Why do we have to learn the same lessons over and over?

Some things we learn instantly - fire is hot, don't touch it again; some things accrete over time - we don't have to reinvent the alphabet or automobile or iPhone every new generation.

Why can't we stop killing each other? What prevents us from accumulating the collective knowledge that War is bad?

c0

We're prisoners of the images we consume. Any man my age will remember when pornography was only available in dirty magazines. Among the earliest I was exposed to was Hustler and a pictorial on the Vietnam War.

Larry Flynt (L) and Jerry Falwell (R).

Larry Flynt ran a series of pictures of dead American soldiers. They were so foul, I wouldn't look for them again, or share them here, even 40 years later.

His point was that violence was the real obscenity, not sex.

Of course, vilifying one class of images over another has no more meaning than saying calories from Twinkies are worse than calories from peanut butter.

Calories aren't the issue, it's the matrix in which they're delivered.

c0

God bless Larry Flynt. He became a Christian, you know, on the phone I believe, led to the Lord by Rose Carter. In the tradition I was raised, that's all she wrote, cue the fat lady, Larry's going to heaven. And he may be, not my place to say one way or the other. I think he was a decent man who fell into a lucrative business.

And God bless Jerry Falwell. I think he felt much the same as I do about Flynt. Too bad you have to be a megachurch phenom not to be soiled by speaking on taboo subjects.

Which is to say, Falwell's opinion on pornograhy is accorded an untainted perspicuity, while Flynt's is dismissed.

[2014-09-25]

c0