A new Resident was admitted a couple of days ago and unfortunately this man walks with a crutch. Why this sight should be associated with a wheel chair in my mind still confuses me. This thought came back to me last night and I remembered a movie in which the main character is the victim of a failed assassination attempt and survives it only to be paralyzed waist down. I couldn’t for the love of God remember the name of the character until this morning that is when it dawned on me that I was thinking about Larry Flynt the publisher of Hustler Magazine.
I had seen copies of the Hustler Magazine when I was a kid and the few who had them in my home town were very proud owners and would show them off to me with great pomp and ceremony. I would have been about 12 years old and these pictures were a welcome sight and very educational for me. Not to mention of course their role in stimulating a growing awareness of sex which I was going through at that time.
I didn’t know much about the Publisher till I saw the movie The People Vs Larry Flynt in the nineties and subsequently saw a news clip of the man himself proclaiming to the world, or whoever was watching TV at that time, that he had, had more Women than Huge Hefner! A point of view that was dismissed by a Reporter in an article who opined that who cared anyways. It asserted Hefner’s playboy Magazine was something that would have been popular even at the time of Sodom and Gonorrhea, I mean Gomorrah and somebody should put the old codger (Flynt) out of his misery!
For me why I enjoyed the film and respect the man is for his stand on the freedom of expression which is a commodity that very few people seem to want to defend these days. It is one of the first casualties in lot of Counties including mine. Furthermore porn unlike war isn’t a killer, unless of course you’re very careless.
More recently Flynt had approached the US Congress for a bail out in light of the present economic downturn in the US and to me that showed this man has balls. I mean if you look at it America is bailing out the Auto Industry when people stopped buying American cars long before the crisis and entertainment especially Adult is a very popular pastime and is a growing industry. It needs all the help it can get! I am sure it will be a cast iron investment.
But Flynt also came to mind in context of an article I read in the only local Sunday Paper I follow regularly. The writer in comparing the situation in Libya and Sri Lanka asserted that the later had still not reached the state of oppression nor does the climate for Revolution exist unlike the former and change is still possible within a democratic framework. He is right Sri Lanka has still not reached the epic proportions of repression that so many of these crackpots have subjected their people to. But if this trend continues it won’t be very long before this Country joins that elite crowd and we end up like them.
Flynt may have been a smut pedaler to those who want view him as such but his character is of a man who believed that there were issues that needed to be fought for. He is called a free speech pioneer and used his resources towards espousing that. What concerns me is the scarcity such people in Sri Lanka who are ready to see this looming menace and willing to take action now without waiting for the situation to deteriorate to an intolerable level. It will happen if things go on like this and are we to allow this rot to continue for god knows how long before we are goaded and forced to take action?
Another long drawn out battle after a repressive regime entrenches itself is something that we can ill afford. Two uprisings one long drawn out Civil War and at the end of it all we seem to be in the same place chasing our tail and shouting the same old rhetoric. The cost in human suffering is yet to be measured and the damage to the collective psyche is bound to have social consequences that will be far reaching. An old friend of mine told me just after the 1983 riots that Sri Lanka had lost its innocence! I don’t think we lost it then. It happened a long time before 1983 and unless we learn the value and necessity of true freedom and are willing to defend it, never mind the innocence, we will never mature as a nation and be truly united to even contemplate genuine progress and true development of its Citizens and Society.
