|
Step 5: Examine the cartoon above by
Doug Marlette, then read the Action Alert issued by the Florida Chapter of
the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the story from World Net Daily
about the controversy, and the two responses
to the controversy by Marlette himself. |
CAIR (Florida Chapter)
Action Alert:
Florida
cartoonist portrays Muhammad as terrorist
(Davie, Florida - 12/22/02) A Florida Islamic civil rights and advocacy group
today expressed outrage at a Doug Marlette syndicated editorial cartoon,
headlined "What Would Mohammed Drive?" showing the Prophet Muhammad
driving a nuclear bomb-laden truck similar to that used by Timothy McVeigh in
the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
The Florida Chapter of The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-FL)
calls for an apology from Marlette's syndicator, Tribune Media Services, and
from his employer, the Tallahassee Democrat. The cartoon is apparently a play
on a recent light-hearted public debate over what kind of car Jesus would
drive. Its publication comes following worldwide outrage over a similar
accusation of terrorism against Muhammad by American evangelist Jerry Falwell.
"Newspaper editors that choose to publish such bigoted cartoons need to be
reminded of their ethical obligations. In the past year, Florida has led the
nation in hate crimes against Muslims, from mosque vandalism to attempted
terrorism by a Pinellas County podiatrist, to the unjust treatment of three
medical students on Alligator Alley. Florida editors should be sensitive to the
needs of the diverse population in their state, and not encourage bigotry or
hatred." Said CAIR-FL Communications Director Ahmed Bedier.
ACTION REQUESTED: (As always, be POLITE. Hostile comments will only serve
to further harm the image of Islam and Muslims.) As Floridians we need to take
the lead on this issue, and inform the editor that these statements will not be
accepted in our state. Contact the Tallahassee Democrat to request an apology
for their defamatory attack on the Prophet Muhammad.
Pulitzer-winner's
cartoon terrorist spurs death threats from Muslims
(Source: World
Net Daily -Posted: December 28, 2002)
A Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist is under fire from Muslims for his depiction
of a Middle Eastern-looking man behind the steering wheel of a nuclear-bomb
laden truck under the headline, "What would Muhammad drive?" The
Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim World
League are demanding an apology from Doug Marlette's syndicator, Tribune Media
Services, and from his employer, the Tallahassee Democrat. The cartoon
shows a Ryder rental truck like the one used by convicted Oklahoma City bomber
Timothy McVeigh.
In a phone interview, Marlette told WorldNetDaily he
would not apologize, though he has received more than 4,500 e-mails from angry
Muslims, with some threats of death and mutilation. The Tallahassee Democrat
also has declined to apologize, but primarily because it did not publish the
cartoon in its print edition. The drawing appeared inadvertently on its
website, however, before being pulled, according to the paper's executive
editor.
In a response to be published Sunday in the Tallahassee
Democrat, Marlette noted that his cartoon is a takeoff on the recent
controversy among some Protestants over the morality of driving gas-guzzling
SUVs — "What Would Jesus drive?" He explained that "to a
cartoonist working in the current geo-political atmosphere, it is a natural
step to ask, 'What would Muhammad Drive?'"
"And I'm sorry to report," he said,
"that the image in post-9/11 America that leaps to mind is the Ryder truck
given to us by the terrorist Timothy McVeigh, carrying a nuclear warhead and
driven, alas, not by an Irish-Catholic or a Jewish Hasidim or a Southern
Baptist, but, yes, by an Islamic militant." Muslims consider depictions of
their prophet to be blasphemous, but Marlette told WND he did not have Muhammad
in mind when he drew the picture of the truck driver, but rather a
"generic" Arab headdress-wearing man. Noting that cartoon images
should not be taken literally, he pointed out that "there were no Ryder
trucks in Muhammad's time." Similarly, he said, "I could have drawn a
cartoon of 'What would Jesus drive?' with some Pentecostal guy driving an
SUV."
'How would you have drawn it?'
Marlette said the cartoon prompted a "firestorm of reaction" from the
Council on American-Islamic Relations, which reprinted it and organized an
e-mail campaign. The e-mails all said essentially the same thing about him and
his drawing, he said. The Muslim writers used terms such as
"blasphemy," "ignorant," "bigoted,"
"hateful" and "donkey."
