I try to exist in a world where there is freedom of opinion, where you're allowed to make jokes. I don't want to live in some PC world where no-one's allowed to say anything.
They have the ability to take a person's freedom from them. On certain situations, they have the ability to take a person's reputation. And under certain circumstances, they have the authority to take a person's life.
America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.
There's no subtext in Harry Potter really; it's all magic, anything can happen. Why do I say this? Because it's a magic spell. It's quite nice in a way. There is a real freedom to it.
Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.
So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.
