POLITICS OF HUMOR: THE ISLAMIC REACTION

As of today, Feb. 15, 2006, street protests continued in the Islamic world over the Danish cartoons apparently lampooning Muhammad. The protests seemed to be continuous for the last 10 days or so, the protestors indignant, enraged and often vengeful. The fire of this protest was fueled and fanned when various European presses reprinted the cartoons. To this writer the moral and political status of the cartoons are questionable and should be questioned. The reprinting of the cartoons seems unnecessary if not irresponsible. Western presses continue to reprint the cartoons asserting their right to publish in the face of pressure to censor the cartoons. Muslims around the world were obviously offended by these cartoons. Such taking of offense is understandable to me. What is not understandable to me is the degree of offense, the fury if not hysteria of their outrage. Possibly I should be able to understand. Possibly I am insensitive, unempathetic or just ignorant. I am not sure. What I do know is that I had no such feelings as I saw last night on CNN. Possibly it is not accurate to call the cartoons a lampooning of Muhammad since they were not intended ultimately to ridicule. Maybe better to characterize them as caricatures or satires. As a political cartoon, however, it seems its main intent was not to demean but to criticize. Now if the furor was over the fact of depiction alone of Muhammad no matter what the meaning or context, then there is no explaining let alone justifying the intent of the cartoon. If however the furor was over the content or meaning intended in the cartoon, then we have, I believe, a different matter at hand. Again it seems the essential intent was not merely to ridicule nor insult Muslim sensibilities. The cartoonists, strictly speaking, are not blasphemers because they are not carrying out these offenses from within the Muslim world. They are not Muslims. They may be accused of being sacreligious or being infidels but not blasphemers since they are not believers in the first place. These cartoonists are artists or caricaturists making a political point. What is that political point? It is that the insult to Islam is really coming from within the Muslim world by Muslims who would turn their religion into an instrumentality for ultimately political purposes. To kowtow to Muslim pressures and protests would be to surrender the political and religious criticism being made. It is extremists within Islam who belittle, insult and compromise the integrity of the religion of Islam. No show of disrespect to Islamic sensibilities could touch the degree of damage done to Islam by extremists, zealots and exploiters who would use Islam to support their political purposes. The theological laxity demonstrated in the predominant silence of the Islamic world in the face of egregious interpretations of Islam to justify any and every imaginable political action is deafening. Any damage that Western attitudes and even cultural exports have done to Islam does not hold a candle to the damage done by Islam itself through theological and political laxity, laziness, opportunism and zealousness. Possibly this unacknowledged self-abuse explains the degree of outrage at the cartoons, an outrage that covers the truth being spoken by some of the cartoons: once again, this truth is that Islam is being politicized from within to the detriment of its religious content and to the denigration of its prophet. The justice which the very concept of "Islam" represents is turned into revenge and the peace which it avows is disavowed in unbridledled violent reaction against putative infidels at every crossroad. ..... It is also unfortunate that the leaders of Islam should make the same mistake that Catholics have made in the face of the sex scandals in America in which a large number of children have been molested by priests. The Catholic bureaucracy delayed, stonewalled, denied and covered up the scandal, exhibiting the callousness and indifference that finally exposes the cruelty, that is the lack of love, that characterizes its state of decay, distortion and inexorable hypocrisy. Islam should have learned from Catholicism's self-destructiveness. Apparently it has not. Instead it itself remains reactive, defensive and self-righteousness. If the rational and reflective leadership of Islam had taken as proactive a role critiquing Islam's divergence from its inner truth as its extremist fringe has taken in promoting violence, then possibly the world's respect for Islam would be greater than it is. ..... Lastly let me say that our probable failure in the West to fully comprehend and appreciate the beauty, wisdom and treasure that is Islam does not go unrivaled by Islam's ability to underestimate the value placed upon freedom of speech in the West. How infinitely often has the truth gone unsaid for fear of reaction, retaliation, offense, shunning or excommunication. When is the defense and exercise of freedom of speech too great especially in striving to express and comprehend the infinite wisdom of God. When the emperor has no clothes, for his own good, should we wait for the innocent child to speak up? Or should we recover our own authentic innocence and speak the truth about the hegemony of religious hypocrisy in our world today, hypocrisy of which countless cartoons could never speak enough truth sufficient to rectify its depth of corruption, perversion and perdition.

