Cartoon Violence

by tristero

Note: I’m not sure the following is entirely cooked. Consider this three quarters baked. Or less.

Mahablog has a bunch of links to opinions about the cartoon riots. And links to some opinions about the opinions.

In a different post, Barbara links to Juan Cole’s comments on the matter and as always they are interesting. Juan believes, among other things, that there something akin to an economic thing at work here. That’s ’cause Muslims, many if not most, live in Third World countries and communities. In short, in part it’s the rich and well off ridiculing the poor.

Maybe.

But as I recall, during the Satanic Verses flap (which in many important ways, I think, the cartoon riots do NOT resemble), Khomeini was in the midst of some serious domestic problems – bad economy in Iran, enormous number of deaths in a futile war with Iraq. Rushdie’s book was the perfect deflection. Similarly, Saudi Arabia had some very good reasons to stoke the controversy. During the recent haj, some 350 Muslims died. Now if the cartoons were published in September, why in late Jan/early Feb is there suddenly such shock, shock? In short, the cartoon riots are part of a Wag The Camel strategy.

Maybe.

And maybe Atrios is ultimately right, that the right to ridicule Muhammed must be defended, but the decision to do so is open to serious question. Especially given how tense things are presumed to be between the West and Islam.

But while Atrios’ take is as close to mine as I’ve read, what seems behind all the craziness is pretty deep stuff, deeper than a first glance might seem. I’m gonna go through my steps in coming to my own somewhat different conclusion, complementary to Duncan’s.

I must confess my Inner Contrarian was the first to react. No, not less but even more offensive cartoons! The world needs more mockery of Muhammed and Islam, I thought. The more they’re mocked, the less power the mockery has and that’s good for everyone. The more it’s mocked, the less sensitive Muslims will become to every slight. The worst thing to do in this situation is to declare ridicule off limits. It makes Islam above human reach, like the acts of Zgriertwrw (the substitute word for the name of the US president, whose name has become too holy to be uttered by non-Republicans).

But then I thought more about Art and Morality. Soundbite version: It simply isn’t art’s job to teach anyone a lesson.

True, it’s not art’s job to be polite. If it was, there wouldn’t be Michelangelo’s David, let alone the poems of Baudelaire, or the late recordings and performances of John Coltrane. And it is certainly not art’s job to make a culture less sensitive and passionate.

But then I flipped that all around and a glimpse of a personal opinion on this mess started to occur to me. If it is not art’s job deliberately to console, it also is not art’s job intentionally to piss anyone off. The dissonances in Monteverdi’s madrigals were not deliberate provocations, as many thought. It’s simply what he heard. Stravinksy wasn’t trying to cause a riot with Le Sacre. He was furious, not happy for the publicity. An artist, if s/he’s really an accomplished artist, doesn’t seek to anger. What a monumentally trivial objective!

In the case of the cartoons, it seems as if they were commissioned for moral reasons, to illustrate a point of view, propagate an ideology – freedom of speech impinged upon by Muslim objections. Their existence was not drawn from some internal kind of inner aesthetic impulse (people have argued for hundreds of years what’s meant by that kind of a drive and I’m not gonna go any further now to define what I mean) but from without.

In short, the cartoons are art to teach a lesson. But while the artist can control his/her brushstrokes, the reaction to art cannot be controlled. In moral art, the reactions are often far from ones the artists desire. Put another way most of us who’ve read the Inferno stop right there. I’m sure the good parts are wonderful, but I think I’ve already read the really good – ie, lurid- parts.

And that’s sort of like the problem with my initial impulse. I, too, wanted to teach those sumbitches a lesson – who, exactly? I dunno, those sumbitches. And that’s just like the newspaper that originally published the toons. But, as I thought through what I was saying, I realized it’s not my business to teach anyone a lesson and that thinking it was is nuts. Gut feelings are very often not good.

Now, perhaps a bit of a digression but it really isn’t. A bit of detail on the use of moral themes in art.

