One year after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, political cartooning is under more threat than ever. But the real threat is job cuts and editors who refuse to hire cartoonists, not terrorists.
One Year After Charlie Hebdo, Editors Are The Real Terrorists
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
17 Comments. Leave new
It’s much safer to insult cartoonists than jihadists or militiamen. When was the last time cartoonists bombed a doctor’s office or bus stop?
OTOH, both of the former pose very little physical threat to the power structure, where cartoonists pose a very real threat that the powerful might get laughed at.
Cries of “The Editor has no clothes!” has to be the real fear editors live with.
All they have is their credibility, and having lost that the snickers of a few might develop (as I fantasize would happen in world awakening) into a roaring derisive laughter.
(CNN)After a year in which it has never been far from the headlines, French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is back in the news again — this time for a cartoon that critics say pushes its provocative brand of humor too far.
The publication has sparked outrage for a cartoon that suggests drowned toddler Alan Kurdi — the 3-year-old Syrian boy whose death in September triggered a global wave of sympathy for migrants — would have grown up to be a sexual molester of the type blamed for a recent wave of mob sex assaults in Cologne, Germany.
Charlie Hebdo does its kick down kiss up act again, comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted.
Those under siege, assault, and invasion by these “refugees,” courtesy of their unaccountable elites, are hardly “comfortable.”
Except for the 14 years of bombing by the Bush and Obama regimes.
A boy who was 7 years old when the Crusade started is now 21 and he has lived in a world smashed by our unaccountable elites.
Most Americans don’t recognize this.
The work of forgetting begins with not seeing.
Yeah, I wouldn’t have chosen Charlie as my poster boy for Freedom Of Speech, either, but you go to war with the martyrs you have rather than the martyrs you wish you had.
Another example of Free Speech: I like a lot of Seth MacFarlane’s work, but sometimes it’s obvious that he’s just trying to be offensive for the sake of being offensive. That doesn’t do it for me, but I’m free to criticize him for it. Rather than shoot him, though, I’ll just turn off the set & pick up a book.
You hit it on the nose, Glenn – there’s none so blind than those who refuse to see – or even think or react to their own benefit. I’ve mentioned the analogy a number of times here, but I can still see a stupid kid, covered with stings and sores, whacking a bee hive with a stick in fury, plainly ignorant to the fact that he is creating his own misery and the misery of those all around him from this, and now that the hive is tattered and shredded, the bees that are still alive want to go build hives in his own house – and now, some of these bees are not very friendly bees anymore – “refubees?”
I find it hard to even consider CH cartoonists. In that their insult was abusively sophomoric and so over-the-top, it really is difficult to decipher any kind of insightful message from the product beyond an extreme dislike of the Christo-Muslim deity.
As also has been pointed out elsewhere in this comment thread, since cartoonists don’t usually go anywhere near a war zone (Ted being one of those rare exceptions), I don’t feel that anybody really identifies CH as “their” martyr, per-se.
In any event, I feel that Ted is more the heir of both Bill Mauldin and Ernie Pyle, as he is also a columnist. But Charlie Hebdo? If I went, say to Mongomery Alabama and set myself up as a cartoonist doing caricatures of R.E.Lee sucking the cock of T Sherman’s former slaves while getting cornholed by A. Lincoln as Jebus looks on, and I didn’t implement a security system not too unlike the headquarters of IBM (or at least some quality paramilitary terror-cell), and then some triple-K conehead simply found me in the Yellow Pages and shot my virtually unsecured ass dead, I’d think that, yeah, maybe I did deserve that.
Ultimately, look to both the ownership — who bought CH out — and also who was France pissing off at the time. Once you discover who they were producing propaganda for, it becomes ciearer who the real killers really were.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/01/08/charlie-hebdo-viral/
DanD
Gosh guys, please don’t pile on me, but I don’t even see this as an issue. Many print publications can barely survive anymore because most of the “news” is free online, and “hiring a cartoonist full-time” can be simply beyond their budget. The real “problem”, which Ted rarely refers to is the constant free access to so many editorial and opinion cartoons that hoping to be a “print” cartoonist barely exists anymore. I haven’t bought a printed publication for years. Is that a “bad thing”? I don’t even watch a lot of the mainstream media or cable stuff much anymore because it is all a rehash of the same things, and it’s filled with filler.
Editors are terrorists? Don’t we have enough real terrorists as it is now?
@rikster – “Editors are terrorists?”
Absolutely – a terrorist seeks to achieve his goals not by direct action, but by scaring people into the actions he wants them to take.
Look at Ted’s run-in with the LAT. Ted wrote some stuff the editor didn’t like. He got fired. Now, he’s scared of writing bad things about the police (doesn’t mean he will stop, and I hope he doesn’t) But the editor also accomplished the goal of scaring other cartoonists & editorialists who might contemplate writing bad things about the police. At least some of them will refrain from doing so: Mission Accomplished.
(I suspect you, personally, know this already – I’m merely piggy backing on your post in order to get up on my soapbox 😉
“I don’t even watch a lot of the mainstream media or cable stuff much anymore because it is all a rehash of the same things, and it’s filled with filler.”
In the end, all the stuff you get for free will be worth less than the nothing you paid for it by watching it.
Media that doesn’t unconceal will leave one blind to what is concealed by the “free” diversions and distractions that make magic tricks so convincing.
One person conditioned to rule and control
The media sells it and you live the role
“One person conditioned to rule and control
The media sells it and you live the role”
Glenn, you’re a poet! Actually, I find much more diverse content on the web than I do on the mainstream TV and publications, and that’s another reason I don’t watch much TV or buy newspapers. As for the dearth of full-time hired cartoonists, I suspect that this is the reality today, and wouldn’t likely change much even if the economy somehow got better for print publications. I do agree that Ted got a really raw deal from the Times and they also hurt his reputation, which sucks, so as far as being terrorists, yes, in his case, but there are many editors that don’t act as terrorists at all, and quite the opposite, like the guy who quit his job when his Vegas paper got bought by addled Adelson. 🙁 Times change and some professions fade or grow with this change – I helped make the first Laser discs and I rarely even use CDs or DVDs anymore…
“One person conditioned to rule and control
The media sells it and you live the role”
Credit due to Ozzy Osbourne, from his “Crazy Train”.
I hope you still like it.
Sometimes a truth stands stronger without association with its speaker.
Greenwald: “Where were the post-Hebdo free speech crusaders as France spent the last year crushing free speech?” http://tinyurl.com/jevnbob
“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
“Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. …That tension will not go away.”
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia