They’re Still Arguing About That Hudnall/Lash Cartoon

I can't really recommend you read any of it. Although I recognize that those with their noses in it may have a very different perspective, I think the nature of this kind of political back-and-forth tends to be foolish to the extreme, all sides, and constitutes the flailings of a nation in precipitous decline more than it does the crude, rude history of American back-and-forth. Still, if you want to follow the backlash that a James Hudnall and Batton Lash cartoon about the President and First Lady received due primarily to the aggressive, focused rant of a cable television host, you could do worse than to start with Hudnall's site or the comments thread on the matter at The Beat.

One small thing that's intriguing to me is that people are quick to focus in on the cartoon and its relative merits, which reminds me of how people used to process the cartoons of Mike Diana when he was on trial way back in the day. There's something about an issue like this one that makes people quick to declare where they fit relative to the nature of the ideas being expressed, which I think is a sign of how much the conversation itself is distorted in any given case. I did it, too. Is it pertinent? I don't think so. The merits of any cartoon do not seem to me to justify harassment or death threats, or even the empty gestures (and I hope to God they're empty) of same that exist for whatever bizarre, sad reason people might do that. That's the primary consideration here, I think, the only real line that gets crossed. Nobody deserves to be personally harassed or threatened for art, for an idea.

I will say given the likely shape of rhetoric over the next several days, even as I run as fast as I can in the other direction in what is hopefully a slow grind to a halt (at least in terms of newsworthy developments), that I don't think that pushing back against this kind of idiocy, or suffering through it, is necessarily heroic or even particularly laudable in any way. It's more sad and necessary than heroic, I'd say. It seems to me that a lot of the extra stuff, anything beyond just doing another work of art, becomes political posturing in a Grand Theater Of Stupid that generates a kind of empty heat upon which certain people somewhere not in the middle of it eventually profit. It's a business, really. Again, I realize that my perspective might change if I were deeper in it. I recall that when the Danish Cartoons were a huge issue that I was similarly depressed when folks cast themselves as free-speech heroes for just doing their job. I don't know if that's completely applicable here, but it reminds me of that.

But again, more than anything else, I deplore harassment and threats. If you're one of those people, please stop. If you're one of the people on the receiving end of that kind of nonsense, I'm sorry, and I hope things get better soon.
 
posted 5:15 am PST | Permalink
 

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