All's Well that Ends Well is Hell: Canadian Stage stage a clunker

Don't believe the hype: this year's Canadian Stage production of All's Well that Ends Well is wrist-splittingly wretched.

I was already in a foul mood when they decided to bombard the audience with ear-splitting elevator muzak before the show even began. I find intrusive music like this something of an assault, like being groped in a public place: a violation of my personal space I neither requested nor authorized.  Yet retailers, restaurants, and waiting rooms seem to think you want to listen to shitty pop-music, and a whole generation of snot-noses have apparently never learned about head-phones. . .

But I digress. The play hadn't even started yet and I was already wishing I were drowning in Lake Ontario. Not an auspicious beginning. And it didn't get better: the whole play is suffused with stomach-churning EDM, blared unrelentingly through every set-transition and a great many scenes. I should have brought ear-plugs. And maybe an ipod. Because then I wouldn't have had to endure director Ted Witzel's grade-school poetry being read between the scenes (or indeed, any of his lousy play). Why this hack thought his own work would enhance the Bard (especially since it bore no relevance to anything actually happening on stage) is not as much a mystery as it might at first seem: after all, it requires a special kind of audacity to butcher a play in this fashion, an audacity that probably really thinks William Shakespeare of Stratford by himself isn't up to snuff.

The show is loud, crude, and grotesque. You can argue all you want that the ugliness is all in the original text, but the choice of presentation lies with each production. You can allude to something naughty with innuendo, or you can build a great big neon sign saying PENIS! You can decide what to emphasize, what to play up, downplay, or whether to insert phallic sausage references. The Bard gives you that leeway. What appears on stage is what the director wants, and if the production is trite and vulgar, it's because the director wanted it that way.

I hated every minute. But that's just me. If you yourself find butt-plugs hilarious, you just might dig this one.    

The Place Where I Lived; In Which the Author goes home

Wandering the Salvation Army depot downtown Hamilton not long ago, I was about to leave, having found nothing I needed amongst the used clothing racks, when I saw something that stopped me cold.

Behind the cashier, sharing a shelf with a marionette clown and a novelty baseball, was a framed picture – a photograph – of a tall church on a lonely hill. It was a rather stark photo, shot in reddish grey and white. The church was not a grand stone Cathedral of European antiquity, but a humble wooden steeple in state of ever so slight decay, standing beacon like in the middle of what looks to be farmland. I suspect it was taken somewhere in rural Ontario, or maybe the American mid-west. At the foot of the hill was a dirt road, with a dust cloud off in the distance, as if a speeding coach were zooming away.

I stood transfixed. It wasn’t just that this kind of rural gothic was exactly suited to my taste, but that this particular picture played a large role in forming my taste. This very picture had been hanging on my parents’ wall in the basement, and had been destroyed in the flood of ’14. I spent most of my formative years staring at this picture, and thought it had been gone forever.  

Funny how the mind of a kid works: when I was little, I thought the focal point of the picture was not the church, but the dust cloud. And I thought it was coming towards us, rather than going away. Something was coming. Something noisy and harsh to disrupt the staid tranquility of the scene. It was actually quite ominous – a picture of almost tomblike stillness, under permanent threat of ever imminent invasion.  

            The rest of the artwork in the basement lacked this impending chaos, but all shared its vaguely gothic quality. Right beside it there was another picture (photo or painting, I couldn’t tell) of an old derelict house in a field of snow. The house looked comparatively modern, but like the church, a completely dead monument to the past, and in this case, literally frozen in time.

            Somewhat incongruously, there was also hanging, a train yard, with a freight train pulling away. Again, I used to think the train was arriving, and thought it only slightly odd that it seemed to pulling in backwards. As a kid you trust such things: even if they appear unusual, there must be a good reason for them to happen if they’re happening. Looking at the back of the train meant no engines and no engineers, no evidence of human presence or agency. The train station appeared just as deserted as the church or the house.

