cartoons, II: the meaning of words and symbols
Honest people may be wondering what to make of the Danish cartoon controversy. Presumably, if you found your way here you can also read the wires, so I won’t re-hash that situation for you here.
Reactions to the reaction in the Muslim world — which include the brief kidnapping of a German citizen and the torching of a Danish embassy in Beirut — range across the entire spectrum.
The central issue in all of this is, I feel, the question of who controls the meaning of words and symbols. Is it individuals who control them, each interpreting them for themselves and leaving others to determine their own interpretations? Or should some group control them instead, defining “acceptable” interpretations that the rest of us either look to for guidance or are compelled to accept?
Before I answer that, let’s look at the cartoons themselves. Fellow Kansas blogger Josh Rosenau dismisses (in a manner that belies the nature of his post) the entire controversy as “bogus outrage over inconsequential and mediocre art.”
He writes, in what I see as the key paragraph:
Imagine a cartoon in an American paper which showed Martin Luther King, Jr. or Frederick Douglass pointing a gun at the reader (roughly equivalent to Muhammad wearing a bomb instead of a turban). Would that deserve condemnation from the White House? What about a cartoon which simply showed a Mexican–maybe Vicente Fox, Pancho Villa or some generic mariachi band–swimming across a river?
I’m not sure whether it would be appropriate for there to be official government statements against such a cartoon, but the calculus is different than if it were a drunk Scotsman or a mafioso Italian. Fat Tony or Groundskeeper Willy from the Simpsons go unremarked–despite existing only as stereotypes. What if Snake, the career criminal, were stereotypically black, a minstrel show caricature of a black criminal, existing only to steal? What if the school groundskeeper were Mexican and existed only as a lazy manual laborer, rather than a thrifty, Scottish, alcoholic manual laborer? I dare say things would be different.
He’s right that things would be different. The reason this is so is because advocacy groups for black and Mexican populations have been far more effective in determining what constitutes “offense” against these populations at large and then forcing that interpretation upon everyone else through legal and political means. Is the depiction of a black man as a crack-addicted gang member or a Mexican swimming across the Rio Grande offensive and stupid? Of course it is. So are most other sweeping generalizations with negative connotations. No sane person today would accept these images as accurate depictions of blacks and Mexicans.
Why, then, aren’t the Italian and Scottish stereotypes treated similarly? Italians and Scots have never had political advocacy movements to speak of, and so have been far less effective in determining what constitutes “offense” against them.
This is important, because such conditions for “offense,” I believe, must necessarily lead to the establishment of conditions for membership in the protected group. See what has happened to prominent black conservative Republicans running for office. One particularly nasty blogger (who, ironically, now argues for a social tolerance of Islam based on that religion’s doctrinal dictates) Photoshopped Maryland gubernatorial candidate Michael Steele in blackface, calling him “Simple Sambo”. It was defended, by this blogger and by others, at least in part on the basis of “authenticity” and membership in the protected group — Republicans are the white, racist ones, and therefore one cannot be both black and Republican.
Cultures in the Middle East (sweeping generalization alert!), from what I’ve seen, have a proclivity for this kind of behavior. As an example, I direct you to the controversy over the Burger King “Allah swirly cone“, where the fast-food giant was forced to pull a frozen dessert from its line because the stylized image of an ice cream cone Burger King used on the package “resembled” the Arabic inscription for the name of Allah, and was thus an “offense” against Islam. The complainant threated a “jihad” against Burger King. (A grilled-cheese sandwich bearing a burn mark in the shape of Christ’s head, on the other hand, will find a willing buyer on E-bay.) Here, the “advocacy group” is a large collective of radical Muslims, and the “brow-beaten” is Western civilization.
That’s the position we in the West find ourselves in. No one wants to be a “racist” or be intolerant, so we embrace tolerance — sometimes at the cost of rights (Google “campus speech codes”), and sometimes accepting or glossing over things that are truly intolerant, such as the infantile excusing or apologizing for people carrying signs saying things like “WHOEVER INSULTS THE PROPHET KILL HIM”* or “BE PREPARED FOR THE REAL HOLOCAUST”*, or calling for the executions of the Danish cartoonists, or the variety of cartoons from Arab media about Jews that will be familiar to frequenters of MEMRI by now.
As for the cartoons themselves — Josh, along with other commentators both left and right, have described them as “mediocre” or lacking in artistic merit. In that, he and they are all correct. I saw nothing there that really made me think anything other than “Boy, I’d hate to read their mail or check their answering machine.” Of course, we must be on guard against real racism, nor should we deliberately seek to offend anyone. Some commentators are doing just that, waving the cartoons around as examples of “free speech”.
