It never grows easy to discover that people you admire are fools. There’s something deeply humbling about building someone up only to discover that the pedestal you erected is not even made of clay but cheap plastic instead. So you knock it down, crunch the shards underfoot and hope that you learned something from the experience.
I’ve been
tugging pieces of broken plastic from the soles of my shoes since learning that
some of my favorite writers—including Junot Diaz and Joyce Carol Oates—have signed
a letter to protest PEN honoring the editors of Charlie Hebdo with a Freedom of Expression award.
Ever since
the murder of twelve of the magazine’s staffers last January, I’ve been amazed
by the number of otherwise intelligent people who have felt obliged to play the
“Yes, but” game. Yes, it was terrible to kill twelve people but it’s also wrong
to satirize other people’s religion. Yes, all of France should be outraged, but
this will only be an excuse for the National Front to take over. Yes, freedom
of speech is important, but it’s also important not to offend oppressed
minorities, whether intentionally or not.
It’s this
last variation of the game that seems to resonate most with the signatories of
the PEN protest. As the letter states:
“The
magazine seems to be entirely sincere in its anarchic expressions of disdain
toward organized religion but in an unequal society, equal opportunity offense
does not have an equal effect.”
Humor is a dangerous medium that must constantly be
monitored and scrutinized for harmful or offensive content. The satirist must
be careful to always punch up and never punch down. Any number of writers have
set themselves up as some kind of self-styled Joke Police who take it upon
themselves to score the direction of every punch and determine what degree of
penalty each low blow deserves.
In the case of Charlie
Hebdo, the official indictment stems from the charge that many of the
magazine’s cartoons are—or could be perceived to be—racist. Even though the
president of SOS Racisme has
categorically stated that Charlie Hebdo
was in fact anti-racist, the signatories of the PEN protest letter are
concerned that the Muslims of France—many of whom are indeed trapped in an
alienating landscape of grim poverty—may feel themselves to be the objects of the
magazine’s scorn.
But the staff members at Charlie
Hebdo were not murdered because they made jokes about Muslims. They were
killed because they mocked Islamic fanaticism. They ridiculed the people who
throw bombs in the name of God. It’s become a reflex in the West to label
terrorists as cowards. Charlie Hebdo
did something much more powerful: it made them look like buffoons.
Years ago,
Milan Kundera argued that his friend Salman Rushdie was condemned to death for The Satanic Verses because he had dealt
with the Koran as a novelist: he had treated sacred scripture not with
reverence or even disdain but with irony. It was that irony that the mullahs
could not tolerate. They could not assimilate it into their worldview.
Therefore the ironist had to die.
The Charlie Hebdo massacre revealed that the
situation has gotten far worse. Religion has returned to the status it once
held for centuries, untouchable and immune from satire. During the Renaissance,
writers such as Rabelais and Erasmus risked their lives to puncture the
certainty of the faithful. Now their victories are being forfeited in the name
of the poor and downtrodden masses. Freedom of expression must end where the
possibility for offense begins. On this, both the imams and the intellectuals
agree.
I could speculate on why writers such as Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Francine Prose have
chosen to join this repressive alliance but as Erasmus himself said in The Praise
of Folly: nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men’s judgments of one
another. So let me continue to sweep the shards of broken pedestals from my floor and hope to build more constructive monuments in the future.
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