because the editors used the philosophy of right-wing authors as Hans Blüher to sanction their own interest in very young boys.
[Gay News Amsterdam, #77, January 1998; Martijn.org]
The [Euro New Right]’s “paganism” entails a naturalism towards mores and sexuality. Unlike still traditionalists, ENR members have a relatively liberated attitude towards sexuality. Thus [Alain de] Benoist had no qualms about giving an interview to Gaie France, which features homoerotic images as well as cultural commentary. ENR members have no desire to impose what they consider the patently unnatural moralism of Judeo-Christianity on sexual relations.
Ummm, Okaaay! It's interesting to read that Judeo-Christian "moralism" is "unnatural" - whereas having it off with little boys is apparently just fine.
Nowadays Michael Heslop is a highly successful sports illustrator, specialising in golfing art. All jolly good, I'm sure! But he also produced my favourite and, in my opinion, easily the best covers for Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising Sequence.
The first book in the series, which was originally intended to be a standalone, was Over Sea, Under Stone.
The sequel, was The Dark is Rising.
Heslop only actually began doing covers for the series with the third book, Greenwitch, although he also went back and did covers for the paperback editions of the first two books as well.
Heslop's hardback covers of the last three books in the series are below.
Heslop was, I believe, somewhat unusual for a children's book illusrator, in that he ended up producing altogether new versions of all the books for their paperback editions in the 1980s. Here they are below.
He also produced a cover for the first edition of the one-volume version of the whole series. Below is the only properly "framed" copy of it I've been able to find of it on line. (There's another, slightly wonky one here.)
It was Steven Spielberg's first "serious" mainstream film.
For me, Empire of the Sun was far and away his strangest and most haunting work for almost two decades, before it was finally superseded by A.I. The comic-book clarity of the director's vision, coupled with the mesmeric and surreal prose of J G Ballard's original, autobiographical novel, makes for a heady, at times disturbing and ultimately deeply moving piece of cinema. At one level it's Hope and Glory on acid: at the same time, it is shot through with pain and loss and beauty, all of which its director has brought to the screen with a quite uncompromising sincerity. It's not perfect, but then neither are any of Spielberg's films, and it certainly paved the way for Schindler's List a decade or so later.
Of course it also launched on the world an enchanting, chilling young actor in the shape of a preteen Christian Bale. In time Bale would weather both kid-flicks and period dramas (not to mention the more-than-occasional bit of sci-fi) to take his rightful place as one of Hollywood's most phenomenal talents, in blockbusters and artsy-fartsy stuff equally. In Empire though there is a simple, full-blooded intensity to his performance that is partly Spielberg, partly his own, and partly down to the sheer energy of a 12-year-old boy. More than Spielberg's cinematography or Tom Stoppard's typically strange, thoughtful screenplay, it is Bale's performance that really makes Empire of the Sun.
That, and of course John Williams's BAFTA-winning score! The words (with Bale lip-synching, as it happens) in the above clip are those of a traditional Welsh lullaby - though it sounds as if they may have been sung to make them sound more Japanese. For me the sheer incongruity of it says more about the chaos and stupidity of war than any number of Saving Private Ryan sequences ever could.
Huna blentyn yn fy mynwes Clyd a chynnes ydyw hon; Breichiau mam sy'n dynn amdanat, Cariad mam sy dan fy mron; Ni cha' dim amharu'th gyntun, Ni wna undyn â thi gam; Huna'n dawel, annwyl blentyn, Huna'n fwyn ar fron dy fam.
Paid ag ofni, dim ond deilen Gura, gura ar y ddôr; Paid ag ofni, ton fach unig Sua, sua ar lan y môr; Huna blentyn, nid oes yma Ddim i roddi iti fraw; Gwena'n dawel yn fy mynwes Ar yr engyl gwynion draw.
Sleep my baby, at my breast, ’Tis a mother’s arms round you. Make yourself a snug, warm nest. Feel my love forever new. Harm will not meet you in sleep, Hurt will always pass you by. Child beloved, always you’ll keep, In sleep gentle, mother’s breast nigh.
