tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888438300076664400.post1321321507253660686..comments2014-12-09T17:25:07.561-08:00Comments on Words and Images: Revision 2 - GenesisAdamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16302919444091859459noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5888438300076664400.post-23029273554496773482011-11-19T17:57:55.795-08:002011-11-19T17:57:55.795-08:001) The good. The broad idea of interpreting Crum...1) The good. The broad idea of interpreting Crumb's book as, at its heart, a critique of organized religion (or Judaism/Christianity in particular) is a fine one. Your pivotal example of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is, I think, the correct starting point for this argument: Crumb does a great job of emphasizing the divine violence without adding or inventing anything.<br /><br />2) The bad. Hitler analogies are poisonous, because they inevitably tend to make us think less, not more. We all know that Hitler=Evil; in fact, it sometimes seems that people have trouble articulating supreme evil in any other way than through Hitler. But the analogy itself is clumsy at best. After all, the US killed far more people through aerial bombardment in WWII than Germany did (my point being that, in some ways, the U.S.'s destruction of Tokyo/Hiroshima/Dresden/etc. might be closer to the divine destruction of S&G than anything Hitler did. I don't care about that claim, really - my point is that the Hitler analogy is in no way constructive. It shuts an interesting essay down just as it was getting started. If you want to argue that the God of Genesis is evil, do that! Use the text, not a sledgehammer.<br /><br />The ugly: Clumsy research and excessive brevity take away from what your focus should have been: a sustained argument (more examples! more attention to the illustrations!) that Crumb is subtly portraying God as evil.<br /><br />Short version: a bold premise and good potential, but hasty, indifferent execution of that premise.Adamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16302919444091859459noreply@blogger.com