Continuing to read about the absurd carnival of speech-quelling and embassy-burning in Iran and elsewhere, I began to wonder how I might unite my increased agitation and my renowned penchant for alcohol consumption. And then it came to me: I should begin drinking Carlsberg beer! After all, the Islamists have been boycotting all Danish products -- not to mention killing innocents and issuing fatwas -- since Jyllands-Posten dared to publish a drawing of some dead highway bandit. Our bold leaders in the press and the White House have done nothing to rally round our ally. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Well, I am going to do something. I am going to drink. Which, it might be noted, is something the Wahhabists wouldn't let me do even if the product were Belarussian, or Columbian. So bottoms up, and -- at the risk of sounding unneccesarily hostile -- up theirs.
N.B.: If you're not much for imbibing, here's a list of other fine Danish exports. They have some lovely cheeses.
After a hiatus of two years, that old misanthropic holiday standby The Anti-Valentine's Day Party is returning to Chattanooga tonight. The carnival of the lovelorn moves south this year to Hoppy's Last Resort in St. Elmo, known nationwide as "the only watering hole within walking distance of my house." Festivities start at 9. There will be music, vodka and numerous opportunities to embarass yourself. Eventually, everyone will cry.
As you might imagine, this celebration is somewhat singles-oriented, since attached parties could hopefully think of something better to do. But as they say at the strip clubs, couples welcome.
The Stranger, a Seattle alt-weekly, has become the first American newspaper to publish the Muhammad cartoons. I have little time today for thoughts beyond a passing "Godspeed, you mocha-drinking libertines," but my usual interlocutor offers a cutting parallel:
I was watching The Magnificent Seven last night and heard a line which perfectly expresses the attitude of the North American press toward the cartoon controversy. A travelling salesman is trying to convince an undertaker to accept $20 to bury an Indian in Boot Hill, the local cemetary. The undertaker admits that it's only fear of local prejudice that keeps him from interring an Indian amidst the "murderers, cut-throats, and derelict old barflies" that are already there, but he adds that regardless of his own opinions on the matter, there's no hope of convincing his driver to make the journey. The salesman asks, "So, he's prejudiced too, uh?" To which the undertaker replies, "Prejudiced? When it comes to a chance of his head getting blown off, he's downright bigoted."The analogue for the members of our irreverent and frequently viciously and aggressively secular media: "Sensitive to religious interests? When it comes to a chance of being beheaded, we're downright devout."
Also, my comments are allegedly working again. We're open for invective.
I've been informed by several friends that the comment function on this site has ceased to be. Dreadfully sorry about that; I've left this blog to the woodland creatures for some time now, so no real surprise that it's suffered some decay. I hope to have a makeshift system up and running by midweek, although my technological incompetence guarantees that any and all improvements will come from other, abler hands.
Meanwhile, it occurs to me that all these posts on humor have been, perhaps predictably, largely humorless. Let's rectify that with an interjection from a friend:
[...] just wanted to note my favorite irony of the whole cartoon situation: the fact that Muslims are responding with fanatic violence to the portrayal of Muhammad as a fanatically violent man. As the expat Canadian Evan Kirchoff notes at his blog 101-280, commenting on his juxtaposition of the Bomb Turban cartoon and a protestor holding a "Behead Those Who Insult Islam" sign: "So if I drop the visual metaphor on the left and just draw a picture of the guy on the right, does he then show up outside my house with an *even angrier* sign?"
At the risk of alarmism, I feel compelled to note the rapid rate at which international newspapers and governments are acknowledging that God is indeed great.
The capitulation isn't terribly surprising; nor is the reluctance of American and British newspapers to take the obvious step of actually publishing the images that everyone is debating. If there is an institution more accustomed to focus-group cowardice than the American newspaper industry, I have yet to meet it. But consider this irony: If the violence currently escalating manages to bubble out of its Middle Eastern pot, then people are going to die over pictures that they have never seen.
You can avoid that fate now, but the more thoroughly frightening scenario is that the freedom to criticize ideologies is being swiftly eviscerated. The right to say all sorts of vile things about people is a necessary part of Western culture. But the right to insult and debate those people's beliefs? That is Western culture. And it is under threat so long as publishers and politicians keep taking their orders from the Central Committee in Tehran.
Reading Martin Amis' v. fine, chilling monograph Koba the Dread this week, I ran across a note that diagnoses the humorlessness of radical Islam as exactly as I've seen. Amis is writing on Stalin, and his weapons in the Great Terror:
He had darkness: the Bolshevik sequestration, the shockingly bitter and unappeasable self-exclusion from the planet, with its fear of comparison, its fear of ridicule, its fear of truth.**The word for this is agonism: the permanent struggle of the self-appointed martyr. Militant Islam is obviously and proclaimedly agonistic.
It is impossible to to live as a religious zealot when everyone around you is laughing at your absurdities and lies. You can be a fundamentalist scholar, maybe; an ascetic, probably; a mystic, definitely. But not a zealot, and not a violent proselytizer of any ideological stripe. Which is why all the people laughing have got to die.
Chris Hitchens comments much to this effect in a recent Slate column on the Danish cartoon flap. His secularist screed is mildly exhausting, but it fuels a much-needed dedication to free speech. The right to offend must be sacrosanct.
Reading Josiah's most recent post on Islam and humor (v. good, IMO) reminded me of an insight by Christopher Hitchens in his 2002 Vanity Fair essay "Jewish Power, Jewish Peril."*
Irony has been an essential constituent of Jewish life ever since Maimonides wrote that, while the Messiah will one day come, "he may tarry." That shrug -- half hopeful and half pessimistic -- is present in Woody Allen and in Lenny Bruce.
Taking this a pace further, I think it fairly safe to say that humor can exist only in an environment that allows for for the ambiguities of doubt -- particularly self-doubt, but the cosmic variety is nearly as crucial. Humor is an admission not only that you may be wrong, but that you (and a good many other things) are very likely ridiculous. And the one thing no zealot of any religious or ideological stripe can countenance is the possibility of being ridiculous. So the Islamic world can find irony. But first it must accept a dash of unbelief.
*The only online locations where this essay can be found, sadly, are sites run by revisionist historians holed up in some Australian cave. No doubt they sought full reprint rights. To read the delectible whole, buy a copy of the Hitch's Love, Poverty and War.