Satire can be Against Everyone

Garry Trudeau recently wrote an article about what he calls the “abuse of satire”. He starts with what satire was meant to be:

“Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule.”

He contrasts the above with Charlie Hebdo, the French publication that lampooned Mohammed and whose office got attacked in Paris in January:

“By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence.”

And so he concludes:

“It’s always worth asking this question: Is anyone, anyone at all, laughing? If not, maybe you crossed it.”

All of the above would make sense, except in today’s world. Today, a particular religion is considered exempt from any criticism; where a bloody, murderous, evil spade cannot be called that because of the unholy triumvirate of political correctness + secularism + tolerance, all taken way too far. So if you can’t speak the truth and you are asked to use “judgment and common sense in expressing oneself” when it comes to a particular religion, what are your options really?

Using satire seems to be one of the few options left. Trudeau himself acknowledges that the demand for such restraint may well be what started it all:

“The Muhammad cartoon controversy began eight years ago in Denmark, as a protest against “self-censorship,” one editor’s call to arms against what she felt was a suffocating political correctness.”

As is well known, the Americans did not send any high-level representative to the post-Charlie march in Paris where pretty much every major leader was present. Trudeau acknowledges that the US version of free speech is very different from the French version:

“The French tradition of free expression is too full of contradictions to fully embrace. Even Charlie Hebdo once fired a writer for not retracting an anti-Semitic column. Apparently he crossed some red line that was in place for one minority but not another.”

The US, on the other hand, worships free speech:

“In America, no one goes into cartooning for the adrenaline. As Jon Stewart said in the aftermath of the killings, comedy in a free society shouldn’t take courage.”

Amen to that.