In his upcoming published response, Marlette
recounted attacks by terrorists over the past year or so, beginning with Sept.
11, 2001. "Such nihilists are considered by many Muslims to be martyrs
worthy of admiration and emulation," he said. "Meanwhile, an Arab
country led by a genocidal maniac intent upon developing weapons of mass
destruction is bringing us into war."
"How would you have drawn [the
cartoon]?" he asked. Marlette said the objective of political cartooning
"is not to soothe and tend sensitive psyches, but to jab and poke in an
attempt to get at deeper truths, popular or otherwise. The truth, like it or
not, is that Muslim fundamentalists have committed devastating acts of
terrorism against our country in the name of their prophet."
'Image of Islam'
Abdullah Al-Turki, secretary general of the Muslim
World League, has demanded the Tallahassee Democrat apologize to the
world's more than 1 billion Muslims and promise not to publish such material
again. "Some enemies of Islam have been trying to tarnish the image of
Muhammad just as they publish misleading information about and wrong
interpretation of the Holy Quran," said Turki,
according to the Saudi publication Arab News.
However, Tallahassee Democrat Executive
Editor John Winn Miller said in an editorial Tuesday that no apology is in
order because his paper refused to publish the cartoon in its print edition.
Miller, explaining that his paper has no control of Marlette's outside work,
said the cartoonist "sends us his cartoons and we decide whether to print
them or not." But he admitted that, "Unbeknownst to me, we had an
automatic system that placed all of Doug's political cartoons on our website.
When that happened with the bomb cartoon, we were flooded with thousands of
e-mails and phone calls demanding an apology."
"We did not publish the cartoon, and we won't
because I don't think it is particularly funny," Miller said. "And I,
frankly, am uneasy about making fun of religious icons in the Democrat. We have
run cartoons making fun of priests because of their actions in the abuse scandal
— but not because of their religion. There were some cartoons that we did not
run because we thought they crossed the line of good taste. Different editors
draw that line in different places."
But Miller said he defends Marlette's "right
to ridicule anyone." "This is an honored American tradition,"
the editor said. "Granted, good comedy like his often depends on
exaggerations. But he does have some fair basis for satire in this case. While
the vast majority of Muslims are a peaceful people and preach a peaceful religion,
there are some who have subverted the message of the prophet Muhammad for their
own violent purposes.
"So to anyone who was offended by Doug's
cartoon, I'm sorry," Miller wrote. "But I do not apologize for his
right to make a point, even if it makes some people mad." When Marlette
joined the Democrat earlier this year, Miller said in a June 21 news story by
his paper that the cartoonist can be "provocative, but he'll have an
editor."
CAIR Executive Director Nihad
Awad complained that "it now seems to be 'open
season' on Islam in certain religious and political circles."
"Defamatory attacks on Islam and on the prophet Muhammad by media outlets
or religious leaders only serve to harm our nation's image worldwide and divide
America along religious lines," Awad said.
Noting that Muslims object to any visual representations of their prophet, Awad also criticized a "racist and stereotypical"
portrayal of Muhammad. "By learning more about the prophet Muhammad,
people of conscience will discover that he was a prime example of tolerance and
mercy," said Awad, who suggested viewing the
recent controversial PBS documentary, "Muhammad: Legacy of a
Prophet."
Note of thanks
In a letter to the Tallahassee Democrat, a
reader expressed thanks for Marlette's cartoon. "I have noticed outrage
about the cartoon, but I have not noticed outrage from Muslims concerning the
devastation and carnage that radical Islamists have caused," wrote Rebecca
Davis. "Their silence concerning radical groups from their own faith
speaks louder than words."
Columnist Kathleen Parker comments in Sunday's Orlando
Sentinel that, "As the year wraps up, Marlette is on the receiving end
of an Islamist fatwa protesting a dead-on editorial cartoon." Marlette,
born in Greensboro, N.C., began drawing political cartoons for the Charlotte
Observer in 1972, then moved to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in
1987 and New York Newsday in 1989. He won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize,
mainly for cartoons about the scandal surrounding televangelist Jim Bakker.