Do not fear the sound, it’s a breeze Brushing leaves against the door. Do not dread the murmuring seas, Lonely waves washing the shore. Sleep child mine, there’s nothing here, While in slumber at my breast, Angels smiling, have no fear, Holy angels guard your rest.
As for the explosions, it's worth bearing in mind that this was before the days of CGI.
Looking back on the film in 2009, Leslie Phillips reminisced:
It was my 85th birthday on Monday, which was also the day I heard that J G Ballard had died. The more people you've known through your life, the more the obituaries begin to pile up. It's one of the tragedies of growing old.
The news rekindled memories of acting in the film adaptation of his book Empire of the Sun in 1987. Ballard played a cameo role: he was such a marvellous writer, and a very gentle man, terribly sweet and friendly.
I spent most of the film with the little boy who played the main part, the semi-autobiographical character who becomes a Japanese prisoner of war.
I had no inkling then that that boy, named Christian Bale, would become such a huge star. The director, Steven Spielberg, took as much care of him as if he was his own son.
Yet another right-wing gay French intellectual who got done for collaborationism, Abel Hermant was indeed an early (1885) contributor to the classic French gay Catholic boarding school genre. Having been a respected member of the Académie française, he was unceremoniously chucked out after the Second World War for having been pro-Nazi.
According to Wikipedia,
Hermant was born in Paris, the son of an architect. He received a degree from the École Normale Supérieure in 1880, and published his first volume of verse in 1883, The Contempt. After several youthful novels, he moved to ironic analysis of the popular mores of the Belle Époque and achieved popular success. His first semi-autobiographical novel, Monsieur Rabossonof 1884, established his reputation as a satirical social observer. Its follow-up Le Cavalier Miserey of 1887, dealt with the issue of homosexuals in the military.
...
By 1899 Hermant was well-connected in society; for instance he was the guest of Anna de Noailles at Évian-les-Bains, where he became friends with Marcel Proust. After a number of tries Hermant was elected to the Académie française on 30 June 1927.
During World War II Hermant's contributions to Jean Luchaire's pro-Nazi evening daily Les Nouveaux Temps, beginning in 1940, his open support of the Vichy regime, and his criticisms of the French Army, marked him as a collaborator. At over 80 years of age, he was sentenced to life in prison on 15 December 1945. Hermant achieved the negative distinction of being one of the four "immortals" removed from the Académie française after World War II for collaboration with Germany. Hermant and Abel Bonnard were expelled outright, in disgrace; Charles Maurras of Action Française and Marshall Philippe Pétain had their seats declared vacant and were not replaced until their deaths.
Pardoned and released in 1948, Abel Hermant tried to justify his conduct during the Occupation in his Thirteenth Notebook. He died shortly thereafter.
Hermant's early work La Mission de Cruchod (Jean-Baptiste) was republished two years ago with a new title and (mysteriously!) a picture of St Dominic Savio on the cover. (Don't ask me why, but do the Google search. Perhaps they just didn't know who he was!)
According to the current publisher's blurb, the story is about George, a beautiful blond fourteen-year-old American boy who, having been enrolled by his parents in a French boarding school in Lausanne, becomes the object of "particular friendship" of another boy, Jean-Baptiste, who is three years his senior. The protestant Jean-Baptiste falls in love with the younger boy at first sight, but, having once tried (and failed) to make love to him, then embarks on a new mission to convert the Catholic George to Calvinism - a "holy" cause which subsequently develops into a darkly possessive, jealous and despotic relationship.
Visiting the Eastern Front, including the site of the Katyn massacre, with the French Legion: Robert Brasillach with Jacques Doriot and Claude Jeantet
A French author and journalist. Robert Brasillach is best known as the editor of Je suis partout, a nationalist newspaper which came to advocate various fascist movements and supported Jacques Doriot. After the liberation of France in 1944 he was executed following a trial and Charles de Gaulle's express refusal to grant him a pardon. Brasillach was executed for advocating collaborationism, denunciation and incitement to murder. The execution remains a subject of some controversy, because Brasillach was executed for "intellectual crimes", rather than military or political actions.
