This is not a new post; I originally posted this in February of 2006. I was going to write a new post after the murderous events in Paris, but it seems to me that what I said then remains relevant now, so I'm just going to post this piece again. There are references to events then in the news other than the main topic; I have left them as is.--Akaky
This being a free country and all, I figure I’m as entitled to my
opinion the same as the next guy, so I’m going to take this opportunity
to bloviate a little, if you don’t mind. There’s a great fight going on
these days and some of the people you’d expect to be in the forefront
of this struggle are surprisingly AWOL. The question facing Western
civilization these days goes beyond the multicultural let’s-be-inclusive
politically correct pap we’ve all been listening to for I don’t know
how many years now. It goes beyond whether or not you find those Danish
cartoons funny or in poor taste. Muslims throughout the world have
responded to the publication of those cartoons by boycotting Danish
products, denouncing Denmark in the media, and demonstrating outside of
Danish embassies and consulates. All of this is, to my mind, legitimate
protest; one need only remember the reaction to Andres Serrano’s ‘
Piss Christ,' Martin Scorsese’s
'The Last Temptation of Christ,' and Chris Ofili’s
‘The Holy Virgin Mary’ to
know that the faithful of all religious persuasions dislike the idea of
having their beliefs mocked or the idea that they should simply sit
back and accept these insults without a fight. What any society,
however, cannot accept is the threat and use of violence to enforce any
one religion’s dogmas as civil law on those people who do not accept
that religion’s doctrines. And yet, many of the people whom you would
think would never under any circumstances accept a confessional
exception for the tenets of Christianity or Judaism in the law seem
fully willing to accept such an exception for Islam.
And why is
that? There are many reasons, but the simplest one is the easiest to
understand, and has the benefit of truth as well: they are frightened;
they don’t want an Islamic rent—a—mob sacking their offices and harming
their families, co-workers, and friends. Who are the they I am talking
about here? The media, for one, which is censoring itself in a manner
it would not dream of doing for Catholic or evangelical protestors, and
seems more interested in playing gotcha with the Administration over the
Vice-President's hunting accident that in showing the American people
what the cause of all the rioting is. Not one major media outlet that I
am aware of has actually published these cartoons, and I think it is a
strange commentary on the American press that their main objection to
this accident is that the White House did not stroke their outsized egos
as much as they would have liked. The artists and Hollywood celebrities
for another, who cannot wait to give us their opinions about everything
under the sun whether we want to hear them or not, but who seem very
quiet in the face of this blatant attempt to blackjack Danish press and
artistic expression and leave it bleeding in the gutter. Where are the
celebrators of transgressive art in this controversy? These are the
same folks who can’t wait for some representative of the Catholic League
to denounce their latest transgressive piece of dreck in order to gin
up some interest in their work, but in this matter they find that
there’s nothing to be said, nothing to be done, please go away and leave
us alone; what you say may be true, but first we must cultivate our
gardens.
This, I think, is not something I’m sure I believe: a
few Danish cartoonists create the most brilliantly transgressive art of
our young century, and the local purveyors of such art have nothing to
say about it, preferring, no doubt, to find new ways of dipping
crucifixes in bodily waste. This is all very far indeed from Voltaire’s
cry of
Ecrasez l’infame (Crush the infamy!) and Flaubert’s dictum that the job of the artist is to
epater le bourgeois (shock
the middle-classes). When Voltaire spoke of crushing the infamy of
superstition, the Roman Catholic Church in France was as powerful in is
way as the state itself, and equally interested in using the temporal
power of the state to enforce Catholic religious teaching and dogma as
the law of the land; the law forbade anyone from questioning the
doctrines of the Church and blasphemy was as foul a crime as murder. And
yet, Voltaire attacked the Church again and again, using his wit and
invective to stir men’s minds against the dead weight of centuries of
dogma and to get people to think for themselves.
Today,
however, we have artists who want to be transgressive, but only if that
gets them a show in a expensive gallery in SoHo, or, barring that, in
some hot new edgy place like Beacon, and afterwards a nice wine and
cheese party and then a good review in the New York Times’ Sunday Arts
& Leisure section. Today, we have artists who want to crush the
infamy, but only if the infamy provides some buzz for their work; today,
we have artists who want to shock the bourgeoisie as much as Flaubert
did, but not if the bourgeoisie close their checkbooks first and go
home. No one wants to deal with maniacal critics willing to use riot
and intimidation in order to protect what they deem holy. Today, we seem
to have a media and an arts establishment utterly unwilling to show the
American people what the fuss is all about and equally unwilling to say
anything in defense of the very freedoms that make their livelihoods
possible. It was easy for the media and the artists and the limousine
liberals to criticize the Catholic Church’s objections to a painting of
the Blessed Virgin that came complete with a lump of elephant dung and
photographs of female pudenda cut from porno magazines, and talk about
what a brave thing this was for the artist and the Brooklyn Art Museum
to do in the face of Rudy Giuliani’s threats to cut the museum’s tax
support, but in the face of Islamic mob violence these same people are
saying nothing, doing nothing.
I wonder if this apathy in the
face of real danger is because we are a softer people than we once were.
Once upon a time, people knew that taking a moral stand meant taking a
risk. In the past few months, the nation has lost Rosa Parks and
Coretta Scott King, both of whom knew that tyranny does not crumble
easily and that bringing down such tyranny may cost you everything and
everyone you love. In the past few months, Jack Anderson passed away, a
man who dedicated his life to uncovering what actually went on in
Washington, D.C. and bringing the secret into the public light, so that
the American people could judge for themselves what their
representatives were doing in their names, despite the pressure from the
politically powerful to keep what he knew to himself. None of these
people thought that what they were trying to accomplish would be risk
free, or that those who stood to lose the most if the old dispensation
were to join Marxism in the dustbin of history would go quietly into
that good night. But they stayed in the fight, they stayed and fought
for what they believed in. We don’t seem to do this anymore, we seem to
say, as we often do about marriage, that this is for better or forget
it, forgetting, as we make light of ourselves, that there are others
watching.
Yes, there are others watching, for whom freedom of
expression is a blasphemy, who believe, as St. Augustine did, that error
has no rights, and everything not found in an ancient Arabic text is
unworthy of existence. Perhaps the Caliph Omar did not order the
destruction of the great library at Alexandria in the seventh century by
saying that if the books in the library agreed with the Koran then they
were superfluous, and therefore not necessary and could be destroyed,
and if they disagreed with the Koran they were heresy, and therefore
harmful and should be destroyed forthwith, but his co-religionists of
today deeply believe that this is nothing more or less than the truth,
and that even unbelievers must accept the dictates of the Prophet and
the ummah, if they know what is good for them. These people will do
everything in their power to reduce the corrupt and decadent West, the
Dar al-Harb,
the House of War, and its will to resist the coming of the True Faith,
and there are more than a few of those people Lenin once called useful
idiots willing to help them along. We see this in the anxious kowtowing
to the notion that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance when we
see every day that it is not; we see this in the twisting of news and
language so as to avoid offending always sensitive Muslim sensibilities,
and we see this in the playing up of Western mistakes and the playing
down of Muslim ones. Robert Frost once famously defined a liberal as a
man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel. We, it seems to
me, no longer want to take our own side in this argument, that we are
content to let the Danes fight the good fight for freedom of expression.
And if they fail, if they buckle under to the threats of mob violence,
then what of it? What is Denmark to us, or we to Denmark, that we
should trouble ourselves for them?
Labels: censorship, Islam, jihad, murderers, Roberta Vasquez, satire, self-censorship, War on Terror