Marlette's comic strip "Kudzu" appears in more than 300
newspapers and was produced as a musical at Ford's Theater in Washington. He is
the only cartoonist to have received a Nieman
Fellowship at Harvard. His book "The Bridge" earned a
novel-of-the-year award from the Southeast Booksellers Association in April and
has been bought by Tom Cruise for film production at Paramount Studios.
|
Last week, I drew a cartoon showing a man in Middle Eastern garb driving a Ryder truck hauling a nuke with the caption, "What Would Mohammed Drive?" The drawing was a takeoff on the recent controversy among Christian evangelicals over the morality of driving gas-guzzling SUVs "What would Jesus drive?" To a cartoonist working in the current geo-political atmosphere it is a natural step to ask, "What would Mohammed drive?" And I'm sorry to report that the image in post-9/11 America that leaps to mind is the Ryder truck given to us by the terrorist Timothy McVeigh, carrying a nuclear warhead and driven, alas, not by an Irish-Catholic, an ultra-orthodox Jew or a Southern Baptist, but, yes, by an Islamic militant. Unfortunately, for many Americans these days, such a leap of the imagination is not a great stretch. Hence, the homeland security office. Over the last year we have watched Islamic militants commit suicide by flying planes into our buildings, killing thousands of innocent civilians, including many Arab Americans. In Afghanistan, we watched the Taliban murder noncompliant women and destroy great works of art. We watched an American reporter decapitated by Muslim "true believers." We watched young Palestinian suicide bombers murder innocents in cafes and markets and on buses, in the name of the Prophet Mohammed. Such nihilists are considered by many Muslims to be martyrs worthy of admiration and emulation. Meanwhile, an Arab country led by a genocidal maniac intent upon developing weapons of mass destruction is bringing us into war. How would you have drawn it? My cartoon has prompted a firestorm of reaction orchestrated by a lobbying group called CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations). This is not the first time my cartoons have prompted such organized attacks. Years ago when I went after the corrupt excesses of Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker's Praise The Lord Club, for example, I similarly outraged fundamentalist Christians with cartoons that, like this one, depicted the obvious correlations of real events to instinctive imagery. That, by the way, defines the art of political cartooning. The objective is not to soothe and tend sensitive psyches, but to jab and poke in an attempt to get at deeper truths, popular or otherwise. The truth, like it or not, is that Muslim fundamentalists have committed devastating acts of terrorism against our country in the name of their prophet. CAIR reprinted my cartoon in its newsletter and encouraged its subscribers to e-mail and call me, my newspaper and my syndicate to complain. During the past few days, we have received more than 5,500 emails and counting, all saying more or less the same thing about me and my drawing: Blasphemy. Ignorant. Bigoted. Disrespectful to our Prophet Mohammed. Hateful. "Donkey"? They all demanded an apology. Quite a few threatened mutilation and death. My only regret is that the thousands who e-mailed me complaining felt that my drawing was an assault upon their religion or its founder. It was not. It was an assault on the distortion of their religion by murderous fanatics and zealots. In fact, I have received death threats and hate mail throughout the years for standing up for the rights of minorities in my drawings, including Muslims and Arab Americans. Just as Christianity and Judaism and probably Zoroastrianism are distorted by murderous fanatics and zealots, so too is the religion of Islam. May I rest assured that the constituents of CAIR who e-mailed their outrage to me and my newspaper were just as vigorous in condemning those who dishonored their religion with the attack on the World Trade Center? Have they been equally diligent at protesting the widespread support - among intellectuals, "charities," and government officials - that the terrorists enjoy in the Muslim states of the Middle East? Were they part of the anti-Taliban movement in this country that long predated Sept. 11? Did they pummel al-Qaida with similar protests and bombard the Taliban with demands that they apologize for spreading a false image of Islam with their hatred and destruction? In my 30-year career I have regularly drawn cartoons that offend religious fundamentalists and true believers of every stripe, a fact that I tend to list in the "accomplishments" column of my resume. I have outraged fundamentalist Christians by skewering Jerry Falwell, Roman Catholics by needling the pope, and Jews by criticizing Israel. I have vast experience upsetting people with my art. What I have learned from this experience is that those who rise up against the expression of ideas are strikingly similar. No one is less tolerant than those demanding tolerance. A certain humorlessness, self-righteousness