12 December 2003Cross purposesMicrosoft's Bookshelf Symbol 7 font, included with Office 2003, includes a couple of swastikas. The company is offering a utility to purge the font set, which, says microsoft.com, contains "unacceptable characters." The Third Reich, you'll remember, used only one swastika variation: clockwise, rotated 45 degrees. Apparently today any swastika is now considered a Nazi artifact, even if it's religious in origin; if you use the hated symbol, it has to be because it's always been your dream to annex Austria and invade Poland. Similarly, possession of a Confederate flag implies possession of enough rope to perform a couple of lynchings, and the twelve-story illuminated cross on the Bank One Tower in downtown Oklahoma City, something we see every December, means that the bank doesn't want business from non-Christians. There is defensive, and there is demented. Used to be, there was a recognizable difference between the two. Yes, but in some ways, symbols are a lot like words which can change their meaning throughout history. For instance, "gay" used to mean "happy" or at least that was the first definition to come to mind. Nowadays, a lot of people think "homosexual" first. Posted by: sya at 4:51 PM on 12 December 2003 |