Satire Does Not Always Involve Humor. The Most Powerful Satire Never Does.

[Denzil_DC]

112. Sadly, the cartoon you linked to is inaccessible, but I get the gist.

One irony is that despite its (broken) longevity, I don't think Charlie Hebdo was particularly influential before now, judging by its readership stats - no doubt just another of those daily provocations of city life, visible on newsstands that some people just shrug at, some recoil from in distaste or well-grounded fear, others buy because it titillates in some way, others read knowingly, and still others take as confirming their revolting prejudices. If it's art, it's subject to multiple interpretations. Whether that makes it "good" satire is both beside the point in some ways, and unknowable without being sure of the intent behind it, as well as understading the social environment within which it exists.

It's like the old maxim about blogging, or political or social ridicule as a whole: Punch up, not down.

Who knows how many more people from minorities may have been victimized because some nutter, not a million miles removed from these murderers, had his prejudices confirmed by seeing these cartoons to the extent that a bit of casual "Muslim-bashing" on a dark night might seem like a bit of fun? (And, of course, how many more will be victimized now?)

But that should be a matter for the artists' and readers' consciences and any existing state legislation on hate speech and acts, and/or serious debate about those issues, not an armed attack that will sadly probably end up with more Muslims dead and living in fear than the writers and artists who populated the Charlie Hebdo offices.

The irony I mentioned is that it's obvious the next issue of Charlie Hebdo will be super-provocative, and sell more than the magazine ever has. As Juan Cole puts it, this serves the terrorists' goal of heightening the contradictions and destabilizing societies that already have problems enough. And the media furor and many of our reactions make us complicit in that.

So, in some ways, Charlie Hebdo's satire may end up being very powerful indeed. But to what end, I'm not sure. Many of those we might be able to ask about it are dead.