and literal-mindedness binds them. Despite differences of culture and creed, they all seem to share the egocentric notion that there is only one way of looking at things, their way, and that others have no right to see things differently. What I have learned from years of experience with this is one of the great lessons of all the world's religions: We are all one in our humanness. Here is my answer to them: In this country, we do not apologize for our opinions. Free speech is the linchpin of our republic. All other freedoms flow from it. I realize this may be a repugnant concept for many of those who wrote, but let me be clear. I do not apologize for my drawing. Granted, there is nothing "fair" about cartoons. You cannot say "on the other hand" in them. They are harder to defend with logic. But this is why we have a First Amendment - so that we don't feel the necessity to apologize for our ideas. After all, we don't need constitutional protection to run boring, inoffensive cartoons. We don't need constitutional protection to make money from advertising. We don't need constitutional protection to tell readers exactly what they want to hear. We need constitutional protection for our right to express unpopular views. The point of opinion pages is to focus attention, stimulate debate and provoke argument. By that standard, my cartoon did what it was supposed to do. If we can't discuss the great issues of the day on those pages of our newspapers, fearlessly and without apology, where can we discuss them? In the streets with guns? In cafes with detonator vests and strapped-on bombs? I welcome the thoughts of all those who made the effort to e-mail me. But
what I would urge them to consider is that minorities should be especially
vigilant about free speech and circumspect about urging apologies for
opinions. Because history shows that when free speech goes, it is always the
minorities who are the most vulnerable and suffer the most from its absence.
Just ask the Arabs currently being held in detention without being charged
with a crime. That's how it works in totalitarian regimes. This is not a
totalitarian country, which, I presume, is one of the reasons those who wrote
to me live here. |
I Was a
Tool of Satan
An
Equal-Opportunity Offender Maps the Dark Turn of Intolerance
(Source: The Columbia
Journalism Review, November/December 2003 issue; Note: this
article has been edited slightly to avoid repetition with the article above)
Last year, I drew a cartoon that showed a man in Middle
Eastern apparel at the wheel of a Ryder truck hauling a nuclear warhead. The
caption read, "What Would Mohammed Drive?" Besides referring to the
vehicle that Timothy McVeigh rode into Oklahoma City, the drawing was a takeoff
on the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign created by Christian
evangelicals to challenge the morality of owning gas-guzzling SUVs. The
cartoon's main target, of course, was the faith-based politics of a different
denomination. Predictably, the Shiite hit the fan.
Can you say "fatwa"? My newspaper, The
Tallahassee Democrat, and I received more than 20,000 e-mails demanding an
apology for misrepresenting the peace-loving religion of the Prophet
Mohammed—or else. Some spelled out the "else": death, mutilation,
Internet spam. "I will cut your fingers and put them in your mother's
ass." "What you did, Mr. Dog, will cost you your life. Soon you will
join the dogs . . . hahaha in hell." "Just
wait . . . we will see you in hell with all Jews . . . ." The onslaught
was orchestrated by an organization called the Council on American-Islamic
Relations. CAIR bills itself as an "advocacy group." I was to
discover that among the followers of Islam it advocated for were the men
convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. At any rate, its
campaign against me included flash-floods of e-mail intended to shut down
servers at my newspaper and my syndicate, as well as viruses aimed at my home
computer. The controversy became a subject of newspaper editorials, columns,
Web logs, talk radio, and CNN. I was condemned on the front page of the Saudi
publication Arab News by the secretary general of the Muslim World League.
My answer to the criticism was published in the Democrat (and reprinted
around the country) under the headline "With All Due Respect, an Apology
Is Not in Order." I almost felt that I could have written the response in
my sleep. . . . . Although my initial reaction to the "Mohammed"
hostilities was that I had been there before, gradually I began to feel that
there was something new, something darker afoot. The repressive impulses of
that old-time religion were now being fed by the subtler inhibitions of mammon
and the marketplace. Ignorance and bigotry were reinventing themselves in the
post-Christian age by dressing up as "sensitivity" and masquerading
as a public virtue that may be as destructive to our rights as religious
zealotry. We seem to be entering a Techno Dark Age, in which the machines that
were designed to serve the free flow of information have fallen into the hands
of an anti-intellectual mobocracy.
