"Do you think I should chime in?"
"There's half a chance in hell the pro-Dementia crowd would listen to you."
"Which is a greater chance than some of the other people discussing it would have."
"Exactly."
"Which almost says I have a responsibility."

And I take my responsibilities very seriously.

Everybody who has no interest in filk (or worse, because I know there are a couple of people, an active dislike), please skip this post.

( Filk, Dementia, Community, And You )

Of course, the flip side of my responsibility is that I have it because some of the dementia artists consider me a friend...and after all this is said and done, I don't know if that won't change.

I lost all respect for Ray Bradbury when he decided to complain about the title of Fahrenheit 9/11, but this is just insulting.

"Oh, no," cries Bradbury. "Fahrenheit 451 isn't about censorship! It's about television!"

Right. Uh-huh. Sure. So, Mr. Bradbury, about this coda, written by you, in 1979...

"'Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door,' are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place."

(Emphasis mine.)

Nice try.

See, the only thing I can think of is, when you wrote that coda, censorship was really a game of political correctness. You write at length that you will not bow to a group which doesn't like your portrayal of them: "If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters."

I can't help thinking that now that censorship is the provenance of the side you tend to support--besides your idolatry of our current President[1], you didn't have a leg to stand on by complaining about title theft[2] so I have to assume you didn't like the politics of Fahrenheit 9/11[3] and decided to do what you could to muddy the waters--you have a choice between retracting the novel and declaring that maybe those people you support aren't always right.

Nice to see your principles are so consistent: my guys can do no wrong, truth be damned.

[1]Of President Bush: "wonderful. We needed him. Clinton is a s***head and we're glad to be rid of him." --Salon, 2001. Ironically, the linchpin of his support was "now we can get some education reform." I doubt No Child Left Behind is what Ray had in mind.
[2] Or would you like to justify Something Wicked This Way Comes and I Sing The Body Electric?
[3] I thought it was a bad movie, plain and simple, but that's a different matter...