Monday, April 20, 2009
Insulting clowns
During the U.N. racism conference in Geneva, as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke and charged the West with using the Holocaust as a "pretext" for bad acts toward Palestinians, various European and other diplomats walked out, and the speech was "disrupted by jeering protesters in rainbow wigs tossing red clown noses at the hardline leader," according to the AP report.
As a believer in free speech, I am not a big fan of disrupting a scheduled speaker (something that happens on U.S. college campuses too frequently), but these protesters have gone too far: by throwing clown noses at the Iranian president, they have insulted clowns! No self-respecting clown would want to be associated with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- he has almost no sense of humor and apparently no capacity for physical or slapstick comedy. Plus, he would constantly trip if he wore the big clown shoes.
Perhaps a more appropriate projectile would have been a prosthetic primary male sexual organ, or a model of the end of the human G-I tract.
2 Comments:
By 
John, at
Mon Apr 20, 01:43:00 PM:
clever.
But disrupting scheduled speakers has become a huge problem...I wonder what kind of remedies there even might be to this?
By 
, at
Tue Apr 21, 12:46:00 AM:
It is not likely an effective remedy will be forthcoming any time soon. At least, not until the general populous and media come together to embrace a consistent, unified stance against ALL such disruptive behavior, regardless of the social or political bias of the protester.
We are not anywhere close to that today.
