Doing Good in a Naughty World

Some fans of the god of the Haiti earthquake and the Boxing Day tsunami have registered their concern about violent computer games. Tom Benyon, who lives surrounded by a "bubbling sewer of gratuitously violent and sexual pornography" and has spent a great deal of time watching images of women being sawn up, chainsaw murders, rape, torture and so on, displayed the respect for education and parental autonomy which one would expect from an erstwhile Conservative MP: "To control this material by expecting parents to control their children with warnings is like King Canute's performance with his waves". Despite the Saviour's casual attitude to property, the dean of Manchester Cathedral is still indignant over a breach of copyright three years ago by Sony, which used images of the building's interior without permission, evidently much to the detriment of public safety in Manchester. The Very Reverend Govender Rogers Govender, who expects eternal bliss as the personal gift of a failed apocalyptic preacher who rose from the dead during the reign of Tiberius, did his best to put Sony straight about the difference between fantasy and reality; but it is far from clear that the lesson has gone home.