August 09, 2007

THEY TAKE IT SO LITERALLY

The people of Seattle are on the edge of their seats:

Construction delays will force journalism history buffs to wait a few more months to visit the Newseum, a museum dedicated to news reporting and the First Amendment being built near the Capitol.

Lenin's Tomb quips, "I hope it includes a special clinic for journalists whose arms dislocate from the spontaneous back-patting."

A museum dedicated to the First Amendment. Incidentally, we caught some crap on the news last week in the motel, where a talking head made a remark about "Second Amendment literalists." Nice. I'd love to hear someone sneer about First Amendment literalists and see how that goes over.

Posted by Sarah at August 9, 2007 09:29 AM | TrackBack
Comments

I love the First Amendment Literalist analysis Sarah. You can apply the same argument to any of the other amendments. How about the 4th or the 13th?

Good job. I will be borrowing this in the near future.

Posted by: Badger 6 at August 9, 2007 11:20 AM

As far as “a museum dedicated to news reporting” they couldn’t be more accurate. Museums are places where one can visit to see things that are old and/or no longer exist. Well, I would say news reporting, that being actually reporting the news – facts, another words, not injecting opinion or uncorroborated, agenda driven falsehoods is indeed extinct. So, I say good for them for acknowledging that. ;)

Also, building a ‘museum dedicated to … the First Amendment being built near the Capitol” is unnecessary. The Capital, and the rest of the DC for that matter, already represents, very nicely I might add, our First Amendment right along with the rest of our rights and freedoms. So that’s just redundant in my book.

Posted by: tim at August 9, 2007 01:07 PM

Badger 6 -- You literally took the words out of my mouth. I had added the line "Or the Fourth or Thirteenth" to the end of it and then erased it because I figured I'd already made the point. Those were the exact two others I thought of as well.

Posted by: Sarah at August 9, 2007 01:18 PM

I work in Rosslyn, Virginia, right across the Potomac from DC, and right next door to the original location of the Newseum. One of their best displays was about seven sections of the Berlin wall, complete with East German guard tower and huge background mural of the fireworks on the night the wall came down.

The new Newseum took three or four sections to the new location, but I believe the ones remaining will be reinstalled at the original place.

If you're into that sort of thing, check out Freedom Park in Rosslyn (very near the Iwo Jima Memorial). Statues and memorials to all things free, including a beautiful tribute to journalists who lost their lives covering the news.

Posted by: Ted at August 11, 2007 06:54 AM