428. POP S&M, MORE SMOKE & MIRRORS by un'Americana a Venezia

The best news of the current week is that poor Meriam, the woman condemned by a Sudanese court to 100 lashes and death by hanging for having married a Christian, has finally left Sudan alive, along with her husband and two infant children, thanks to the protests of so many onlookers and the direct intervention of diplomats, especially Italians.  Otherwise, this dreadful week in July, 2014, will be remembered only for tragic mayhem:  three different passenger aircraft went down; the Israeli government kept teaching its nearest antagonists a lesson, firing on the guilty and the innocent alike; the fearsome plague of ebola spread farther in Africa; opposing forces continued fighting at the Russian border; and another execution by injection went wrong in America, taking two agonizing hours to kill a man who waited twenty-five years to die.  Indeed, it's been a cruel and unusual week.  What's going on in Syria and Iraq continues to be hopelessly oppressive with no end in sight, especially for Christians and females.  It was reported, erroneously, one hopes, that the leader of the fledgling "caliphate" wants females in the territory to undergo genital mutilation.  Even in the face of such heinous news, to the mindless joy of would-be masochists worlds away, the Internet has not bothered to downplay this week's release of the preview of a movie based on a series of pornographic bestsellers.  Hype for a movie trailer?  I remember when my spinster aunt who lives in a picture-perfect small town in America first mentioned these books by a British writer; she voluntarily confessed that people of her acquaintance were reading them.  Naturally, I pictured club and church ladies.  The main activity of this series-turned-movie is bondage.  I haven't read any of these books and don't plan to, just as I had no call to read the Harry Potter line either.  Bondage is neither a new genre nor a new fetish.  Even the Victorians practiced it on the sly.  It is amazing to me, nonetheless, that bondage has just turned into mainstream entertainment.  That other Brit managed to turn sorcery into acceptable family fun.  These crafty, if not notably gifted, writers, along with their agents, their publishers, their publicists, and the movie studios, have been making boatloads of money from the public's newly discovered passions for witchcraft and sadomasochism.  Who would have thought it possible?  The philosopher Nietzsche shocked the world in another era by suggesting that God was dead.  Of course, that is an outright fallacy; otherwise, the world would be an even darker mess.  Still, mankind seems to be cruisin' for a bruisin' these days.  What is dead in our time, it seems, is modesty, or pudore in Italian.  Some individuals will do anything in public, write anything, say anything, and justify anything, for the sake of lucre.  "Money makes the world go round," they sing in "Cabaret," an excellent film that depicts the moral decadence of Germany just before the war.  In an era when people are starving to death and in need of medical care in forgotten lands where the business interests of rich countries exploit natural resources and leave behind only poison; a time in history when women everywhere don't feel totally safe either inside or outside of their homes; a period of human history when the last thing that matters to most people is the sacredness of all life, we have media moguls continuing to invest in sheer violence and/or debauchery.  Today it's a soft porn product, not nearly as heavy as DeSade, so that customers fundamentally removed from cruel reality are happy to dole out good money to fuel mindless fantasies in a part of the planet that badly needs a wake up call.  A young female screenwriter, favorable towards the bondage theme but critical of the actor in the trailer, remarked, "I needed someone who is a little more bang-able.  Someone who is going to ravage me a little bit more."  In the face of what's really happening in the world, all the real pain and suffering and injustice, maybe that big, bearded caliph and his bad boys over in Iraq would be more than happy to accommodate dizzy little daydreamers like her.   UN'AMERICANA A VENEZIA