What a day to be a journalist: To reprise an old Cold War-era saying, better read, it appears, than dead.
Every newspaper in the free world should today be reprinting one or another of the brilliant cartoons that may have provoked the wrath of the terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday, or the original offending cartoons of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005 which set the Muslim world to rioting and puking in 2006 and which every paper in the free world ought to have reprinted way back then, but mostly didn’t.
Why should we do this, or something like it, even if it’s a bit late in the game?
Because, well, we — cartoonists, editors and journalists — are a pretty much a useless lot. Except for the cartoonists, we have few actual skills. We don’t make things, sell things or do things. What we do is write about, or draw, what other people make, sell and do. We are the ciphers, the code clerks: Stuff occurs in the world and we say what it was and sometimes, what we think it means (except for the cartoonists, we are usually wrong).
This isn’t much of a contribution, any way you cut it.
So today of all days, we should do the very little bit of which we are capable, and publish the hell out of those cartoons.
That’s all we can do; therefore, it’s what we should do.
Plus, it would be fun, and a bit of fun is just what we all need at the moment.
As British cartoonist Martin Rowson said Wednesday on the BBC, despite the horror of the Charlie Hebdo attack, the very best response to it is to “laugh them back into the dustbin of history, where they belong.”
(I love Rowson, and not only because he has written and had published a book called F—: The Human Odyssey, though that is a big part of it.)
It probably won’t happen, at least not quite the way I envisage, partly because we — cartoonists, editors and journalists — don’t run our shows any more than you all run yours, wherever you toil. We work for corporate entities that have concerns and sensitivities, don’t you know.
They have shareholders or investors (they’re the ones who call us “content providers” now) and they don’t want to hugely and unnecessarily piss off a huge group of potential readers or advertisers, such as, say, Muslims, even though so far as I know there’s not a scintilla of evidence that Muslims are more willing than any other group to pay for news, though there is plenty of it to suggest that they are rather more sensitive to such slights.
Instead, many news outlets likely will run the Je Suis Charlie hashtag and join in the general verklempt-ness, best captured by the political leaders of the free world, who have expressed their deepest sympathies to “the families” of the victims, denounced the violence and asked aloud how on Earth such attacks can be stopped.
Truth is, most people are sad and shaken, just as most of us are clever enough to tell the difference between the fundamentalist freaks of Islam and those Muslims who have no time for jihad or beheading folks on the common street or taking an AK to the staff of a satirical magazine.
And truth is, the attacks can’t and won’t be stopped, not all of them anyway, no matter how good a country’s security forces. Whether committed by lone wolves, rebels looking for a cause, the mentally unstable or the more highly trained jihadists with actual affiliations to terror groups, whether homegrown or imports or self-radicalized, they can’t all be stopped. We ought to recognize that.
And, sadly, almost no one is stirred to real action by murdered cartoonists and journalists, let alone by assaults upon the freedoms (to speak, to publish, to make fun of everything and everyone) they exercised every working day of their lives and which mostly lie about, quietly atrophying, in most of the rest of us.
You want to talk about common or “shared values,” as just about every western leader has done since the attack? The value most shared in the West, and perhaps in this country in particular, is timidity.
The day Charlie Hebdo was attacked, I had a story in the paper about an Ontario man named Eric Brazau being jailed another year for, at least in part, spouting off on a Toronto subway train about the Qur’an and Islam.
The judge found, in essence, that Brazau should have known that talking in a loud voice and ranting about the Qur’an on a subway car would make passengers sufficiently uncomfortable that someone would pull the emergency alarm and cause a big delay.
And someone did, a man who wasn’t involved in the discussion at all, and Brazau was found to have provoked him to do it.
The young woman Brazau had actually engaged in debate — she was appalled by his rudeness to one Muslim passenger and that he was shrieking about such things in front some girls wearing the hijab — was holding her own nicely, thanks very much. She did exactly what most of us would hope we’d do if we overheard some clown yipping off on the subway.
But another year in the joint, on top of the five-plus months Brazau has done already? Really?
The judge said, “There’s a time and a place for everything, Mr. Brazau. A TTC subway car is not Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park.” When I reported this to a smart friend, he said, “I thought the whole country was a free-speech zone.” He knows better, of course, but felt compelled to point out that such freedoms aren’t supposed to be restricted to safe areas.
We have been cowed, journalists and citizens alike, hardly into submission, but certainly into a state of ridiculous delicacy and self-censorship.
As Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s founding fathers, once wrote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
There are tyrants enough. I only wish there were more for whom nothing — nothing — was sacred, and properly so, because nothing is. But we aren’t all Charlie Hebdo, alas, and never will be.
Source:: canada.com
