So a Danish newspaper dared to publish several cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, which is taboo according to Muslim tradition, with varying degrees of provocative slant, which is the essence of political cartooning. Thus raising all sorts of public questions about responsible journalism, freedom of the press, cultural sensitivity, offensiveness to minorities, jingoism, and tyranny by majorities. Or maybe it's not that complicated; maybe it's just about respect.
They used to call this stuff "political correctness," but the term lost traction from over-use, and it eventually turned back on itself when it became more politically correct to appear to be politically incorrect and vice versa. Are we confused yet? The rub in that debate was - and is - that bigots can dismiss the obligation to show respect for 'others' by calling it all mere "political correctness," which essentially made it okay to act like a racist mysogynist nativist xenophobe.
Back to Danes drawing prophets for fun and profit. The thing that sticks in my recovering-Methodist craw is how effectively the most vehement reactions to such indiscretions prove their opponents right. In a recent Slate, Reza Aslan writes:
Of course, the sad irony is that the Muslims who have resorted to violence in response to this offense are merely reaffirming the stereotypes advanced by the cartoons. Likewise, the Europeans who point to the Muslim reaction as proof that, in the words of the popular Dutch blogger Mike Tidmus, "Islam probably has no place in Europe," have reaffirmed the stereotype of Europeans as aggressively anti-Islamic. It is this common attitude among Europeans that has led to the marginalization of Muslim communities there, which in turn has fed the isolationism and destructive behavior of European Muslims, which has then reinforced European prejudices against Islam. It is a Gordian knot that has become almost impossible to untangle. (Depicting Mohammed: Why I'm offended by the Danish cartoons of the prophet)
For as long as I can remember, I've thought caricature was cool. As a little kid I used to glom onto the Saturday Evening Post cartoons - alas we were not a New Yorker kind of family - and when we moved to Detroit the editorial page became my favorite spot in the Free Press, followed closely by the sports section. Those were the days. Oliphant, Herblock, and Jules Feiffer were my heroes, along with Buchwald and other satirists, their wordsmith cousins. And for what? Doing what they did so well, making fun of other people in public! Identifying and exaggerating other people's physical traits, deeply held beliefs, foibles, misdeeds, and misfortunes. Hello, I'm Joe Bloe, I'm in public humiliation.
You could say that the objects of cartoon scorn asked for it. The really great subjects of caricature - Nixon, for example - made it his business to produce an abundance of material for cartoonists by diligently, patiently, relentlessly acting in absurdly deceitful and destructive ways in the public arena. So he wuz askin' for it, right? Although his sidekick Agnew tried to badmouth the press into self-censorship, it didn't work. Score one for the Fourth Estate.
Now the skirmish is between the European (Christian-dominated) press, with its justifiable resistance to self-censorship, and the wounded sensibilities of Muslims, and I think we can agree that there's enough hypocrisy to go around. At least in public, most Americans and Western Europeans fall all over themselves being respectful of Jews but openly call Muslims backward, inhuman, and worse. And they have their counterparts in southwest Asia who use some of the same names - or their local variants - for Christians and other nonbelievers. Give a demagogue a small crowd, and he'll find you a common enemy to make into the great Satan.
Okay, so the Sharks hate the Jets, and the Jets hate the Sharks, I think we got that. Why do the Jets have to go out of their way to prove their manhood or their piety by taunting the Sharks in print?
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