Bad Mr. Death

[Ed Toner]

Long article, but the download is worth it. I wonder if T. E. Ruppenthal is actually Jewish. I picked this up on another forum, which mentioned he is.

Anybody?

http://freedom.orlingrabbe.com/lfetimes/bad_mrdeath.htm

Bad Mr. Death

Encounter with the Holocaust Cult
by T. E. Ruppenthal
Modern life possesses a plenitude of things to depress a person. Oddly I
recently discovered that even reading wonderful old magazines and viewing a
fine movie could be depressing because I perceived how easily and quickly a
great deal of our beloved freedom of speech has slipped away.

I normally try to put humor in my essays, but this time I have failed. I
apologize in advance.

The National Lampoon. The mere memory of that magazine brings a smile to my
face. Recently, while cleaning out a closet, I found a few issues, dating
from the early to mid 1970s, which I greedily sat and all but devoured. What
a time it had been. A product of the ferment and freedom of the 60s, the
Lampoon shocked and titivated, amused and annoyed; the magazine considered
nothing and no one sacred, and so everything and everybody was open to being
parodied, satirized and ridiculed. Yes, it could be sophomoric, silly and
salacious, but more often it shone. The writers! Doug Kenney, Henry Beard,
Anne Beatts, Michael O'Donoghue, Tony Hendra, P.J. O'Rourke, Sean Kelly,
Gerald Sussman, Chris Miller, Jeff Greenfield, John Hughes, and many more,
plus an array of fantastically inventive cartoonists. Not only were they
marvelous comedic talents, but intelligent and articulate too.

In the 60s, a brief explosion of liberty burst across America or perhaps
more accurately, the 60s witnessed a dramatic growth in using our liberty;
the bounds of our language, our view of government, our accepted beliefs,
all stretched. The Nat-Lamp began in 1970 and continued exercising liberty
for two decades, but would, I fear, be unpublishable today, owing to the
swift erosion of basic freedoms.


The Ascendancy of Hurt Feelings
Somehow our language has become harmful. The adage, "Stick and stones may
break my bones but words can never hurt me," has been overthrown. It is now
commonly accepted that words can indeed hurt and hurt so terribly that many
words and phrases, ideas, concepts and questions need to be censored and
banned. Today humor ..............................