Bob Ellis is an illustrious Australian playwright, screenwriter, journalist, filmmaker, and political commentator. Ellis has attracted a great deal of international attention (and incredulity) for his hyper-sophisticated remarks yesterday wondering why there should be so much outrage over the beheading of James Foley by a representative of ISIS. If Joffrey Baratheon can have Ned Stark beheaded, after all…
Queen Elizabeth I, an English hero, beheaded her female cousin. Henry VIII, a popular English monarch, beheaded two of his wives. William Shakespeare, a popular playwright, beheaded no more than eighty of his major characters, including Macbeth, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Buckingham, Thomas More and twenty-four of Titus Andronicus’s sons. Charles Dickens, a popular novelist, beheaded his most admired character, Sidney Carton. The Simpsons, a popular television series, beheads in its Halloween specials eight or nine people a year, and in its subseries Itchy and Scratchy hundreds of others. The Simpsons is watched by hundreds of millions of children. And no complaint has been laid. Beheadings occur routinely in Game of Thrones. And no complaint has been laid.
Why then all the fuss? Why especially profess such shock at airbrushed images in which there is no horror at all and serve only, I guess, as Rorschach blots or shadow-puppet silhouettes of imagined beheadings or severed heads?
Read the whole thing.
The only possible observation is that decadence, deracination, and over-exposure to left-wing BS damages the brain and anesthetizes natural human sensibilities, making some people unable to distinguish between contemporary reality and fiction.