Many of you have written about the blog entry, pointing to an excerpt of a talk I gave at Google in which I showed a video by Javier Prato in which Jesus is singing Gloria Gaynor’s “I will survive.” The YouTube video makes it seem as if this is all there was in my talk. And so my inbox has been filled with people outraged I would have made such a disrespectful video about Jesus, etc.
This will be obvious to everyone ordinarily here, but for the record:
(1) I did not make the “Jesus Christ: The Musical” video. Javier Prato did.
(2) I used the video in probably 5 or 6 out of 200 talks over the last three years, in the section of my talks in which I show examples of “remix” creativity.
(3) I show these videos not because I endorse the message, or even believe in the message. For example, here’s a fantastically clever video about John Kerry I showed dozens of times during the 2004 election. It makes fun of Kerry — the man I supported for President. The point was not the substance of the message; it was to demonstrate the spread of the technique.
(4) The Jesus video was relevant to the story I was telling because the artist was threatened by the copyright holders because of the video.
(5) I decided to stop using the video when one Christian whom I knew told me he thought unhelpful to the purpose for which I was using it. That seemed right, so I dropped it.
It will be interesting (in a root canal kind of way) to see how far or deep PC-ism runs in this society.
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