            The theme of desertion abandons us (ha!) in next room which was my father’s study. Dad had a big picture of Ponce-de Leon or some such guy. A very grave, regal figure with a dark beard (the painting, not Dad), this man would have fit perfectly in any of the other pictures (even the train station). He too was a figure from the past, ancient, unchanging, unmoving. As it was, he was very at home in a study, hanging on imitation wood panelling between vast shelves of dusty books. He bespoke knowledge (if not wisdom), and disciplined scholarship.

Dad’s study was not off-limits to us – indeed, it was open access all around. But it was clearly grown-up territory. This was a place where work was done, all books and machinery. Dad was (is) a gadget hound, particularly in the realm of audio-hi-fi. On the north wall, in between two ground view windows that stared down at you like eyes, was his setup: a massive floor-to-ceiling stack of machinery, every bit as grandly imposing as Deep Thought from the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  At its base was the Marantz deck, a dreadnaught of an amplifier, to which was connected the Teac Equalizer and Reel-to-Reel machine, Nacamichi tape deck and Cd-player, Technics turntable, and Celestion Ditton 44 speakers (which were taller than I was). When given the right command, this monster could move mountains.

(Am I supposed to be impressed by your piddly little ipod?)   

 Like the church on the hill, this stack stood unchanged, apparently carved out of the earth itself, from before I was born to the very Day of the Flood. My brother and I tried to save it – the Marantz at least – but just as you can’t uproot a tree in a hurry, there were too many cables anchoring it to the ground. Too many things to unscrew and unplug, while water was rushing in. Sometimes you just gotta concede.

Anyway, this is the place where I lived. To a kid, everything looks big and foreboding, and unimaginably archaic. To me it looked looming and shadowy as well, and just a bit surreal (to say nothing about stuff like this playing on the big cathode ray tube-television:). But to me it was home; it was warm and safe, and it was where I wanted to be. Perhaps it was there I developed a lifelong taste for solitary looming, shadowy things, and became an incurable antiquarian. Why I feel so at home in churchyards and on country roads, and attracted so much to old, lonely buildings, though only from the outside – never from within.

To my horror, the photo on the wall was not for sale; it was for auction. I put in a ridiculously high bid, but did not win it, even though I still had the highest bid when I checked on the closing day. Some smart alec probably snuck in at the very last moment with an extra dollar or two. I really wish I’d thought to examine the picture first, to find out who took it or published it, which might have given me a clue as to where it came from. I’ve tried Googling “Church on a Hill”, and it hasn’t helped so far. In any case, it was clearly not a one-off work. Maybe not mass-produced, but copies exist in the world. In my mind, that makes it more valuable, not less.

Places I didn't live: In Which the Author Doesn't Go Home

They say you can never go home. Who exactly says that? Can't say I know, but I have heard it said. I think about it every time I revisit my childhood home, which is actually quite often. It’s funny the things that do come back to you, and the things that just don’t.

Of course, my childhood home was almost entirely washed away by the flood of 2014. True, the room where I spent most of my time and stored the accumulated artifacts of my life up until then, were drowned – “washed away” is definitely the wrong phrase – in a deluge of shit-laced sewer backup. There was no attempt to restore it to its original state, my folks seeing it more as an “out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new-opportunity.

So that particular bit of nostalgia is gone without a trace, but there are little bits elsewhere that remain.

The woods by the creek are still there, and the foliage is denser than ever. When I was growing up, kids would ride their bikes over the little hills and mounds in there, and were constantly sculpting them with shovels. Grown-ups, true to their mission to stamp out fun where ever it may be found, sent bulldozers in to flatten the mounds out, either stupidly ignorant of, or contemptuously indifferent to, the damage to the landscape – the bulldozer treads just butchered the landscape and crushed all manner of plant life. Just so kids couldn’t ride their bikes over a dirt path. It was a typically upper-middle class solution to a non-problem, but the busy-bodies have since turned their attentions elsewhere. The woods are still there, even if the hills are gone. The pathways are much too narrow for bicycles now, but kids still find their way in, as they always will.

The grassy field beyond the woods has not been paved over with houses yet, but give it time; Canadians hate nothing so much as undeveloped green space.

