The Islamists mean to censor us one way or another: if not from fear of retaliation, then by retaliation. Shut your mouth, still your pens, stop thinking, or we will do it for you. Permanently.

Molly Norris, mild-mannered cartoonist, started a fire she cannot put out. As Rick Santelli’s “rant” on TV from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade fueled the Tea Party, Norris inspired thousands revolt against Islam. In a desiderative whim, she drew innocuous, refrigerator-door magnet caliber pictures which she claimed were images of Mohammad: a spool of thread, a teacup, a spoon, and other mundane things. Overall, they looked more like idle doodles than passionate expressions of the freedom of speech. She posted them in protest of Viacom’s Comedy Central forbidding its cartoon show, “South Park,“ to depict Mohammad in a bear suit.

That spawned the immensely popular “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” on Facebook. And thousands did draw. It is interesting to note that one can invite people to “draw Lincoln,” and we would see images of Lincoln ranging from good to unrecognizable. But how does one draw an image of a person whose face has never been seen, except in imagination? Imagination took hold.

Numerous responses have appeared on Facebook where artists comment, “We have reached 50,000 members. As the news of the rebellion against the attacks to our liberties are heard, brave people join the campaign to stave of those who would annihilate that which we believe in, freedom. Thomas Jefferson’s quote is also on the Facebook page. “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”

Americans and their friends across the globe responded en masse. The defiance was overwhelming, producing more cartoons than the Danish could draw, many of them ingenious. For a while, everyone was a Guy Fawkes, or a Paul Revere, or a Joan of Arc. (more…)

“When’s the movie coming out?”

I have been asked that question repeatedly over the course of seven years of book-signings for Sparrowhawk at Colonial Williamsburg’s Booksellers by eager patrons who have read the series and wish to see it on the big screen.

“Not any time soon,” I usually answer. “If it is ever produced, it won’t be by Hollywood. And if Hollywood in some episode of hubris thought it could tackle it, it would attempt to maul and dismember it, just out of sheer, doctrinaire meanness, coupled with incompetence. I would likely disown the result. After all, Hollywood hates America.”

I borrow the title of film critic Michael Medved‘s book-long critique of Hollywood (Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Neither he nor his book is the subject here, but rather the culture that cannot produce Sparrowhawk or any other nominally pro-American, pro-freedom film — including the “traditional” ones which Medved has championed in his book and in various conservative and religious columns (promoting family, God, and other, non-intellectual, non-fundamental values — “Leave It to Beaver“ style, with Ward Cleaver taking questions from the audience). (more…)