``..It is, therefore, in the interests of both individual justice and political clarity that Martha be found innocent.'' Doug
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While Michael Dawson's points are all well made and I agree with all of them, but I think there are other issues at work here.
Doug has a kinky soft spot for rich, fake blonds with mild transgressive tendencies like Madonna and evidently Martha. It's a little like Catherine Driscoll's celebration of the Spice Girls. Some inexplicable and abhorrent thing of psyche. Strange.
But there are certainly worse fetishes around. Take my current sick and twisted fascination with Leo Strauss. I want to find something really dark and abhorrent, some hint of homophobic submission-aggression nazis thing (like Horowitz v. Ginsberg) but I just can't quite make the case.
Leo was unfortunately droll and not every imaginative. While he was a teenager he joined the Blau-Weiss youth movement. This was a Zionist youth movement tailored after the German Wandervogel groups. (see Michael Zank, Early Writings)
I was hoping I could get some young, shy, fat-Leo-in-lederhosen thing going for a big brawny Hans or rough-haus blond Dieter---but no go. It's almost there, but it's just too indirect to really demonstrate.
Sort of like trying to defend Martha Stewart, if you follow the kinky logic....
Chuck Grimes