'Give up the cartoonists; they're in the attic'
That is what many of us in the trade feel has been our lot since our brethren in Denmark were forced into hiding after drawing likenesses of the Prophet Muhammad.
"Them damn pictures" -- Boss Tweed's term for Thomas Nast's cartoons in a more innocent time -- have exposed not just the internal dynamics of what some call "Islamofascism," but the corruption of our own values.
Our interiors have been illuminated like an electrocuted Daffy Duck in an old Warner Brothers cartoon and we see what we're made of: not a lot of guts or brains.
There's something about cartoons, by definition unruly, tasteless and immature, that brings out the ayatollah in even the most permissive of adults. And a debate on rights versus responsibilities is legitimate following the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's decision to publish images of Muhammad.
But once these images became a major news story (and were hardly controversial by Western standards of satire), I can see little reason -- other than bodily fear, bottom-line self-preservation and poor judgment -- for the U.S. media to refuse to show the cartoons to the American people and keep them informed.
When we withhold information in the name of a misguided sensitivity we allow street mobs from London to Jakarta to define the debate in this country. We have capitulated to intimidation and threats and negotiated with terrorists.
No need for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to behead us. We do it ourselves.
Defensiveness about caving in
to the imams spread across the nation's editorial pages. The television talking heads clucked about the irresponsible European press that had reprinted the offending images. Even cartoonist Garry Trudeau assured the San Francisco Chronicle that he would never depict the prophet in his comics in a mocking way; nor would he show improper pictures of Jesus. As Doonesbury's Zonker might say, "Dude, this is so not about you."
The images of Muhammad commissioned by Jyllands-Posten do not mock the prophet any more than I dishonored Jesus Christ when I drew a cartoon of the Last Supper where Welch's grape juice was served. I was exposing the followers of Christ who used the doctrine of inerrancy to promote a corrupt agenda; the Danish cartoonists were depicting the hijackers of Islam by fanatics like the tormenters of Salman Rushdie and the murderers of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh.
I argue that publishing those cartoons was an act of democratic inclusiveness. In a society of laws, all are treated equally under the law. Law is "insensitive" that way, as is intellectual inquiry, as is satire. By engaging satirically with Islam, these artists included Muslims as peers in the tradition of satiric self-examination and irreverence that we have until recently taken for granted in the West.
Denmark's Muslims might have expressed their displeasure through the democratic avenues of their adopted country if their unscrupulous imams and corrupt Arab governments hadn't manipulated the cartoons to ignite riots across the Muslim world.
As newspapers in Europe and even Muslim editors in Jordan withstood the intimidation of the jihadists by reprinting the cartoons, the timidity of the American media looks increasingly like cowardice, appeasement, or better-you-than-me cynicism.
Bush administration public relations ambassador Karen Hughes compared the drawings to racial slurs, calling them "blasphemous," and former President Clinton described them as "appalling." Denied the opportunity to see the images, American news consumers are in the dark about a major news story. Adding to the absurdity, the images are only a mouse click away on the Internet.
This controversy is not going away, any more than ignoring the new images out of Abu Ghraib will make the Arab world hate us any less.
I understand why newspaper cartoonists, who have seen their jobs shrink from more than 200 only 20 years ago to fewer than 80 today, are reluctant to stick their necks out.
But what about those artists who enjoy the immunity of celebrity? Earth to Barbra Streisand. Earth to Alec Baldwin.
In July 1990 I spoke in Prague, Czechoslovakia, at the first East-West journalism conference. I explained to the freshly minted free press there how the American cartoon was born in revolution.
The first, designed by Ben Franklin, showed a snake cut into eight segments, each representing one of the colonies. The legend above it read "Join or Die." The best cartoons question authority, challenge the status quo and are inevitably accused of "Disturbing the Peace," borrowing the title of Vaclav Havel's latest book. If the editorial cartoons are doing their job, efforts will be made to suppress them.
That week in Prague, the easterners were admonished repeatedly to be "responsible in their journalism." I noted that the Japanese word for cartoon is "irresponsible drawings." Responsibility, of course, like beauty, lies always in the eye of the beholder. The reporting of some of the great journalists at that conference -- datelined Vietnam, for example -- was often labeled "irresponsible." Havel's writings were called "irresponsible" by the Soviet thought controllers. The list of "irresponsible" expression goes on: from the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate to the New York Times' revelations of warrantless wiretapping. Having grown up in the southern United States during the era of the civil rights movement, I remember how business, civic and religious leaders called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "irresponsible." Those cautioning "responsibility" in today's cartoon controversy -- in both the West and the Middle East -- have much in common with those "good people" of the segregated South, who preferred, as King wrote, "a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."
And like the politicians and oligarchs of the segregated South, the corrupt leadership of Arab countries encourages the anti-cartoonists because their violent passions are a diversion from the government's own neglect and abuse of its people. Why haven't the true Muslims condemned those who so disgrace their faith? We constantly ask this question even though the answer is contained in the reluctance of our own civilization's instruments of free expression to confront the problem.
"Fill the jails" was Gandhi's strategy of non-cooperation with an anti-democratic system, and it was adopted by King, when he flooded the jails of Birmingham to defeat segregation.
Just as nonviolent demonstrations exposed a corrosive political system and channeled the outrage of helplessness constructively, so would a form of cartoon direct action have advanced the true interests of Islam.
In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," King wrote:
". . . We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with."
If everyone had stood up for Denmark's embattled cartoonists, and filled the news pages of America and the West with those banned images of the Prophet Muhammad, then the taboo might have lost its meaning, as going to jail lost its stigma when it was in the service of freedom.
When King collected his Nobel Peace Prize on the heels of the Birmingham campaign, he said that "every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities."
Perhaps one day the Jyllands-Posten cartoonists will be recognized for their contributions to democratic health and a peace truer than the one they have disturbed.
Doug Marlette, 581-8330
doug.marlette@tulsaworld.com