Twenty-five years ago, I began inciting the wrath of the
faithful by caricaturing the grotesque disparity between Jim and Tammy Faye
Bakker's televangelism scam and the Christian piety they used to justify it. I
was then working at The Charlotte Observer, in the hometown of the Bakkers' PTL Club, which instigated a full-bore attack on
me. The issues I was cartooning were substantial enough that I won the Pulitzer
Prize for my PTL work. But looking back on that fundamentalist religious
campaign, even though my hate mail included some death threats, I am struck by
the relative innocence of the times and how ominous the world has since become,
how high the stakes, even for purveyors of incendiary doodles.
One of the first cartoons I ever drew on PTL was in 1978, when Jim Bakker's
financial mismanagement forced him to lay off a significant portion of his
staff. The drawing showed the TV preacher sitting at the center of Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper" informing his disciples,
"I'm going to have to let some of you go!"
Bakker's aides told reporters that he was so upset by the drawing that he fell
to his knees in his office, weeping into the gold shag carpet. Once he
staggered to his feet, he and Tammy Faye went on the air and, displaying my
cartoons, encouraged viewers to phone in complaints to the Observer and
cancel their subscriptions.
Jim Bakker finally resigned in disgrace from his PTL ministry, and I drew a
cartoon of the televangelist who replaced him, Jerry Falwell,
as a serpent slithering into PTL paradise: "Jim and Tammy were expelled
from paradise and left me in charge."
One of the many angry readers who called me at the newspaper said, "You're
a tool of Satan."
"Excuse me?"
"You're a tool of Satan for that cartoon you
drew."
"That's impossible," I said. "I
couldn't be a tool of Satan. The Charlotte Observer's personnel
department tests for that sort of thing."
Confused silence on the other end.
"They try to screen for tools of Satan,"
I explained. "Knight Ridder human resources has a strict policy against hiring tools of Satan."
Click.
Until "What Would Mohammed Drive?" most
of the flak I caught was from the other side of the Middle East conflict.
Jewish groups complained that my cartoons critical of Israel's invasion of
Lebanon were anti-Semitic because I had drawn Prime Minister Menachem Begin with a big nose. My editors took the
strategic position that I drew everyone's nose big. At one point, editorial
pages were spread out on the floor for editors to measure with a ruler the
noses of various Jewish and non-Jewish figures in my cartoons.
After I moved to the Northeast, it was Catholics I
offended. At New York Newsday, I drew a close-up of the pope wearing a
button that read "No Women Priests." There was an arrow pointing to
his forehead and the inscription from Matthew 16:18: "Upon This Rock I
Will Build My Church." The Newsday switchboard lit up like a Vegas
wedding chapel. Newsday ran an apology for the cartoon, a first in my
career, and offered me a chance to respond in a column. The result--though the
paper published it in full--got me put on probation for a year by the
publisher. That experience inspired the opening scene of my first novel, The
Bridge.
The novel's protagonist, a political cartoonist
named Pick Cantrell, is fired after beating up his publisher and returns with
his wife and son to North Carolina, where he confronts the ghosts of his past
in the form of his grandmother, Mama Lucy, the family matriarch and his boyhood
nemesis. In an attempt to show how the grandmother became such a formidable
ogre, the book flashes back to mill life in the thirties, when Lucy, like my
own grandmother, was bayoneted by a National Guardsman during a textile strike.
There were obvious autobiographical elements of The Bridge. Like Pick, I
would have beaten up my publisher if it had been legal. And The Bridge's
fictional setting of Eno, North Carolina, is based
loosely on Hillsborough, a former mill village where my ancestors once worked
in the cotton mill's weave rooms and where I now live
with my family. These days the town features an advanced white-wine-and-Brie-in-bulk
community of writers and other bourgeois bohemians. Various members of the
community were given highly fictionalized analogs in the novel, from a vegan
restaurateur to a sex-toy manufacturer. But most of the book came straight from
the imagination.
