Don't have much sympathy for Pussy Riot

Finally bothered to watch a video of the punk rock "band" Pussy Riot desecrating a Russian Orthodox church. Hooliganism is the right word for it. What a repulsive group. Claiming that they weren't trying to offend anyone is absurd. They went in and filmed this thing for YouTube. Women in the church resisted being filmed while a man was politely asking the "band" to leave the altar. One gets on her knees and crosses herself. And now they've put this out as a single, their one and only CD. How many gigs has this "band" ever played? Not even their apologists refer to them as "musicians".

The Nation magazine defended them on the basis of political statements they made in letters from jail. It's possible that Pussy Riot is made up of brilliant political intellectuals, but that has nothing to do with it. I'd have more sympathy for them if they were dullards. 

Defenders of Pussy Riot get mad if you compare them to the Dixie Chicks and the actions taken against them because they spoke out against Bush. It's completely different, they say, because the Dixie Chicks weren't criminally charged. Of course, that was because the Dixie Chicks didn't commit a crime. Pussy Riot did.

I knew two people in Oregon who were on trial, facing 20 years in prison, charged with first degree arson for burning a strip of yellow cloth as part of a political protest. The judge ruled that this constituted arson because the scrap of bedsheet was a "thing of value". In fact, if they had burned it in their fireplace at home, it still would have been "arson". Burning a scrap of cloth was no different from burning down a building.

A Pussy Riot supporter wrote write an article on the Counterpunch website. He wrote in response to an earlier article pointing out the hypocrisy of the U.S. press defending Pussy Riot when they don't do the same for people in the U.S. The original article was narrowly focused on the US press, but the Pussy Riot supporter took it as an attack on the "band". He said this was "ignorant" and that the history of Russian punk rock was somehow relevant to whether invading and desecrating a church was a crime.

"The band members have been pulling stunts like this since their teens," the guy wrote, "their most infamous previous stunts include filming themselves kissing subway police and a media-invitation public orgy." He didn't mention that these "feminists" also filmed a woman performing a sex act with a frozen chicken in a supermarket.

What clever girls.

As they were being led from the courtroom, one of the girls said "We are happy because we brought the revolution closer!"

"Well done," the cop said.