Je ne suis pas Charlie

Though I consider myself to have a relatively good sense of humor, I have to confess here that I have never really had much taste for satire. The big problem with satire is that those who need most to get the joke don’t. All they get is pissed off, and then bad things usually happen.

The editor and staff at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo are now the heroes of free speech – actually, its martyrs. Borrowing an analogy from my previous post, they had been tickling the rattlesnake for a long time, and finally, the rattlesnake had enough.

 It was a terrible price, but their martyrdom seems to have been required to galvanize the rest of the world into recognizing the perversion of Islam – not Islam itself – for the danger that it is. I am just as angry as anyone else who has been watching the news the past several days, and would be absolutely thrilled if a way were found to erase terrorists from the Earth – especially those who are teaching children – and adults who haven’t found something better to do with their lives -- to follow their murderous course.

In solidarity with the slain French journalists, media outlets and individual Internet users alike have republished the cartoons said to have started the whole thing. But the right to republish a few irreverent cartoons, to me anyway, is somehow missing the larger point. How do we shine a light into the dark recesses where twisted versions of religion are nurtured – the places where, in the marketplace of ideas, there’s only one product on the shelf, and there hasn’t been anything new since the Middle Ages? Does spreading around a few cartoons accomplish this end?

I think to really get this job done, you need a lot more than satire. You need more Gandhis. More Martin Luther Kings. More Aung San Soo Kyis – or in the case of Islam, more Malalas.

Habemus Papam

"...If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist,  if he wants everything clear and safe, he will find nothing...Those who always look for disciplinarian solutiions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists -- they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies."

It has bgeen crystal clear for years that the Catholic Church has needed an overhaul. Perhaps it will begin with the sea change that has occurred at the very top. The words above are from an interview given to a Jesuit journal by Pope Francis I -- a welcome breeze through the musty catacombs of an institution that needs it.

I am no longer Catholic, but I was raised that way in a time when things were different.The Mass was in Latin. Fridays, and quite a few other days, were meatless -- I had one of those calendars with the fish icons signifying when meat was off-limits. I kept close track of my sins, so much so that I was afraid to fly unless I had been to confession, in case the plane should crash and I should die with a blot on my soul and be sent to the place with eternal central heating. It was a scary time to be a child, much less an adolescent. The church has since lightened up, to a point.

There's something about religions. They start out with a simple mission and then turn into corporations with a hierarchy and sets of rules, regulations, and judgments -- often combined with the conviction that the world won't be quite right unless everyone is converted. Judaism had turned into one of these when Jesus came along. If he had a mission, it was to bring religion back to its original purpose. Would he approve of what has been done in his name since he left? For that matter, would the Prophet Muhammad (blessings and peace be upon him) be happy with what's happened to Islam? I think we know the answers.

I am becoming less "religious" as I age, when I've always been told it should be the other way around. My problem with most religions is that they consider being human some kind of inferior status. When we screw up, we're told we're "only human." The phrase "human nature" usually refers to something negative. I often wonder what would become of art, music, and literature in a world where humanity is continually discounted. Would we all be singing hymns instead of love songs?

A worthy goal of religion would seem to be to put us into alignment with our "better angels." But it also has to let us breathe. I may be reading too much into the new pope's words, but I think this is one of the things he's trying to tell us. It will be enlightening to hear what else he has to say.

Race to the Cellar

It’s astonishing to me how two men with a couple of sharp instruments and a twisted interpretation of Islam could throw a nation of millions into alert mode, but that’s exactly what happened in the U.K. this week.

The two murdered an innocent British soldier in the London district of Woolwich in especially unpleasant fashion. Some officials called them cowards, but they weren’t at all. They remained at the scene of the crime and welcomed documentation of what they had done by people in the area with smartphone cameras, finding a willing audience for their insane ideas.

As if this weren’t enough, the footage (funny how we persist in using antiquated terms for digital information) made its way not only onto the Internet, but onto respected news outlets like the BBC. Pictures of one of the suspects holding a bloody meat cleaver were on the front pages of many newspapers.

We often hear the argument these days that information is now democratized, that we’re all reporters, and that we don’t need the traditional “big brother” media outlets to get out the news. In desperate search of ears and eyeballs, the media succumb to this intense pressure to share every single detail of a crime perpetrated by those seeking maximum distribution of it, partly on the grounds that such distribution will happen anyway.

Just to mix metaphors – and I’ve used this one before – we are like 12-year-olds sitting around a campfire in the dark, trying to one-up each other with a more shocking ghost story – and there’s nothing more effective than a ghost story that’s true. The result is, we get desensitized to normal levels of horror, and the bar is raised – or lowered, depending on your point of view.

I hope that some day, as we all get used to playing with our new electronic toys, that editors will be appreciated again. Freedom of speech is precious – but so is the freedom not to speak – or to deny full voice to an infinitesimal minority of individuals whose only goal is to scare us to death.

In the Top of the News...

My radio listening this morning brought three stories worthy of comment.

Malala, the 14-year old Pakistani girl shot in the head by a Taliban militant for having the temerity to advocate education for women, stood up for the first time in a British hospital today, and now they’re saying she could make a full recovery.

I take a little offense at the notion that religion prompted this shooting. While I’ve long contended that religion often gives God a bad name, Islam doesn’t go this far off the rails. While it would be nice if Jesus comes back, I think he should wait in the wings and let the Prophet Muhammad (blessings and peace be upon him) return first and straighten some of these crazies out.

BTW, while fundamentalist Islam displays its low opinion of women by forcing them to wear burkas, that policy doesn’t say much about men, either. Why do women have to wear burkas? Is it because men can’t control themselves at the sight of a female?

************************************

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the 1987 event known as Black Friday, when the stock market dropped 22 percent in one day. I was working in radio, and we had to take our business/stock reporter out for at least one drink to calm him down. I remember that his tie was loosened at the neck, sort of like what Jerry Lewis used to do on those charity telethons to denote long hours of stress.

Could a similar thing happen today? Not in a single day, the experts say, thanks to automatic trading curbs that would kick in. It would just be elongated. Like four years, maybe? Well, it is nice to see the market coming back.

***********************************

And finally, it’s also great to see Mitt Romney and Barack Obama having fun with each other at the Al Smith dinner in New York. The boxing analogy fits like a glove over the debates we’ve seen so far – that’s how we “score” them, by jabs, power punches, etc. The dual appearance at the dinner reminds me of what we often see in the ring, when two boxers who have furiously beaten each other up for 11 rounds come out for the 12th – and the first thing they do is touch gloves.