I'm not sure I expected my foray into what Mark
Twain called the "littery" world to be a
stroll through a Bloomsbury garden, but I surely did not expect the Taliban, or
as some people in my town of Hillsborough called the literary terrorists who
went after my book, "HillQaeda. A neighbor of
mine thought he recognized himself in the gay-writer character, Ruffin Strudwick, the author of a Civil War best seller,
"told from the point of view of a female Confederate spy," which had
"created an uproar among Civil War scholars by
suggesting that the relationship between Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson
was latently homosexual." It's true, my neighbor made a name for himself
by taking on the fictional persona of a Confederate female (not a spy), but the
fictional Strudwick was a composite. In fact, his
troubled relationship with his father prompted Pat Conroy's sister to write and
thank me for basing Strudwick on her brother. Their
father, The Great Santini, "would just love how
you made Pat gay," she said. The only literal trait my neighbor shared
with Strudwick was a weakness for vintage costumes
and red high-tops. If I had to defend myself for lifting those details, I would
contend that dressing like that around a cartoonist amounts to entrapment.
Sadly, the title of my first chapter, "A Gift for Pissing People
Off," proved to be all too nonfictional. As the galleys of the novel
circulated, the offended writer wept like a televangelist to anyone who would
listen, claiming he had been viciously caricatured. Another local writer known
for her "niceness" called urging me to change my book. Amused as I
was to see literary sophisticates behaving like small-town provincials (this is
North Carolina; hadn't they read Thomas Wolfe?), the smile was presently wiped
off my face. A local publicist I had hired to promote my book called in tears
after being told by the nice writer's husband that she would never work in this
town again if she continued to represent me. Then the rector of the Episcopal church my family attended complained about the Strudwick character and, lest he be mistaken for the earthy
minister in the novel, contacted my publisher and asked to have his name
removed from the acknowledgments. This, of course, set off alarms within my
publishing house, which brought in lawyers to vet the novel for libel.
Then the weeping writer's close friend who managed the campus bookstore at the
University of North Carolina (where I had just become a visiting professor)
canceled my book signing there. She tried to get other booksellers around the
state to do likewise, on the ground that The Bridge was "homophobic
trash." (Her bookstore sells T-shirts that proclaim, "I read banned
books.") Reviews were posted on Amazon.com trashing The Bridge,
repeating the homophobia charge, all with similarly worded, weirdly personal
talking points. A bit of verse was sent anonymously to my home address:
"May maggots munch your belly-bone and rats chew on your ears . . .
." My wife, who had already been shunned on the street and at the local
latté bar, read it as a death threat.
I resisted the impulse to respond. My day job requires enough gladiatorial duty
on behalf of free speech. And the attempts to censor my novel weren't really a
First Amendment abuse: the government wasn't trying to shut me up (unless you
count that state-owned campus bookstore), only a bunch of unarmed and dangerous
writers. Besides, my brothers and sisters in the free press covered my flank
nicely. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, for instance, called the attack
"a panty-wadding fatwa," adding "I, for one, can't wait for the
cartoon."
But how do you cartoon a cartoon? It's a problem
of redundancy in this hyperbolic age to caricature an already extravagantly
distorted culture. When writers try to censor other writers, we're in Toontown. We are in deep trouble when victimhood becomes a
sacrament, personal injury a point of pride, when irreverence is seen as a hate
crime, when the true values of art and religion are distorted and debased by
fanatics and zealots, whether in the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, the Prophet Mohammed, or a literary Cult of Narcissus.
It was the cynically outrageous charge of
homophobia against my book that brought me around to the similarities between
the true believers I was used to dealing with and the postmodern secular
humanist Church Ladies wagging their fingers at me. The threads that connect
the CAIR and the literary fatwas, besides
technological sabotage, are entreaties to "sensitivity," appeals to
institutional guilt, and faith in a corporate culture of controversy avoidance.
Niceness is the new face of censorship in this country.
The censors no longer come to us in jackboots with
torches and baying dogs in the middle of the night. They arrive now in broad
daylight with marketing surveys and focus-group findings. They come as teams,
not armies, trained in effectiveness, certified in sensitivity, and wielding
degrees from the Columbia journalism school. They're known not for their
bravery but for their efficiency. They show gallantry only when they genuflect
to apologize. The most disturbing thing about the "Mohammed"
experience was that a laptop Luftwaffe was able to blitz editors into not
running the cartoon in my own newspaper. "WWMD" ran briefly on the Tallahassee
Democrat Web site, but once an outcry was raised, the editors pulled it and
banned it from the newspaper altogether.
