Michelangelo

Speaking of art, I read that Kuwaiti female artist Shurooq Amin opened an exhibit which was closed almost immediately because her paintings involved homosexuality and forbidden substances. As everyone knows, there are no homosexuals in that part of the world, and no one there takes drugs, either. Knowing how kind Kuwaitis and Saudis are, I expect her body will surface somewhere in the Gulf sometime around Easter.

Mind you, we civilized Westerners are not far behind. The Telegraph reported last week how a human-rights organization that advises the UN on discrimination issues wants to do away with a book by one Dante Alighieri called The Divine Comedy. Bad Dante! Bigoted Dante! His book represents Islam as a heresy and Jews as scheming moneylenders. The bully Dante damns homosexuality as unnatural. The spokeswoman (dread word) and president of this outfit, one Valentina Sereni, wants the book removed from school and university curricula. She calls the epic poem racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic. She covered all the bases so at least we know where we stand if we read The Divine Comedy. It means we are homophobic anti-Semitic Islamophobes who want to kill all black people.

Florence King, a wonderful Southern writer, once wrote, “Democracy is the crude leading the crud.” Hear, hear! Only in our dumb democracy can a crude wop such as Sereni act like the Hitlers who shut down Amin’s show and make it look like she’s on the angels’ side. Any kind of imaginary “-ism” or “-phobia” has now replaced murder most foul and every other sin imaginable. Sereni should move to Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.

I now leave you because I have The Divine Comedy in front of me and am looking forward to reading it for the next ten hours of bliss. You know what that makes me. I don’t even have to explain it.