Strolling the neighbourhood, I’m struck by how clean everything is. No chip-bags, chocolate bar wrappers or cigarette butts in sight. You can walk the streets in your bare feet, and I often do – I find the rough concrete scratching the itchy soles of my feet as evocative of summer as grass between my toes, which is also common here. True, power tools often shatter the peace, but these are no worse than the obnoxious motor bikes revving their engines outside my apartment window all hours of every day. I marvel at the lush green lawns and the tall trees lining every street, forming a leafy archway overhead, and remember a time when this sort of thing wasn’t the exclusive preserve of the super-wealthy.

Thank you globalization!

You need to be super wealthy to own a home here now; the kinds of people moving in are the kinds of people who like to turn tasteful detached bungalows into three story mansions, and buy their kids Mercedes for their sixteenth birthdays. Everywhere I look, the physical manifestations of my memories are replaced by ornaments of excessive wealth. Renovations, facelifts and landscaping, all gaudy and garish clashing colours and mismatched materials, almost defiantly out of character with the neighbourhood, or even the merest aesthetic consideration.

   

It wasn’t always this way.

There are also a couple of places I really wish they would change. There are couple houses in the old neighbourhood whose pale blue and white motif has always lent them a kind of sickly quality. I’ve always found them cold and foreboding, not in the gothic haunted house kind of way – that would be to flatter them – but with a kind of stultifying aura of age.

I don’t know what created this impression, but I’ve carried it with me all my life. I must have been no more than four years old when I had a vivid dream of visiting one of these houses. In the dream, the place was run like a dusty museum, filled with glass china cabinets and stiff, uncomfortable furniture you weren’t allowed to sit on. Everything was of that sickly blue and white, and could have been a hundred years old. The matron of the house, a prim but not unfriendly old woman, introduced me to her “daughters”, who were no more than animated piles of clothes, Victorian style dresses with no heads or hands. even at that age I suspected there were people with no more personality than the clothes they wore.

Rubbish of course. I never set foot in either of those houses and have no idea what their owners were like. I suppose four-year olds are judgmental. I guess there was something about the places, the ghastly pallor, the dreary sense of order, that struck a fidgety young ruffian as unbearably oppressive. As if, alone in that warm and animated neighbourhood, these were places where the stomping and shouting of little boys, was unwelcome. Unjust no doubt – who knows what kind of people lived there? But try arguing that with a four-year old.

At least one of those houses has since been purchased by a youngish couple who are warm and friendly as can be. They keep their curtains open, and the large screen television in their living room is usually playing sports. This actually humanizes the place. But even if I was wrong about those particular places, I know that such places exist – alleged homes run like mausoleums, and I will always feel ill-at ease in them.     

Dialectics on Poodle-play: Thoughts on Zappa

Been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa lately. I tend to do that in the warm months – don’t ask why. I think the tradition started in Teacher’s College. I’d recently got my hands on a copy of Sheik Yerbouti (sic), which I’d not heard in its entirety before.  There’s not much I can say about Zappa here that hasn’t already been said before, so I’m not going to go too much into how amazing instrumentals are sometimes stuffed into lousy songs, or how much more pronounced the keyboards seem to be. I don’t need some student of Zappa studies pointing out all my errors of fact or omission. Doubtless there will be contrary evidence to everything I say. But there was something that struck me that I wanted to comment on.

No doubt, Zappa was a paradoxical, contradictory figure. He was known for taking music more seriously than just about anybody in the business – a notorious workaholic, more dedicated and disciplined than any mere mortal should be (and no one who heard him take on the PMRC could doubt he was a serious thinker as well). And yet, he could not write a single song lyric that wasn’t a joke. Or would not more likely, as I don’t imagine there was anything Zappa couldn’t do. He never wrote a sincere ballad, or straightforward rock song. For all their deeply subversive qualities, out-and-out protest songs weren’t his bag either (“Trouble Every Day”)? No, sarcasm and ridicule were his weapons of choice, lifting the lid on life’s absurdities with bemusement/amusement rather than outrage, let alone mere human emotions like happiness or sadness.

Yet, there are times I wonder. . .

