The trouble with some bloggers is...

The trouble with some bloggers is they fling words around without a sufficient understanding of what words do: how they can point and injure, how they can menace and maul. Let me put it this way: If your words are going to have the effect of pointing, injuring, menacing or mauling, shouldn't one first be able to fully appreciate how such words possess such properties when one uses them? Would you drop a nuke without having any clue as to the damage it would do?

I use words with emphatic, unapologetic passion -- and, like David Cote (though less offensively in this one case -- and see, David, I used your bloody name; hope you're happy), I use them to generate and provoke discussion, passion and even disagreement. I believe that a theater that lacks dialogue is complacent, dangerously attenuated to the status quo. This seems a no-brainer to me. Or, as Steven Sater wrote in Spring Awakening, "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah."

Anyway, I'm relatively new to blogging about theater or anything else, and my apparent enemy seems to believe the best way to get attention to himself is to characterize things as he wishes they were, not as they are. Because today I called out David Cote for the inappropriateness of his comment, "religion is bad theater for stupid people," this enemy is now suggesting that I am "backpedaling" -- that I am shrinking sorrowfully away from my anti-Christian beliefs, at least as he sees it as a result of my Mike Daisey posts.

Except that I haven't any anti-Christian beliefs to shrink away from in the first place.

What I was, and what I remain, is vehemently opposed to the religious right foisting its belief systems and morals on anyone else -- inciting, overtly or covertly, a societal atmosphere that makes the act of pouring water on someone else's art an acceptable form of public discourse.

And I am against anyone who is themselves against the idea of "To each his own." And I am against anyone who is against religious freedom -- of the freedom to possess no religious beliefs at all if that is what they choose. Doing so does not make me anti-Christian. Doing so makes me utterly (and constitutionally) American.

I am not anti-Christian -- unless you believe than an anti-Christian is someone:

...who criticizes Christians, or anyone, who believes they have the right to foist their morality upon anyone, at any time or place or manner of their choosing;

...who believes Christians, or anyone, possesses the right to desecrate the art of other people;

...who believes Christians, or anyone, have the right to impugn, to violate physically, the freedom of speech of any American whose spiritual beliefs do not comport with their own.

If defending freedom makes me anti-Christian, this Jew says bring it on, baby.

Finally, when people toss around the word "anti-Christian" as if that moniker belongs to them, that it is somehow theirs and theirs alone to hijack and contort toward their own nefarious goals and agendas, that's when I worry about bloggers, because I frankly worry that such individuals have only a limited relationship with the reality of words -- what they mean, what they do. And that is why I raise my concern once again that this nation has some terrifying Fascist tendencies going on around its edges.

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