no place for satire

To compare Charlie Hebdo to one of its english counterparts, say, Vice Magazine, is to wonder if the former’s sense of satire is indeed less ironic, more explicit and crass, if not somewhat mean spirited. Their rhetoric, to use foreplay as a metaphor, is like being dick slapped during the foreplay. From the massacre comes the phrase “Suicidal Free Speech,” the implication that you are free to say what you want, but may die from it. “I’d rather die standing than live on my knees,” says their late editor Stephane Charbonnier, a ghostly prophecy, long before it would be his final elegy.

If you found yourself forlorn after seeing the picture in question of prophet Muhammad that was the apparent reason why these people lost their lives, imagine what a militant Islamic extremist might think. The conventional “they were asking for it,” of course, does not apply to being murdered, but should stay in the turf war of politics; with religion, however, such ideas always sadly manifest in swords, guns, bombs, and one day I promise, nuclear annihilation. It seems that a small percentage of those who are most literal with their books tend also to be the most violent, which applies to not just Islam, but the legacy of Christianity and modern Judaism (Hinduism and Buddhism have bowed out of the modern arm race).

Now merely a tepid precursor to terror’s curation of culture, when Seth Rogan and James Franco reprised their bromance in The Interview, expectations wavered between another vulgar comedy to brilliant satire, and as the reviews rolled in, audiences agreed to the former. That studios would make millions off a bad movie is not a phenomenon; that this is not a phenomenon, however, is a kind of phenomenon. Yet, unlike Lincoln, JFK, Selma—or even The Passion of the Christ and Zero Dark Thirty—whose complicated men would all be fated to die (apologies for any spoilers), the subject of assassination behind this movie was not only still relevant, but petty, humorless, and maybe a bit paranoid. Then again, irony is only enjoyed within the alliance. North Korea thus hacks the production company in a new “cyberwar,” as opposed to the more domestic and ridiculous “celebgate” hack, in which boobs of our royalty (i.e. celebrities) are unwittingly bared for hungry subjects, leaked photos which oddly became inadvertent satires of celebrity itself: imperfect truth rupturing the semblance of perfection. With the Sony hack, people nervously wondered if terrorism could be virtual; that is, over the internet, and not in actual bloodshed, that timeless exclamation mark of a head on a spike. Little did we know.

The gunmen were heard shouting Allahu akbar which, for those who don’t know, can actually be translated to “God is greater,” whose comparative adjective infers outside false deities, a twist on “God is great,” which probably betrays something deeper about all religion, beyond linguistics—that the incessant violence committed by those who claim to fight in His name are not necessarily fighting for God, but for whose own personal belief is greater. All religious figures are therefore unfortunately turned into mascots, made by men to evoke provincial anger, to mock the other team, and be mocked.

All revolutions start with books and end in blood. The pen is not just mightier than the sword, but also earlier. The cartoonists who died at Charlie Hebdo may have lost their lives, but they won the war of universal empathy, in whose ideals people find solidarity and ultimate dignity. To those wholeheartedly agreeing with this sentiment—that death and loss are, in the grand scheme of things, not just inversely related but even mutually exclusive—just imagine what suicide bombers think.

Those who are angry and have nothing to live for tend to find something to die for, which describes not just much of the Middle East, but the recent troubles of black males in America and here in England as well, both arguably products of some kind of White-rich-people-in-control machine. I’m either too stupid or deflated to think I know the answer. I promised myself when starting a website that I wouldn’t post anything on religion or politics, but I’m suffocated and surrounded by all this recent disaster. I  (along with millions of others around the world) have now seen the picture  of the Prophet more times than I would wish, I go to the news now looking for death the way, as a boy, I’d masochistically seek horror movies, disturbing my sleep in fits of sweaty terror, tossing and turning to visions of imagined monsters. “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist,” says Kaiser Söze discreetly about himself, which is how an atheist might indict God. Satire may have begun at the tip of a pen, but it died at the tip of a finger. Now that’s a trigger warning. Hands up, they still shoot.