Sunday, April 22, 2018

Seriously Silly Satire on HBO's "Silicon Valley"

Jared: You can be openly polyamorous. And people here will call you brave. You can put micro-doses of LSD in your cereal, and-- and people will call you a pioneer. But the one thing you cannot be is a Christian. Silicon Valley -Episode 4, Season 5
 Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own. Jonathan Swift
Image result for Outing a christian on Silicon Valley
On last week's episode of Silicon Valley, Mike Judge's send up of America's tech-culture on HBO, the uber-dweeb CEO of Pied Piper outs a fellow CEO who is openly gay, as a committed Christian - monogamous and church-going.  All sundry at a strategy meeting are shocked and both the outer and the outed stand to be shunned by the devout secularist majority.

  

This is satire worthy of Jonathan Swift -Swift is the guy who argued for the eating of Papist babies in the 17th century.

Jaimie Morrow of the Daily Post writes this
The show exists to call out the real Valley on its hypocrisy. To find the ruthless capitalism that glides beneath the veneer of “making the world a better place,” as when it highlights the dark side of the gig economy or presents tech billionaires powered more by self-aggrandizement and petty spitefulness than by their lofty rhetoric. This episode attempts to puncture the Valley’s much-vaunted commitment to diversity and inclusiveness by highlighting one group that is supposedly not included.

Yes, but later Morrow seems stung by the barbs and tries to salve those broad wounds with this in defence of Valley's ultramontane secularism

While the Valley has plenty of militant atheists, secular humanists and plain old nonbelievers, it doesn’t necessarily follow that Christians are oppressed. I’d certainly be interested to know what former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger and Electronics Arts co-founder Dave Evans, all prominent Christians, think of the matter.
Uh, huh. and professional law enforcement officers are asked to serve on Rahm Emanuel's police watch-dog inquisitions - COPRA et al. - as opposed to Peoples Gas activists. 

Christians are not approved in our Brave New World of cable, tech, politico-activism and that fact is causing  the great divide in the state of the civil union, once called the land of the free and home of the brave.

Mike Judge has taken a bold step toward bringing people together.

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