The New Criterion

Last March, the New York Press printed an issue with the cover headline: "There’s nothing funny about this man dying. Or is there?" The man in question was Pope John Paul II; Matt Taibbi’s accompanying article was, as I wrote then, "a melange of scatology, violence, and ranting-vagrant incomprehensibility." Nevertheless, I didn’t judge it especially shocking: "Catholic-bashing is so common and so safe (no pesky fatwas to worry about) it’s a wonder even the most devout Satanists aren’t bored of it by now." (More here.)

Brooding on my tepid response, I wondered whether outrage itself wasn’t a thing of the past. Do people (other than left-wing college students, who only fake it) get outraged?

Well, we’ve learned in the past few days that some do. It seems a fitting reductio of fanaticism’s absurdity that cartoons are the last straw. Since 2001, whole rainforests have been milled into books, newspapers, and magazines bristling with denunciations of Islamic fundamentalism. Does the guy with the "Freedom Go to Hell" placard not get The Economist?

Many commentators have pointed out that, well, it’s not really about a political cartoon, or even a political argument; it’s about the taboo Islam places on representation, especially of the Prophet. (This is not, as Amir Taheri pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, even strictly true.)

There are dozens of easy responses to that, and all of them have been getting a workout. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ. The dung-studded Holy Virgin Mary at Brooklyn’s "Sensation" exhibition. The New York Press on Pope John Paul II. Now that the militant Muslims are shrieking death-chants and razing buildings, we look back fondly on those old-school blasphemies, satisfied that all we did was ignore them as the boring gimmicks they are--or write op-eds.

The western death-chant du jour is the one about defending to the death your right to say it--whatever your it might be. Funny line. For one, no one ever believes he might have to make good on it. For another, it’s a bit like saying you support the war but not the troops: Feel up to dying for South Park and Larry Flynt? If you’re a red-blooded ’merican, maybe. But what about dying for a mad mullah and his flammable fan club? To quote another beleaguered cartoon: Good grief.

Of course, in this case, nobody knows what to do. Apologize for the cartoons--but not for their publication? Isn’t that essentially meaningless, another flinch? Celebrate the cartoons expressly because they are a provocation?

In the old days, conservatives hated provocation for its own sake, provocation without artistic merit or intellectual import. Let’s be honest: Muhammad with a bomb for a turban isn’t clever. It’s certainly no better than Ariel Sharon wearing a Nazi uniform or decapitating Palestinians with a swastika-shaped axe. That kind of bilge makes Andy Capp look like a serious commentary on substance abuse.

Now conservatives want the Jyllands-Posten Mubombhead in every newspaper, on billboards, maybe even flying over Mecca on a hot-air balloon. Isn’t this enthusiasm misplaced, not to say hypocritical?

Not necessarily. What the professional "provokers" in the western world have long done is poke at empty hornet nests and applaud themselves for their bravery. Jyllands-Posten kicked the biggest nest on earth, and out swarmed creatures glad to die for the chance to sting. There’s a big difference, it turns out, between showing off . . . and showing beyond a doubt the problem in our midst.

With that in mind, it pleases me to report that the New York Press, which I once numbered among the practitioners of the easy, juvenile, hit-and-run insult, is (or was, until yesterday) a different kind of paper. From the New York Observer:

Editor-in-Chief Harry Siegel emails, on behalf of the editorial staff:

New York Press, like so many other publications, has suborned its own professed principles. For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization. Having been ordered at the 11th hour to pull the now-infamous Danish cartoons from an issue dedicated to them, the editorial group--consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editor Jonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah, chose instead to resign our positions.