The Intestinal Fortitude of the Independents

I'm happy to see that The Interview is showing after all, thanks to the courage of the owners and managers of our independent theaters. When the big chains refused to take the risk of showing it in the face of threats by North Korea's tyrant Kim Jong-Un and his tame hackers, these brave men and women stood up and insisted that Sony provide them with copies to show.

And with that bolstering their courage, Sony also decided to release The Interview online, which means that anybody with an adequate Internet connection can watch it, even in the absence of an independent theater showing it.

As of yet I haven't had a chance to watch it. But I'm going get it done, just to show that pudgy little two-bit dictator that I'm not scared of his threats.

The New Cowardice

Back in 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie over the novel The Satanic Verses, I made a point of getting a copy of it and actually reading the whole thing through. It wasn't the sort of thing that I would normally read, and quite honestly I found a good bit of it tedious, but I was disgusted by the notion of a religious leader calling for the death of a writer (personally I think it's for the unflattering roman a clef portrayal of Khomeini himself, and that the disrespect to Mohammed issue is a convenient cover).

Recently, when the news came out that North Korea was trying to suppress The Interview through  cyberterrorism, I thought I was going to need to sit through a showing of it, just to show my support for intellectual freedom. But it looks like I won't even get the opportunity. Sony has caved completely and shelved the movie indefinitely, rather than even risk the chance that the pudgy little dictator of a two-bit tyranny actually can carry through on his threats of violence against theaters showing it.

What a long way we've fallen in just twenty-five years.