He became an editor of Je suis partout, a fascist paper founded by dissidents from the Action Française and led by Pierre Gaxotte. Brasillach was attracted to the fascistic Rexist movement in Belgium, and wrote an article and later a book about the leader of the movement, Leon Degrelle. Brasillach admired what he perceived to be Degrelle's youth and charisma and Degrelle's insistence on being neither left nor right, supporting striking workers, encouraging love of the King, family and God and desiring to see the establishment of an anti-Communist and anti-Capitalist Christian-influenced corporate state. Degrelle went on to collaborate with the German occupation of Belgium and served in Waffen SS. Brasillach was also greatly impressed by José Antonio Primo de Rivera and his Falangist movement. By contrast, he described Mein Kampf as a "masterpiece of cretinism" in which Hitler appeared to be "a sort of enraged teacher.
A soldier in 1940, Brasillach was captured by the Germans and held prisoner for several months after the fall of France. At his trial the prosecution alleged that his release was due to pro-German articles written while in captivity. He was freed in early 1941 and returned to his editorial duties at Je suis partout. He wrote in favor of the Vichy regime but later embraced a more wholehearted germanophile policy of collaboration and Nazi policies and criticized the Vichy state. He joined a group of French authors and artists in a trip to meet with German counterparts in Weimar and in November 1942 he supported the German militarization of the unoccupied zone under the Vichy government because it "reunited France".
Brassilach visited the site of the Katyn massacre, toured the Eastern Front, visited French volunteers and wrote, on his return to France, that he had gone from embracing collaboration due to reason and rationality to being a collaborator for reasons of the heart ("De collaborationiste de raison, je suis devenu collaborationiste de coeur.") He called for the death of left-wing politicians and in the summer of 1944 signed the call for the summary execution of all members of the French Resistance. He considered himself a "moderate" anti-Semite and was replaced as editor of Je suis partout in 1943 by the even more extreme Pierre-Antoine Cousteau. He was a member of the Groupe Collaboration, an initiative that encouraged close cultural ties between France and Germany. He went on to work for various journals, including Révolution nationale and le Petit Parisien. After the liberation of Paris Brasillach hid in an attic, joking in his diary: "Jews have been living in cupboards for four years, why not imitate them?" He gave himself up on September 14 when he heard that his mother had been arrested. He spent the next five months in prison and continued his literary endeavours while incarcerated.
The sentence caused an uproar in French literary circles and even some of Brasillach's political opponents protested. Resistance member and author François Mauriac, whom Brasillach had savaged in the press, circulated a petition to Charles De Gaulle to commute the sentence. This petition was signed by many of the leading lights of the French literary world, including Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Arthur Honegger, Jean Anouilh and Thierry Maulnier. De Gaulle did not comply and Brasillach was executed by firing squad in Montrouge. It has been argued that De Gaulle refused to spare Brasillach because the author had on numerous occasions called for Georges Mandel's execution. De Gaulle admired Mandel, a prominent conservative politician (who happened to be Jewish), and who was murdered by the Milice during the closing days of the Occupation. Brasillach called out "Long live France anyway!" ("Vive la France quand même!") immediately before his execution.
[Wikipedia (Adapted slightly)]
Unlike other gay fascist ideologues, Brasillach probably just "happened" to be gay. But Brasillach was also the only right-wing gay Catholic French collaborationist that I know of who actually lost his life because of his pro-German wartime activities. And particularly shockingly he was killed not for military or political crimes but for "intellectual" ones (Orwell's famous "thought crimes"). By some he is regarded as a "martyr" to this day. Although William Joyce wasn't gay, there are some fairly obvious parallels. In practice quite probably he was also targeted because de Gaulle harboured a personal grudge against him.
I must admit, I'd be lying if I said I didn't admit to a certain wry pleasure at Robert Downey Jr's congratulatory declaration to Tom Holland 'Spider-Man is English again.' After all, not so long ago, deliciously (and however briefly!) all three of America's top three comic-book superheroes were played by Englishmen. (Christian Bale's Welsh, but who's arguing?)
