dovate

I was sad to see Lewis Lapham go as the editor of Harpers. The guy was only a couple months away from running a cover story on how 9-11 was an inside job and about a year and a half from claiming our world leaders are masked reptilian beings from a secret underground civilization in an alliance with a cabal of ancient demigods masquerading as demons, angels and fear harvesting aliens.

For the record, that’s a statement of respect, not a shot at his credibility. Sometimes he stepped out onto a limb. He only did so under the assumption that his audience was thoughtful enough to form an opinion of their own.

But anyway, over in the editor’s chair at Harpers, in step Ben Metcalf who opened his tenure with the brick to the face proclamation:

Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?

Let me be clear that I have no wish to perform such a deed in fact, nor do I want anyone else to destroy bodily what is, at least in the technical sense, a fellow human being… 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.

And moving on:

…it is deemed illegal to write that one (I) would like very much to take the president’s throat in one’s (my) hands and, with the force of opposable thumb on privileged windpipe, work the life out of it.

and finally:

In place of the intitial 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?

Holy living fuck! Speechless.