Some great artists have conciously worked with moral themes in art today, to try to come to terms with it. One of the greatest masters of the trend is – irony of ironies – the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier. His masterpiece, “Breaking the Waves,” (don’t rent it, see it in a theater where you can’t escape) is both a deeply moving affirmation of Catholic faith and a harrowing, pornographic rant against the superhuman sacrifices required to live a life truly in imitation of Christ. You can easily conclude that art as the mediator of morality has not been deconstructed but eviscerated in von Trier’s work. But you can just as easily see in the fate of Emily Watson’s character the redemptive, sacrificing love of Christ and the good that can flow from it. And that’s just for starters in trying to approach this amazing, impossibly aggravating film.

Von Trier’s film is shattering, insane, magnificent, fiercely ambiguous, sublime. By intent, Lars makes you seek your own sense of morality within the structure and actions of the film. And just as intentionally, you are doomed to fail. This isn’t a paen to relativism or amorality. Rather, for von Trier, it’s something like the point of the Book of Job: the moral compass of humans is too puny to grasp God’s greatness and thoughts. But while you’re on this doomed journey of moral discovery, you just might think to wonder how your sense of good and evil gets shifted and twisted and turned inside itself. And if there is a “good” in the film, it’s that sense of wonder. An aesthetic sense. The sense of art. It’s an exhausting experience to watch Breaking the Waves. And unforgettable.

By contrast, the Muhammed cartoons are, morally dull, even by their own admittedly less high-falutin’ standards. And the reason is obvious after a bit of thought. The intention behind them is not to work out some kinky artistic/personal problems. No, the intentions behind the cartoons were those of the self-righteous Western mediocrity and they couldn’t be clearer – let’s show Them free speech is a good thing.

Wow, that’s taking a controversial position! But much to the amazement of the Danes, they found that it actually was. And this is what makes the cartoons indefensibly awful, even stupid. Unlike Stravinsky, for whom teaching moral lessons was the last thing on his mind; unlike von Trier, whose control is simply awesome over fiendishly complicated moral themes; the cartoonists and their editors set out, like the naive, idealistic Kevin Costner in the Untouchables, to do good. They got their asses handed to them.

So here’s the point of this long digression into von Trier, aesthetics, et al.

Why do the cartoon riots remind me of Paul Wolfowitz and George Packer, who seemed to have nothing to do with it? For a very simple reason. The same perverse sense of entitlement and exceptionalism underlies the anti-aesthetic impulse of the editors: Let’s do some good! This is not to argue for a crude Scowcroftian realism, but rather to protest, strongly, against the insanity of making simplistic moral/political statements either in art or in foreign policy. A lot of the time, they just make things worse. A lot worse.

So to sum up. Yes, on the level that most often should be addressed – the practical level – Atrios is right and that’s as far as anyone needs to go. Of course, the rioters are, at best, grossly overreacting and at worst, have been driven insane by those that provoked them to overreact. Of course, free speech needs defense, and of course commonsense propriety was in short supply in the newspaper’s newsroom. But underneath these self-evident truisms lies a sad truth that bears some thinking about. The events of the cartoon riots, in all their mad senselessness and fatal tragedy, reflect – epitomize – some of the worst but most virulently widespread presumptions of our time: the arrogance and shallowness of white boy moralizing; the maniacal self-destructive sense of sheer helplessness that descends into pointless murder, destruction, and horror.

As I see it, both the decision to commission and publish the cartoons and the riots that followed simply defy comprehension not because one couldn’t predict the consequences but because one could, with depressing ease. Unless they come to their senses, the white do-gooders are gonna get us all killed in their crusades. And the recipients of all this do-gooding are gonna do the exact same thing when their fury at the do-gooders is cynically stoked and channelled into senseless destructiveness and murder.

In short, no more cartoon riots. No more cartoon editors. No more cartoon evil cavemen. And no more cartoon American administrations. It’s time not to listen to what our gut says, it’s time to give it some alka-seltzer and get it to shut up so we can think.