Henry Cavil for his part comes across for all the world as just a really nice, normal, grounded, educated young man - and yes, he's rather handsome and seriously ripped with it. And personally I think he's also nailed Superman, but what do I know?
It also very hard to resist the charm of a blockbuster actor who likes to spend his spare time reading a good book. (It wasn't just the tight trunks that made me warm to Daniel Craig. And Ewan McGregor is on the record as having said the same about reading.)
And as for lines in interviews like 'My first acting role was in prep school, when I was about 11.'? Just toooooo cute, by half!
The first and probably the last "pagan" novel I ever tried to read was Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon.
To be honest, even as a moderately observant Catholic teenager, going to Confession semi-regularly, I'd have lapped up the incest. It was the paedophilia that actually made me freak out. So it came as an odd sort of relief to find out eventually that the author herself was actually married to an outspoken paedophile - albeit a gay one. (Now there's a surprise! And that last link is from this site, BTW.)
Before she died, however, Marion Zimmer Bradley gave up on her experimentations with witchcraft/paganism (and presumably gay and lesbian fantasy porn) and returned to the Episcopalianism of her childhood. Not unlike Anne Rice, I suppose, who returned to her traditionalist Catholicism after a bout of cancer (or some such unpleasantness)!
Rice's lapsation had seemingly gone hand in hand with writing homo-erotic/paedophile vampire stories such as Interview with the Vampire, in much the same gay paedo "Catholic" vampire tradition as Montague Summers. At the same time, she also brought her son Christopher up as a homosexual. (Now apparently he writes gay pseudo-porn of his own, but I remember seeing a TV interview with him before his looks went, and he was truly scrumptious!)
Sadly, Rice wrote only one Catholic book, about Jesus when he was a little boy. She also posted a bit on the traddy web forum Angel Queen. (And yes, that is what it was called.) And then she promptly lapsed again when it turned out that (Quelle horreur!) actually the Catholic Church is not terribly keen on gay marriage.
A few years back, I started to think there might be something to be said for the HRA. It did get me thinking though, Why do we have to punish sex crimes quite so harshly?
The real reason of course, very simply, is to make people feel better. Specifically though, I suspect that what people really want to feel better about are their own sexual sins - fornication, pornography, and so on - that aren't actually crimes but are (or traditionally were) seen as being a bit naughty and/or "unhealthy", but which aren't really so different from those that are crimes. In purely material terms, in other words, the "sex crimes" that people get life sentences for and their livelihoods destroyed are hardly any worse than what most people now regard as private, harmless pleasures. They have to punished, and punished severely, to make us feel that they are different, and to make us feel that however bad we may be we aren't nearly so bad as all that! And so it is that the sex criminals we do still punish have to be condemned ever more vociferously and incarcerated for ever longer periods as scapegoats for the rest of us.
Because fundamentally we are all paranoid about sex. I don't know why this is, but it has to have something to do with sex's being a private matter between husbands and wives. (Or at least that's what it's supposed to be!) No one really knows what other couples get up to in the bedroom, and at the same time (presumably for evolutionary/"Darwinian" reasons) no one likes the idea that other people may be having more or better or just more enjoyable sex than we are. And that, I'm quite sure, is why we criminalise sex for children (although of course the official reason is that children don't like sex* and need to be protected from it). After all, if a 9-year-old is getting more action that you are, what sort of a loser must you be!?
Well then, where are the sometime outliers of the 1960s Sexual Revolution - England's version of what in France are know as "les soixante-huitards", though in practice "soixante-retards" is normally nearer the mark - when one comes to modern sex crimes? The answer, of course, is that they're all over the place. After all, as I've tried to point out previously on this blog, there's no reason why a gay man shouldn't be a fascist or a Christian or a Marxist, and by the same token there's little reason to suppose he won't be a sexual hypocrite as well. And thus it was that once "gay sex" was "legalised" in the 1960s (and the laws were "equalised" in the '90s) most gay men gave up on pushing the boundaries back any further.
