Always look on the bright side of life

I know that anyone who likes Monty Python will read this post after recognizing, as its headline, the title of the song that the condemned men sing and whistle while nailed to crosses in "The Life of Brian." My former Pacific Business News colleague and Hawaii Public Radio alum Chad Blair discussed it with Ian Lind, who mentioned it recently on his blog http://ilind.net. If you did not see it, "Life of Brian" was widely slammed as a satire on the life of Jesus. Though an irreligious man myself, I found it more pointedly directed at extremism and fatuity, therefore supportive, in a mischievously underhanded way, of religion's finest traits, including faith. Seeing it reminded me of a news conference I covered when Rev. Jerry Falwell, come to national celebrity as head of the Moral Majority, called a news conference to denounce TV shows that undermined family values. Falwell and some other guy offered a list of the worst shows. Reporters didn't understand and asked who was surveyed. No one was surveyed; they made the list up -- examples of bad shows. Like that sitcom where a single mom was raising two daughters and one of them ran away with her boyfriend. It set a bad example. Wait a minute, I said. I saw that show. At the end of the episode, she had learned her lesson and returned home, giving a fairly eloquent speech about the reasons why what she did was wrong. The last scene could have been written by the Moral Majority. Wouldn't that make it an example of good television from their point of view? Rev. Falwell looked at the other guy. The other guy said maybe so. I didn't press the point, being impressed he didn't try to talk his way out of it. But I never forgot how easily, and with so little thought, people could condemn something as wrong-thinking. Even I'm capable of considering something to be arguably sacriligious. I'm one of the few people who actually read Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses," and to me it was unquestionably sacriligious. It's also hilarious, but that's another thing entirely. I just think that reserving judgment on such things might be a good idea once in awhile. I could live without sitcoms but I wouldn't want Rushdie novels or Python movies banned, because then someone would probably ban "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis and then where would we be?