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.