As I said, the music itself was never a joke. There are countless moments of genuine feeling all over the catalogue. Only when he put words to it, did it become silly. Think “Sofa Number One”, a bittersweet little ditty that almost grows cosmic at the end. But when he added lyrics to the exact same tune for “Sofa Number Two”, what we get is nonsensical German, uttered in an exaggerated guttural dialect. Sure it was funny, but was that really what he was thinking when he composed the piece?

Or how about the closing chorus to “Tryin’ to grow a Chin” off Sheik Yerbouti? The melody’s inspiring, the song builds up to it in a beautifully executed crescendo. For any other artist this would be an anthemic moment, or a denouement of a stage musical. For Zappa, a novelty suicide note:

I wanna be dead,

In bed

Please kill me,

‘Cause that would thrill me.

Doesn’t it feel great belting out those words?

The song itself is a spoof of pimply teenaged angst, but one never gets thinks for a second that Zappa has any genuine sympathy for such issues (true enough, angst can be insufferable, but let they who’ve never indulged in it cast the first stone). I can’t help wondering though, was this really all he had in mind when he wrote the song? Was that much energy really expended just to give us a joke chorus?

Zappa was the sort of guy who knew what he was doing. I very much doubt anything was done by accident, and I doubt he’d have anything but contempt for this kind of speculation. And yet. . .the incongruity is there. He was the sort of artist who chose not to express himself through words, which weren’t his natural medium after all, but I can’t help but wonder. . .could he have done so?

Was he capable?

There are some folks who have difficulty showing genuine emotion. Who need to hide behind a stoic sheen or sardonic mask. Some folks just can’t put it into words. I wonder if Zappa was one of these. He felt plenty – you can feel it in his notes. But when it came to words – to attaching concrete meanings to abstract sounds - he needed to infuse it with nonsense.  Maybe using sincere words would have let the world in too close, or maybe it would have been telling. Or. . .

Zappa admitted he had little patience for books, so it probably shouldn’t surprise us he had little aptitude for poetry. Maybe language was the one instrument he couldn’t master.

Speculating about genius is a mug’s game. I’m probably wrong. All the same, when I listen to “Tryin’ to Grow a Chin”, I can’t help but wonder. . .

                                                                                                  

More Turkeys: In Which the Author Breaks Turkish Law.

"Recep Tayyip Erdoğan." is a twerp.

There. I've done it. I could be arrested in Turkey now. I must never try and enter the place. In Turkey it is illegal to insult the president (translation: criticize his government), and it fully expects other governments to enforce this law in their own countries as well - as Germany was recently quite happy to do. Let's hope my government has more guts than Germany's.

Now, Turkey has seen fit to detain foreign journalists as well as her own, as Dutch writer Ebru Umar has learned.  

Tin-pot dictatorships detaining journalists is nothing new. What's galling about this case is that until recently Turkey claimed to be a democracy, and presumed for herself a place among civilized nations. It's depressing to see such places sink backwards, and depressing to see no one in power calling her out on her bullshit. According to the above article, more than 1800 cases have been prosecuted in Turkey since 2014, and more than a hundred journalists imprisoned. Umar isn't the first Duch Woman to be arrested either: they nabbed Frederike Geerdink last year.

Think about this next time you open up your local tabloid and see a grotesquely offensive caricature of your Prime Minister or President in the editorial cartoon. In many parts of the world publishing cartoons is a criminal offense. The ability to publish such cartoons is a very simple acid test of the health of a democracy. Those who would tamper with such rights are beneath contempt.

So yeah, Erdogan is a petty tyrant, a tin-pot dictator, a twerp, a scoundrel, an all around asshole. It needs to be said; stopping people from saying it doesn't make it any less true. 

With Tongue Firmly Bursting from Cheek: Thoughts on Kiss.

Finding myself in a record store with a coupon felt a lot like it used to feel when my grandparents gave me a small paper bag, said “take what you want” and let me loose in their general store. Under such conditions, I acquired my very first Kiss record. As it was only four dollars, and someone else’s four dollars to boot, I figured “why not?”.

