Ridicule and satire

[phantom power]

I love TT's last comment (emphasis mine)

Tristero at Hullaballo articulates something I’ve been grappling with pretty much my entire career:

The objects of satire are often - always? - respected authority figures or ideas within the culture of the satirist. WITHIN the culture, not OUTSIDE the culture. Even in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, the object of satire is not really the third world country to which Bill Boot has been booted by an editor who confused two Boots. It’s the British press’s hopeless, corrupt reporting from such countries. The satire was directed directly at institutions that were part and parcel of Waugh’s upper class British Twitworld.

In contrast, as I see it, Islam is not part of mainstream Danish culture. Mohammed has no genuine cultural authority the way, say, the royal family might. To call the cartoons satire, therefore, seems to me inaccurate. It’s simply ridicule, and ridicule of a figure from a culture that, from within Denmark - the satirizing culture - is Other. Danes are heaping scorn and humiliation on someone’s religion, someone who is not Us. Someone who doesn’t look like us, doesn’t act like us, doesn’t think like us, isn’t as rich as us. And just can’t be us.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2006_02_05_digbysblog_archive.html#113932717451373767

And this is why so many right wingers have suddenly become free speech absolutists on the issue of the Danish cartoons. Right wingers hate satire, but they love ridicule.

http://thismodernworld.com/2683

[sui generis]

1. to fundamentalists, ideas are dangerous

"we're being disrespected and persecuted" is the first line of defense/offense.

The second one is burning embassies.

Who gives a shit. It was an editorial effort, not representing the opinion of the western world. Most of them were even inocuous, and the one that was inflammatory should have been addressed at the level of why someone would find that worthy of editorial graphic review.

I'm sorry, our world is full of symbols, including figurative symbols of people, parties, and religions. If you're a fundamentalist you can't differentiate the symbol from the referent, that's a given. Likewise you'll make a rule to keep even stupider people from having a symbol to confuse with a referent.

Don't worry fundies! Nobody is going to worship that fucking cartoon. It is a symbol. It is an opinion. It is a sardonic observation. Get the fuck over it. A dozen people are dead because of a goddamn cartoon. A dozen minds snuffed out because of a symbol that represents nobody and means nothing.

[China_cat]

2. An important element of satire

is ridicule.

Satire is a mode of challenging accepted notions by making them seem ridiculous. It usually occurs only in an age of crisis, when there exists no absolute uniformity but rather two sets of beliefs. Of the two sets of beliefs, one holds sufficient power to suppress open attacks on the established order, but not enough to suppress a veiled attack.

Further, satire is intimately connected with urbanity and cosmopolitanism, and assumes a civilized opponent who is sufficiently sensitive to feel the barbs of wit leveled at him. To hold something up to ridicule presupposes a certain respect for reason, on both sides, to which one can appeal. An Age of Reason, in which everyone accepts the notion that conduct must be reasonable, is, therefore, a general prerequisite for satire.

The right wingers hate satire because they don't understand it or the elements that go into making it.

Read Swift's 'A Modest Proposal'.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

3. You make some good points

but I personally think that a world religion with as much importance as Islam has right now is part of our global culture, and as such, open to ridicule. Bad manners, but not a reason for violence.

[phantom power]

4. Oh, I don't approve of the violent reactions...

Mostly, I liked the observation about the difference between satire and ridicule (and which one wingnuts prefer), and I do agree with their observation that purpose of the cartoons was evidently more ridicule than satire.

However, I also very much liked this observation:

But all of that is beside the point. An open society, a secular society can't exist if mob violence is the cost of giving offense. And that does seem like what's on offer here. That's the crux of this issue -- that the response is threatened violence and more practical demands that such outrages must end. It's back to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses (which, if you're only familiar with it as a 'controversy' is a marvelously good book) -- if on a less literary and more amorphous level.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/007602.php

Of course, on the level of world politics, we do not have an "open and secular society." For that matter it seems as though even here in the U.S. our own society is growing less open and secular, all the time.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

5. I agree with everything you say

it's an unfortunate situation and it happens when people behave badly..on all sides.

[bloom]

6. a local cartoonist

made the comment that for secularists - "Free Speech" can become a religion.

So it becomes more of a religion vs. religion question with that perspective. I thought that was interesting.



Also - Democracy Now has a good segment on this today - Thursday - where someone familiar with Denmark and the newspaper was discussing how the cartoons were meant as a way to provoke the minority, immigrant group and to enhance the us vs. them atmosphere of the country - perhaps encourage them to leave, make them feel unwelcome, etc.