Canada and Other Matters of Opinion by Rex Murphy Read Free Book Online

tones” clothing consultant, author of
The Treehouse
) Wolf as among her fellow thinkers.
    Ms. Jong, and God bless her courage, issued a warning this week—via the Italian press, where the Apocalypse (notsurprisingly) has its own feature page—that should Barack Obama lose the election on Tuesday, “blood will run in the streets.” Fearful that that was a tad ambiguous, she—this was the novelist in her breaking out—referenced America’s founding trauma.
    “If Obama loses, it will spark the second American Civil War.” There you have it. Vote for Barack Obama, or Gettysburg will have a sequel, and poor Ken Burns will have to do that damn series all over again. The stakes are high. You betcha. (And, oh yes, Jane Fonda’s having “back pains” just thinking about this. Which probably means she should stop thinking with her back, but I digress.)
    Well, we all know what happened when America ignored Cameron Diaz four years ago. Global warming, Katrina, stock-market meltdown and, of course, that rape thing. The question is, will Americans similarly ignore the prescience of the artist who gave the world the concept of a “zipless fuck”?
    I cannot think it will. America will not a second time be heedless. There will not be blood on the streets. No second Civil War. And America, and Barack Obama, will have no one to thank for it but Erica Jong, and the immortal slogan: Save Jane’s Back—Vote Obama. Intellect will out: John McCain and Sarah Palin are toast.
    In my books, this is right up there with Cameron Diaz. Sigh.
    Among the many blessings, uncounted till this very moment, of the election of Barack Obama to the American presidency, are the reduction in Jane Fonda’s “back pains” and the averting of the second American Civil War. I do not know which of this two history will choose to merit the superior wreath in Obama’s civil crown. For, insomuch as he has stayed a scene of civil slaughter—at least according to Erica Jong and the illuminati of
The View
—he must be regarded as a true American hero. But to have assuaged the ravages wrought by years of producing exercise videos (Jane Fonda was the spandex queen of losing weight by televised exhibition) in which she so aerobically starred, to have reduced Jane Fonda’s back pain, is an accomplishment from which Clio may stagger back in bewildered amazement. The goddess of History probably has no scale in which to enter achievement of this magnitude.
    And good news for Cameron Diaz—Bush is gone and rape is, once more, illegal. Making statements of pathetic ignorance is, however, as legal as ever.

CARTOON CRISIS

UNDER THE COVER OF FAITH | February 11, 2006
    The casual understanding of what is being called the cartoon crisis is fairly straightforward. A Danish newspaper published twelve cartoons that depicted the Prophet Mohammed. Two in particular stood out: one featured the Prophet wearing a “bomb” turban, the other featured him on a cloud meeting three suicide bombers arriving (we presume) in Paradise with the line, “Stop, stop, we ran out of virgins!”
    The cartoons, measured by a secular, Western yardstick, were not exceptional. A few were mere stylized representations. The pictures were not ferocious caricatures—compared with the ferocious U.K. Cartoon of the Year of Ariel Sharon eating Palestinian babies, they were timid and innocuous.
    By the standards of a moderate religious sensibility, they were irreverent. By the standards of Muslim sensibility, they were beyond question blasphemous and insulting. The cartoons’ blasphemy does not hang on what many arecalling the absolute prohibition against any picturing of the Prophet. The question of whether the Prophet may be represented in images or art is, I gather, not as determinatively settled as a lot of news accounts casually suggest. They are blasphemous because in Islam, as in fact in many or all the world’s main religions, mocking, deriding or disrespectfully or perversely invoking