Here and there, however, little squeaks and whimpers can from time to time be heard that perhaps hint at a half-forgotten bygone era of sexual radicalism that some of the former revolutionaries still have some degree of attachment to. After all, one of the most important tenets of Marxism (and cultural Marxism is just as much Marxism as any other sort) is that the Revolution can never end. However "free" and "equal" sexual minorities (e.g. gays) may now be, they (i.e. others) can still be more "equal" (e.g. children) and more "free" (e.g. paedophiles).
Officially, of course, this is the era of Gillick competence, and given that the mainstream gay movement is now obsessed with "safe" sex that clearly seen as a "safe" way of encouraging sexual activity amongst underage children. And then of course there is the anti-bullying (or anti-anti-gay "bullying") industry, the point of which (Duh!) is to promote a pro-sex message by painting any real or imaginary anti-sex lobby as, er, "bullies".
Unofficially though, and away from the legally questionable world of "sexual rights for young people", the more thoughtful (and more, er, Cambridge-educated) sort of former Sexual Revolutionary has occasionally raised a weak-piping voice in the name of such formerly liberal virtues as tolerance, forbearance and common sense. Former Brideshead-star Jeremy Irons himself has of course been constantly getting himself into trouble down the years for saying sensible things about the kiddie-fiddling panic. But also, out on the Far Left, Peter Tatchell is one of those stopped clocks that every now and again actually tells the correct time. Stephen Fry, who listsSandelas one of his favourite books when he was growing up and claims to have been sexually active at an early age himself, has also made a perfunctory stab at the same. Richard Dawkins has defended "mild paedophilia". Indeed, for the briefest of moments six years ago it seemed that an unrepentant sodomite who tears pages out of Bibles in hotel rooms might, just might have been about to redeem himself. Sadly, thanks in part no doubt to the trusty Torygraph, we never heard much more from "Sir" Ian McKellen about the dangers of anti-paedo hysteria.†
So, what do these various characters have in common? Well for one thing, with the honest exception of Jeremy Irons††, they have all tended to be quite bigotedly anti-Catholic. For another, it's quite probable that they have all, with the possible exception of Ian McKellen, done some time (whether literally or figuratively) on the psychiatrist's couch - and not, by any means, that there's anything wrong with that! What I mean by that it that they have all at least thought about "things", and are perhaps somewhat aware that the world isn't necessarily a fair and properly ordered place.
My own attitude is one of deep scepticism that misdemeanours of a purely moral nature should (or, for that matter, even can) be punished by violence (including incarceration). And given that it is the state that does and should hold the monopoly on violence it is thus hard to see why such "sensitive crimes" are any of the state's business. But that's not because I want to downplay the gravity of sexual immorality or push "back" any barriers. Rather it's because I believe in the spiritual values of forgiveness (and unlike murder it is possible for a victim to forgive sexual abuse) and reconciliation - values that I cannot imagine a "rationalist" like Richard Dawkins would have much time for. And thus whereas I agree with the sentiments they express, the essential contradiction of their being expressed by such positivistic and essentially amoral characters as Dawkins and Fry, makes it difficult to foresee any time that they'll achieve any sort of fruition. * In reality of course all children think sex is hilarious. Everyone who has ever been a child knows this, and quite frankly the degree of cognitive dissonance required for "society" as a whole to pretend otherwise is all but apocalyptic. † Not that Sir Ian himself has ever been involved in anything remotely to do with gay Nazi paedophilia! Oh no! Absolutely not! Although Brad Renfro did eventually top himself, and Bryan Singer's predilections are now virtually an open secret. †† For all his faults, Irons has always struck me as being a fundamentally decent human being. There's a good case to be made that he's a "small-c conservative", in that he's pro-foxhunting and at least sceptical about abortion and gay marriage. More to the point though, he comes across has having quite self-consciously tried to be a "good dad" to his various beautiful boys. In any case, it would surely be hard for the star of Brideshead and The Mission to be that anti-Catholic.