Rock and Roll Over was exactly as I expected: unremarkable, but not unappealing. Lead track “I Want You” pretty much sets the pace, right down to the unambiguous title. It kicks off with a wimpy Boston-esque acoustic intro that’s over before you were really sure it began, switching to its teenaged tantrum of a chorus.  The whole album more or-less follows the formula – “get it out of the way” verse, “more like a chant” chorus, ‘nother verse, short bridge, chant-chorus, chant chorus.  It feels almost factory produced. And lyrically[1], there’s nothing here your average horny fifteen-year old couldn’t have written. Who else could’ve penned a petulant refrain like “I Want You”, or “meet me in the ladies room” with a straight face? Was there ever a band up until that point so unashamedly unsophisticated and unabashedly crude?

Yet for all that, it’s catchy as hell. The secret weapon here is of course Ace Frehely, who, if no Blackmore or Iommi, manages to infuse even the lamest choruses with flare and groove.  I confess, I’ve always liked Paul Stanley’s singing, and ringmaster Gene Simmons keeps it all anchored together. The formula works. I suspect Master Simmons realized early on that whatever else he had planned for this mega-venture called Kiss, the whole project would be dead in the water if they couldn’t write songs people wanted to hear.

I was particularly interested in the production by Eddie Kramer. It’s bass heavy, and muffled. It sounds like the band is performing in your living room, and I can’t help picturing them recording in a studio with a shag carpet. Now, I have no idea if Record Plant Studios actually has shag carpet in their recording rooms, but that’s what it feels like. There is something there absorbing the echoes. Compare that with the approach that would become fashionable in the eighties, when every band on the planet, Kiss included, apparently lost their bass player and took to recording in a tin-can[2].   

For me, it’s all very evocative of an era – the Seventies – which I directly experienced, but got all its detritus growing up. Re-runs, film strips, fashions and furniture my folks hadn’t gotten rid of, movies that were still pretty recent and songs that weren’t yet that old. It takes no great leap of the imagination to place my pre-adolescence a little bit earlier than it actually happened. (Okay, a full decade earlier, but bear with me).

Picture if you will, a nerdy teenager in the Seventies, living in a room stacked high with comic books and Kenner action figures, and recent memories of Hannah Barbara. Chemicals are raging inside, but you’re not sure where they fit in your current world. You find four spandex-clad masked superheroes singing what you’re thinking, and BOOM – lifelong Kiss fan is born.

(Why mention Hannah Barbara? Evocative of the era. And those cartoons were no-less fantastical than the Don Juan world of Kiss. It’s entirely appropriate that Hanna Barbara produced Kiss meet the Phantom in the Park; it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Kiss coexists in the same world as Scooby-Doo).

Of course, this little counter-factual thought experiment only goes so far. I actually was a nerdy teenager in a room full of comic books and Kenner action figures, with recent memories of Hannah Barbara, and Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons and every other badge of nerd-dom imaginable, and I never got into Kiss. I was fascinated by their imagery, but was deeply disappointed to hear how much they sounded like frat-boys. I mean, how could you dress like a demon and never sing about demons? Where were the swords? The Space-ships? The Conan-themed concept albums?  Maybe it was the Catholic abstinence-only education, but I was weary of anything overtly sexual back then, and couldn’t relate to party-bands (mainly ‘cause I didn’t get invited to those kind of parties). Hormones could be channelled into pulp fiction and dime novels, but rarely openly confronted or declared.  More importantly, the music itself, mid-paced rock songs, seemed kind of well, sedate to a kid who’d already discovered Black Sabbath. (And Rush ruined just about every other band).

But. . .remember, we’re evoking the era. The year is 1976, and Rock and Roll Over is Kiss’s fifth studio album. Heavy Metal is a very new, loosely defined thing with only a few practitioners (and more than a few who no longer fit the bill today). There is no thrash Metal, no symphonic Power Metal, no Death Metal, Bay Area and Gothenburg are just points on a map, and   Norway exports nothing but peat moss. The world has yet to discover Sad Wings of Destiny, or 2112[3].  Heck, Star Wars hasn’t even come out yet! We are not yet spoiled by the embarrassment of sonic riches yet to come, and the pickings are slim. Into this world parachutes Kiss. . .