Commentator Neil Stevens (by way of INDC Bill, who has an excellent post in his own right) at Redstate:
This could have been what some people call ‘a teachable moment,’ in fact, were it not for the perplexing responses by the American right, even from usually-reliable conservatives. People like Michelle Malkin, who can usally be counted on to expect a certain amount of dignity and respect in our culture, are waving around the cartoons like they’re wonderful things to see, while not showing much recognition of how hateful they really are. She’s not alone, either. I just single her out because I read her site every day.
I understand the logic, and the reasons, for this ‘blogburst,’ but I think the enthusiasm is misplaced. We can celebrate freedom without holding up the worst of it as an example. We can even go farther than that, and condemn trash when we see it, while we mutter to ourselves that tolerating it is the price of freedom.
We can show solidarity with the Danes, in support for western values, without endorsing and integrating the ‘art’ at issue. These cheap scribbles, drawn up by a smirking ‘artist’ for the shock value, aren’t worth the paper they were printed on. I think it’d do us more good if we remembered that in discussing this issue.
As appealing as it is, we can’t fall into the trap of supporting the enemy of our enemy. The fact that the radical Islamists don’t like these cartoons, doesn’t imply that these cartoons are something that should be celebrated. If we want to celebrate somebody, how about paying tribute to Theo Van Gogh and Hirsi Ali, for making more honest portrayals of the worst of Islam, without slamming the whole, varied Islamic tradition in the process?
This could have been a teachable moment, where we on the right showed the world that we can support freedom from government intrusion, while still retaining social pressures against filth. We’ve failed, though, and I fear it’s going to come back to bite us in the future.
All of this is, I think, inevitable in a society driven as ours is now by identity politics. We can — and we should — show respect and tolerance (here I use the word’s true meaning, rather than the PC version of it) for others’ beliefs, and we can even make sacrifices to do so. We should be on guard, however; when we make such sacrifices, let us do so with our eyes wide open — and never at the point of a sword.
UPDATE: Further commentary from Jeff Goldstein and Eric Scheie, who takes a different angle. The Commissar has a round-up of the “protest” violence.
02.06.2006 @ 16:43
It’s always encouraging to find myself in essential agreement with people on the left and the right on an issue. I think we’re basically in the same place on this, but I want to comment on one point you made about my post.
You argue that the difference between stereotyping of the Italians versus stereotyping African-Americans is that Italian-American groups have been less vocal than African-Americans. I think that’s backwards. Stereotypes of blacks in America have cultural relevance. Too many people won’t hire a black person because of stereotypes of black people as criminals and drug abusers. Too many people cross the street when they see a dark face walking toward them. Those stereotypes have real consequences. In contrast, no one turns away job applicants with vowels at the ends of their names because they don’t want their business to get taken over by the mafia. People can separate the stereotype from the person in a way they can’t with blacks. The Knights of Columbus is plenty vocal in complaining about mob movies, but no one takes it seriously because no one takes those stereotypes seriously.
The NAACP is taken seriously because anti-black stereotypes (like anti-Mexican stereotypes and anto-Irish or anti-Italian stereotypes 100 years ago) have real world consequences.
You refer to being “on guard against real racism.” African-Americans face “real racism,” in a way that Italian-Americans don’t. And our analysis of portrayals of their stereotypes can’t ignore that, or we fail to guard against it.
The bulk of my post was meant to extend that analysis to Europe, which has a different cultural context, one in which Arabs and Muslims occupy a social position more like African-Americans or Mexicans in America.
I mention this in the hopes that it can be a teaching moment for each of us.
Over all we see this the same way. The controversy over these is as bogus as the controversy over “Book of Daniel” (a crappy TV show which, by portraying Jesus, got the Christian right worked up, though not enough to burn embassies), or the controversy over casting a gay man as a Christian missionary, which did provoke vague threats of arson. The response is that free speech is important, there’s no point pissing people off for the sake of pissing them off, and it’s better to be pissed off than pissed on.
02.07.2006 @ 08:51
I don’t (and nor can any rational person) have any problem with groups being formed to combat racism. My point was that many of these groups have suffered from “mission creep”, defining as “racists” those who don’t support each point of their political agendas; and further, that radical Islam, seeing the stunning success of these tactics in the West and the painful contortions we inflict on ourselves to avoid such labelling, has adopted them for itself.