IDEOLOGICAL SHOWSTOPPERS

Recently on Bill Maher's "Real Time" HBO political talk show(Oct. 27, 2005), the logic of ideological economistic diversion was illustrated quite nicely. When discussion turned to the exigencies of national health care, the discussion was diverted quite effectively with, euphemism and subterfuge, nicely imperceptibly mixed. During the discussion, the issue was shaping up as to the virtue and necessity of national health care in the face of, some say, 45 million people without any health care insurance. The fools we are for the forceful sway of ideological discourse became apparent quickly. Rather than continue to deepen discussion as to the exigencies of such health care, Tucker Carlson, liberal obscurantist of the highest order, with mechanical ideological efficiency raised the point that in fact health care in Canada costs much more than in the U.S. Innocent enough, seemingly, but note the insidious tactical "logic" of deflection and diversion. Rather than discussing the questions of the priorities and problems of "national health care", Carlson, with calculated conservative yet seemingly mechanical unconsciousness, swerves the topic to 'the measure of money' as the determining and defining factor in the discussion. The ultimate concern for Carlson here is the condescending reassurance that if such a plan costs more than we already spend, how could it possibly be worthwhile. Of course the hidden assumptions in Carlson's sleight of hand are several. Surely Canada's model is not the only model as he would seem to assume. If it were, surely we could learn from such a model and not repeat their mistakes; and, surely there are variations on the Canadian approach. Though the talk show went temporarily into dead air space at Carlson's interjection, one of the other guests recovered from Carlson's 'sucker punch' and pointed out that the real question is not what it will cost but firstly what our priorities really are. Do we really care that millions are without health care? And if it were to cost more than, God forbid, CANADA, then might it not be worth paying the bill? In addition Carlson assumes that we can compare Canadian apples and American oranges in health care. But with proper pundit panache Carlson ups the ante with the claim that 'in fact' fewer Canadians are satisfied with their health care than Americans. God forbid, such powerful polemic, such forceful social scientific data. Surely, therefore Carlson adeptly implies that we must therefore have an inviolably better system. Fortunately Maher saved the day by noting that the dissatisfied Canadians could not possibly have been less satisfied than the 45 million Americans with no health care coverage. We surely should note how quickly and potently the spectre of ''too high a cost" or "not enough money" stops the show. Of course we at such times also quickly forget that billions upon billions are readily available for unjustified wars such as Vietnam and Iraq. Carlson's crowd which includes the AMA, conceivably the most powerful lobby in the world, obviously do not have national health care anywhere on the agenda, at least in the 21st Century, if ever. So the conservatives/neo-conservatives throw up the panoply of idiots such as Carlson proffering the ideological smokescreen of such idiocy, obfuscation, subterfuge and distortion. The "mental block" that we all suffer in the face of such ideological obfuscation extrudes itself in the name of "being realistic" and "mature" about the matter at hand. If one were to "think", so "think" the neo-cons, one would see that such health care is unrealistic and one who considers the possiblity is not (politically) mature. ..... In a college classroom one of my students pulled a similar (unconscious) maneuver. While discussing the costs of repairing the long neglected levees of New Orleans, the student argued that certain federal money couldn't be appropriated for local repairs because it was legally slated for federal use. Well of course. But the point that has to be made once again is how easily our supposedly democratic discourse avoids the human issue of human well-being and safety. One can so easily explain why for decades money could just not quite find its way to the repair of said levees. Now if said levees had been near Santa Barbara or some other wealthy white community, "the money" would have found its way through the bureaucratic barbwire, around the administrative mud holes and out of the coffers of the overly abundant military budgets in time and in sufficient amount to save the day. But the ideologized idiotic mind so easily blocks, diverts and explains away through supposedly "sufficient reason" the anxieties of analytic, bureaucratic-technocratic administrative defensiveness and self-justification. In the meantime, the forgotten "living dead" lost in the margins, intersticies and backwashes of "America" never seem to find a voice and logic capable of sidestepping the ideology of economistic, bureacratic and administrative "reason" long enough to have an effective and affective accounting. That is, we can't stay "conscious" long enough to deal with the human issues in a human language. The spectre of the unconscious mechanical mind is effective enough only to "mind the business" at hand. And the business at hand is always tending to and nurturing the forces preventing the fading of that very black bottom line.