In yet another rightwing theft of postmodernist tactics, apparently it's okay to jeer and sneer and stare at the people we are actively seeking to kill or depose, to humiliate as a softener before the hardball begins. These are old tactics by now. The CIA plotted to have Castro's beard fall out so that he would 'lose face'. Saddam Hussein was declared "a homo" in the first rumblings toward his demise. Gaddafi was, of course, daffy (and also the crucial principal financier of Mandela's ANC party when its viability was on the line). Bin Laden had 'his porn stash'. And more recently, of course, the West lit up with hilarity at the notion of assassinating North Korean leader Kim Jung-un in a Seth Rogen comedy.
But lampoon some Israelis, who took to the hills overlooking Gaza with lounge chairs and beverages, the Star of David firmly planted in the ground, while the IDF bombed Gazans with remote-controlled drone missiles - well, that could get you fired, and did: Australian columnist Mike Carlton practically chased out of town by murderous Semites crying, "You hate me!" Of course, it was the cartoon accompanying Carlton's column which caused the original uproar - never mind that the cartoon was adapted from a Guardian photo depicting the very scene the cartoonist dressed up with funny curls. Meh.
No question: While not exactly a Massacre of the Innocents, the mowing down of a set of journalists is a horrible thing. There is nothing funny about that. And just to prove it, there were calls by fellow Jews for the editors of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz to be assassinated after they ran a cartoon depicting a kind of scorecard of journalists killed in Paris versus journalists killed by Israel Defense Forces in Gaza one of the many summers past. They're all the same summers when your grass in Palestine.
So all the pollies and pundits and assorted power punks have flown in to lay their wreaths of hypocrite mon lecteur fleur de malice at the graves of the fallen anti-heroes, who despised the endless ground zeroes these weasels stood upon. Another chance to co-opt, to call for more security, more up-ratcheting. Just as they did after two NYC police officers were murdered by yet another woken up sleeping dogmatist. Authorities are always 'flying in' these days to validate or co-opt. Former president Obama had the sense or couth to stay away from the Charlie Hebdo charade - maybe he learned something after a terminally ill Nelson Mandela purportedly pretended to be dead in 2013 rather than receive the President's phony smile. Out have come the slogans, the T-shirts with "Je suis Charlie," that will soon be discarded, collected and shipped en masse to some Third World hell hole, showing up worn by children rummaging through trash heaps in the 'burbs of Port Morseby or the like. Like the Che tees before them.
One good thing has come for Charlie Hebdo though: circulation has shot through the roof. Everyone in Europe now seems keen to seize a copy. Which inspires a modest proposal. What with falling revenues forcing newspapers out of the biz everywhere, maybe editors could start designating staff to be sacrificed for love of free press and freedom of expression The New York Times, for instance, might hang someone out to dry. Not David Brooks, who is too much of a vanilla milkshake, but, let's say, Maureen Dowd, who is about the only one on staff capable of stirring people to healthy outrage with her acerbic wit and saucy savvy. Okay, full disclosure: I once had crush on her.
Think of the rebirth, the revenue renaissance that the NYT could enjoy if Dowd were hung out like a pià ±ata (naked, if she prefers) and beaten by dogmatic mobs with dust brooms until all those whiskey shot glasses come tinkling out of her (assuming she drinks up to stereotype) and Bill Maher wrings his hands and Obama rings dem bells and Kathryn Bigelow directs another "journalistic" biopic on Dowd with black cats and Charles Schulz shows up, like Groucho, and machine guns 'em all down with cartoon bullets. "Look at them run," he'll sneer, "now they know they've been in a war."
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