The cyberprotest by CAIR
showed a sophisticated understanding of what motivates newsroom managers these
days: bottom-line concerns, a wish for the machinery to run smoothly, and the
human-resources mandate not to offend. Many of my e-mail detractors appeared to
be well-educated, recent émigrés. Even if their English sometimes faltered,
they were fluent in the language of victimhood. Presumably, victimization was
one of their motives for leaving their native countries, yet the subtext of
many of their letters was that this country should be more like the ones they
emigrated from. They had the American know-how without the
know-why. In the name of tolerance, in the name of their peaceful God,
they threatened violence against someone they accused of falsely accusing them
of violence.
With the rise of the bottom-line culture and the
corporatization of newsgathering, tolerance itself has become commodified and denuded of its original purpose.
Consequently, the best part of the American character, our generous spirit, our
sense of fair play, has been turned against us. Tolerance has become a tool of
coercion, of institutional inhibition, of bureaucratic self-preservation. We
all should take pride in how this country for the most part curbed the instinct
to lash out at Arab-Americans in the wake of 9/11. One of the great strengths
of this nation is our sensitivity to the tyranny of the majority, our sense of
justice for all. But the First Amendment, the miracle of our system, is not
just a passive shield of protection. In order to maintain our true, nationally
defining diversity, it obligates journalists to be bold, writers to be
full-throated and uninhibited, and those blunt instruments of the free press,
cartoonists like me, not to self-censor. We must use it or lose it.
Political cartoonists daily push the limits of
free speech. They were once the embodiment of journalism's independent voice.
Today they are as endangered a species as bald eagles. The professional
troublemaker has become a luxury that offends the bottom-line sensibilities of
corporate journalism. Twenty years ago, there were two hundred of us working on
daily newspapers. Now there are only ninety. Herblock is dead. Jeff MacNelly is dead. And most of the rest of us might as well
be. Just as résumé hounds have replaced newshounds in today's newsrooms,
ambition has replaced talent at the drawing boards. Passion has yielded to
careerism, Thomas Nast to Eddie Haskell. With the retirement of Paul Conrad at
the Los Angeles Times, a rolling blackout from California has engulfed
the country, dimming the pilot lights on many American editorial pages. Most
editorial cartoons now look as bland as B-roll and as impenetrable as a 1040
form.
We know what happens to the bald eagle when it's not allowed to reproduce and
its habitat is contaminated. As the species is thinned, the eco-balance is
imperiled. Why should we care about the obsolescence of the editorial
cartoonist? Because cartoons can't say "on the other hand," because
they strain reason and logic, because they are hard to defend and thus are the
acid test of the First Amendment, and that is why they must be preserved.
What would Marlette drive? Forget SUVs and armored
cars. It would be an all-terrain vehicle you don't need a license for. Not a
foreign import, but American-made. It would be built with the same grit and
gumption my grandmother showed when she faced down government soldiers in the struggle
for economic justice, and the courage my father displayed as a twenty-year-old
when he waded ashore in the predawn darkness of Salerno and Anzio. It would be
fueled by the freedom spirit that both grows out of our Constitution and is
protected by it - fiercer than any fatwa, tougher than all the tanks in the
army, and more powerful than any bunker-buster.
If I drew you a picture it might look like the
broken-down jalopy driven by the Joads from Oklahoma
to California. Or like the Cadillac that Jack Kerouac took on the road in his
search for nirvana. Or the pickup Woody Guthrie hitched a ride in on that
ribbon of highway, bound for glory. Or the International Harvester Day-Glo
school bus driven cross-country by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Or the Trailways
and Greyhound buses the Freedom Riders boarded to face the deadly backroads of Mississippi and Alabama. Or the moonbuggy Neil Armstrong commanded on that first miraculous
trip to the final frontier.
What would Marlette drive? The self-evident, unalienable American model of
democracy that we as a young nation discovered and road-tested for the entire
world: the freedom to be ourselves, to speak the truth as we see it, and to
drive it home.
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Step 5 (cont'd): Finally, in one page (two
separate paragraphs if you prefer) state whether or not you would publish the
previous cartoon ("Is it just me, or does it stink in here?") by
Hart and/or this cartoon ("What would Mohammed drive?") by Marlette
if you were the editor of a newspaper. Defend your decision. |