            Consider also, that Kiss were never about the records. Picture if you will, the live show, all explosions and spotlights, a choreographed spectacle which no one else at the time was doing, at least on nothing near the same scale. I can’t help but admire anyone who takes theatre seriously. I’ve been to hundreds of shows and am constantly dismayed by how many “performers” can’t respect the science of the stage – looking bored, showing up drunk, opening with slow songs, mumbling to the crowd. . . While the punks may bristle at the blatant capitalism of it all, there comes with it both professionalism and craftsmanship – ticket buying fans are guaranteed to get what they pay for. Compare this with the contempt artistes like Zepplin or G’n’R often showed to common folk who actually had to work for a living. . .

Back to our fifteen year old. Martin Popoff formulated it thus: kid is enraptured by Kiss show, picks up guitar, learns a few Kiss songs, finds they’re not that hard and soon surpasses Frehely. By the time he’s twenty five, he’s guitar wizard in his own right, has his own band, and BOOM: the year is 1986, and there are Metal bands everywhere.    

Everyone from Anthrax to Zombie cite Kiss as an influence. It’s not really there in the songs – would you have guessed Thomas Quorthon was a huge Kiss fan? (Or Garth Brooks for that matter?). But the performance aesthetic – knees bent, shoulder width apart, rictus-grin, tongue like thrust out like a whale-harpoon, chrome, steel and leather[4] - that’s all Kiss[5].  That, and the lust for glory, to stand on stage and command an audience. More inspiration than influence, their impact has been huge. They’re not really a band, but an idealization of what a band should be like.

Besides, how could anyone not like “Rock and Roll all Nite”?

---

[1] I swear “Love ‘em, Leave ‘em” sounds a lot like “Normal People”, which is probably the very last thing this band would ever sing about.     

[2] Judas Priest were the worst offenders. Ian Hill was still in the band pics but you’d be hard-pressed to hear him anywhwere.

[3] Alright, released the same year, but the first real statements by either outfit. Consider the era Up Until Then.

[4] Priest played their part here.

[5] Though Gene Simmons did not invent the Malocchio. 

The Turkey rules the Roost: How Recep Erdogan came run things in Germany

           So. . .

             Having destroyed freedom of speech in Turkey, it now looks like Recep Erdogan wants to destroy it in Germany as well. Don’t laugh: he just might.

            According to the Guardian It started when a comedian named Jan Böhmermann read out a less than flattering poem about Erdogan on German television. The legendarily thin-skinned Erdogan went crying to Angela Merkel, demanding Bohmermann be prosecuted. After which Merkel, as leader of one of the world’s strongest democracies, told Erdogan in uncertain terms to screw off, right?

            Right?

            No actually. She frumped disapprovingly over this “deliberately offensive text”, which is only to be expected in diplomatic circles. After all, what is one world leader supposed to say to another? But it would never go to trial. Would it?

             Well. . .there is a law. Paragraph 103 of the Criminal Code forbids insulting representatives of foreign states. And there are some German politicians who seem quite keen to enforce it. No less than the general secretary of the Merkel's party Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Peter Tauber exclaimed:

“In a constitutional democracy we all have to stick to the rules, and one of these rules is that offending foreign heads of state is punishable by law,”  

              Wow. Nobody tell Kim Jong Un.

              Isn’t it interesting that Mr. Tauber thinks protecting the delicate feelings of foreign despots is more integral to Constitutional Democracy than upholding the rights of its own citizens? And why am I not surprised that a politician would want to enforce a law designed to protect politicians from ridicule?  

              Granted, I’m no lawyer, but all the same, I’m at a loss as to how German lawmakers figured this little stipulation was consistent with Constitutional Democracy. Basically, it means that any tin-pot dictator’s cult of personality is technically enforceable in Germany.

I hope it doesn’t have an extradition treaty with any of these places.

            That’s the obvious part. But there is a little worm in the ointment that complicates things a little. It doesn’t change anything, but it complicates it just a bit. Let’s look at what Böhmermann actually said. Like all the best comedians, most of what he said is true. He accuses Erdogen of “repressing minorities” – true! – “kicking kurds” – true! – “slapping Christians” – true! – “while watching child porn” – oh dear.

