The Atlantic Monthly site is accessible, but The Believer is not. Yes, granted it could be that the latter’s moniker is taken to heart and makes it deserving of being blocked on religious grounds, but the NYRB is open for all, yet The London Review of Books is blocked. I sense a conspiracy, a conspiracy instigated by the macro-manager filtering sites and sheltering us web-crawlers here in Tehran against a certain outlook, that kind of self-deprecating disposition. As if humour ever hurt anyone.
Well, at least laughter takes away gravitas, and gravitas is the province of dictatorship – that much we glimpse in Kundera’s novels. And dictatorships lack taste, as demonstrated by Idi Amin, Marcos, Ceausescu et al (see October’s edition of Wallpaper*). Now I see the correlation. As if:
In exchange for the repression of your freedoms, I renounce my true aesthetic sensibility!
Gravitas sans taste. That is the tag-line of dictatorship in the 2oth century.
By the way, Google searches for “Hannah Arendt” fail to filter pass God’s sieve, however, which tends to undermine my hypothesis, such as it was.
