The Art of Outrage

Last night, I was looking through a stack of articles I had clipped from various magazines over the years and ran across a cover story from the June 2006 edition of Harper’s magazine entitled Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage. 

Art Spiegelman penned the article. In case you’re not familier with Spiegelman, he won a Pulitzer in 1992 for his comic-book/graphic novel Maus, which the Wall Street Journal described as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust.” 

Maus is a truly a remarkable piece of work, which makes it very easy for me respect Spiegelman’s commentary about the art of outrage. In this case, Spiegelman wrote about twelve cartoons of Muhammad that appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in early 2006. Spiegelman reports that the outrage stirred up by a handful of Islamic radicals over the twelve cartoons published by Jyllands-Posten resulted in the following:

“…more than 100 dead and 800 injured as millions of offended Muslims protest around the world,; flags and buildings burned; cartoonists in hiding with million-dollar price tags on their heads; editors fired and arrested; legislation to put stricter limits on free speech or revive blasphemy laws in the U.N., the E.U.m and beyond; boycotts of Danish goods costing over Euro 50 million in lost revenues; and even Danish pastries in Iran rechristened (though I suspect that might be the wrong word) “Roses of Muhammad.”"

I have to admit that I am not familiar with Jyllands-Posten, but I have now read at least three descriptions of the publication as “right-wing” and tending towards the incendiary in terms of cultural, ethnic and religious issues. Apparently, the newspaper commissioned the illustrations as part of a quest to find an illustrator for a children’s book about Muhammad.

Well, Harper’s kindly republished the illustrations and Spiegelman rated each of the twelve illustrations on a one to four bomb scale, with four bombs being the most incendiary. I should mention that Spiegelman qualifies his ratings with the following pre-rating disclaimer:

“I apologize in advance for how banal and inoffensive the Jyllands-Postens cartoons appear to my secular eyes. I share a lack of knowlege of Islam with these twelve artists, and it’s our very cluelessness that must read as arrogance to the devout.”

I admit, I don’t find it all that amusing to see anyone, but especially editorial cartoonists, trying to make points about things that they haven’t bothered to understand very well. I’m not sure how well I understand Islam in practice, though I have read the Koran. It was part of my religious education all those years ago.

I have to agree with Spiegelman. The majority of the supposedly offedning cartoons published by Jyllands-Posten are so obtuse that they are beyond understanding, assuming there is even anything to be understood at the heart of the illustrations. And I think the religious radicals who circulated these images knew that. Otherwise, they would not have felt the need to insert into the mix several other (and far more offensive) images that were never published by Jyllands-Posten. These acts were calculated to incite violence, plain and simple, not to express concern about respect for the faithful.

I find this kind of deceit offensive. Far more offensive than the cartoons published by some right-wing Danish newspaper with a chip on its shoulder. I agree with Spiegelman:

“Those Danish cartoons were what Alfred Hitchcock called a “McGuffin,” the almost irrelevant plot device that just gets a story rolling. The cartoon insults were used an excuse to add more very real injury to an already badly injured world, and in this at least they succeeded.”

They certainly did succeed – in a committing crimes against humanity in the name of religion – all built upon a false claim. The Danish imams who ultimately incited riots and the deaths of more than 100 people around the world should have been held accountable, tried and sentenced for the murderers that they are. But no government will hold them accountable. Why?

You know and I know that religion=hatred, hatred=fear, fear=death. When is someone going to add up the numbers and realize that there is no balance in those equations?