            Accusing someone of watching child porn is not a small thing, and it’s only natural that Erdogen would take exception to it. It muddies the waters because it takes us from the realm of political commentary into the world of slander and libel, where, under most juristictions, Erdogen would have a much stronger case.

              What is libel? The technical definitions vary, but it basically amounts to false accusation, or defamation, or falsehoods that could damage a reputation. Spurious accusation of child pornography could destroy a life just as thoroughly as a physical assault, so laws are in place to prevent them being made willy-nilly.

Newspapers have to be super careful when reporting on such things; it’s why in criminal trials, even where the evidence seems overwhelming, the crime is always “alleged” and the defendant is always “the accused”.

             A chief defense against libel law is that of “fair-comment”. It is fair to comment on certain things and express an opinion. So, for example, in a restaurant review, you are free to say it’s a lousy restaurant, but not that they put rats in the stew. The former is just your opinion; the later is a lie.[1] The former is fair comment, the latter would be slander. I wonder if Böhmermann has opened himself up to a charge of slander, rather nullifying his fair (and necessary) political comment with a cheap (and not-terribly funny) joke.

             The existence of libel law – in theory – shouldn’t amount to a limitation on your freedom of expression. You are free to speak the truth. You do have to prove that it is the truth. Which strikes me as only fair and reasonable: say what you will, but be prepared to back up your words.  I personally have always thought of freedom of expression as the ability to speak the truth rather than the ability to blab: but as one man’s truth is another man’s blabbery, the definition should be as inclusive as possible and come with as few external fetters as possible.

            Unfortunately, libel law is often used to limit freedom of expression, and limit the truth. In Britain, anybody can sue anybody for just about anything. The British Chiropractic Association sued Dr. ___________ for telling the British public that chiropractic is full of shit[2]. He didn’t slander them: all he did was publish the data. In my home town, developers have sued residents for speaking out against them – their case was weak, but they were counting on their victims to be unable to bear the court costs. In the hands of the rich, this law, like most others can be a gag for the poor.

            But libel law isn’t the only gag available to the psychotically insecure, and dictators aren’t the only ones ins search of them. I don’t even know if Erdogen’s going for libel. What interests me is that laws exist in democratic countries which give foreign dictators a measure of control over their citizenry, and many people seem happy to relinquish this control. Germany isn’t the only place with such laws on the books: Italy, Poland and Switzerland have them too, and in Britain’s it’s still technically illegal to call for abolishing the monarchy in print. Not so long ago, many people happily conceded that the Ayatolah Komeny should have the power of life and death over British citizens. Many seem to think the Charlie Hebo staff had it coming. Ireland still has blasphemy laws on its books. In Canada, citizens can be hauled before “Human Rights Tribunals” without legal representation, for any perceived slight. Some conservatives want to criminalize criticism of Israel (anti-semitism), and some liberals want to criticise criticism of Islam (Islamophobia) and both call for ever expanding the hate speech or obscenity laws.

           Meanwhile, bloggers have been arrested and lashed by their government in Saudi Arabia[3], or lynched by their countrymen in Bangladesh for the despicable crime of expressing their thoughts. Both must have known the risks and both thought them worth taking. Courageous people the world over are dying for what we in the first world are quite relinquishing. How inspiring and sickening it is at the same time.   

           

Update:  Merkel's caved in, and is letting the prosecution go ahead:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/15/angela-merkel-agrees-prosecution-comedian-erdogan-poem 

Most concerning is this little quote from the CDU Parliamentary Faction leader:

“In a constitutional democracy, it is up to the courts to decide where the boundaries lie."

So, the courts get to decide the limits of satire, and the limits of speech, and the limits of thought. Has the Parliamentary Faction leader considered that the courts decide such things in dictatorships as well?

Autocrats of the world, rejoice!

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[1] Assuming of course they don’t actually do this – but even if they did, you’d need damn good evidence for it before committing it to print. You’d be better off just repeating what other people say.

[2] Fortunately, Dr.___________ is also a best-selling author, and so happened to have the resources to fight back. Many do not.

[3] Which Canada’s Liberal government is happily selling a billion dollars worth of armoured cars to.