Good Time Charlie, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

January 10, 2015 Martha Thomases 5 Comments

Like all people with a soul, I am outraged over the terrorist murders of the cartoonists and other employees of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, apparently by Islamic fundamentalists.  These are the actions of cowards.  More to the point, these are the actions of people with no sense of humor.

In my pretentious youth, I didn’t want to be funny so much.  I wanted to be delicate and sensitive and poignant. The kind of woman who cries at the sight of a butterfly.  The kind of woman who wrote poetry.

That didn’t happen.  I come from a family that told a lot of jokes.  My mother subscribed to Mad magazine.  I stood up and told jokes in assembly.

In other words, I am not Anais Nin, nor am I Joni Mitchell or Sylvia Plath nor any of the other women I thought were so cool that men could not resist them.  Instead, I am the kind of woman men find it remarkably easy to resist.

Thank goodness.

Humor is one of the most important tools we have in fighting fascism and other totalitarian ideologies.  To quote Tom Sullivan:

“I have long said that loss of the ability to laugh at yourself is the first warning sign of fundamentalism. That applies whether the fundamentalist is a jihadist of the right or from the fringe left. Plus a lot in between. A priest I know once said it was a healthy thing, now and then, to spit on your idols.”

The cartoons that incited the terrorists don’t particularly amuse me.  I suspect I live too far outside the society that inspired them.  There are not a lot of Islamic fundamentalists in my circles.  The Muslims I know do not seem like a monolithic threat, but rather are my friends, neighbors and colleagues.  They are middle class people who go to the same schools as my kid, watch the same movies, and ride the same subways.  It’s not the same environment that exists between Muslims and the rest of French society.  Similarly, I would guess that the assassinated cartoonists would not laugh at the same things I do, like Donald Trump’s claims to being a viable presidential candidate.

It’s possible that even if I lived in Paris and was intimately attuned to the politics, I wouldn’t find the cartoons funny.  I mean, we all have different taste.  A lot of what I’ve seen seems (to my uninitiated eye) to be kind of sophomoric, insulting the Prophet just to get a rise out of people. It reminds me a little bit of the last scene in Time Bandits, where the clueless adults are warned, “Don’t touch that!  It’s evil!”

You can guess what they do.

Anyway, my sense of humor (or lack thereof) is not the point.  If someone makes a joke that I don’t like, I don’t laugh at it.  If someone makes a joke I find offensive, I either engage in conversation about it (if it’s a person) or stop buying/watching the product.  It is possible for me to get seriously offended by someone’s attempt at humor, and still not feel the need to plot that person’s demise.

In France, the separation of Church and state is even more everyday than it is here.  Their politicians, for the most part, do not discuss their “Judeo-Christian” heritage, nor does a mainstream politician discuss his or her conversations with a deity.

There is racism and bigotry, because the French are humans like the rest of us, but they don’t say Jesus told them to be that way.  Their racism and bigotry is pure, undiluted nationalism.

This is a roundabout way to say that I almost understand why some French Muslims are susceptible to the call for jihad.  When a person feels like all reasonable courses of action are closed to him, then the unreasonable ideas gain footing.  If the media seems out to get you, you want to get the media.

We have crazy people in this country who think the media is out to get them.  This includes our own versions of religious fundamentalists.  It includes the New York City police department, certain conservative commentators (who don’t notice they are part of the media) and Michelle Bachman.  For the most part, they are too stupid to justify any attention.

But even they are not stupid enough to think the solution is to kill cartoonists.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, can’t draw for shit.