Je suis Charlie, but not really
A thousand years ago, when I was editing a magazine that was supposed to bring news of the continent to eager young men, I looked into Charlie Hebdo as a story.
Mark Twain had wonderfully outrageous ideas, but he was still foxy Grandpa — and a celebrator of American frontier life.
Though Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert can be harsh, there’s a wink back there, a soothing humanity.
The writers and artists there didn’t — and don’t; it’s still publishing — want to be friends with celebrities.
Prurient priests and wanton nuns are familiar running characters.
Suppose an American cartoonist were to draw, in crudely exaggerated outlines, a drawing of President Obama defecating on the Bill of Rights.
Not that it’s not under fire over here, too — our threat comes from the corporations that control the media, not from Islamic fundamentalists.
[...] it’s hard to make money online — at least for a content provider.
People talk about these issues online, and some are very cogent, but so far that abundance of intelligence has not resulted in any great artifacts of social criticism.
Maybe the drawing of the prophet Muhammad in a sexual position is not our cup of tea, humor-wise, but we should still be calling Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi a thug and a murderer.
The al Qaeda members in Yemen who trained the terrorists who killed the Charlie Hebdo staff members are cowardly gangsters.
Rather, they are raining war down into the Muslim countries of the Middle East, allowing and encouraging the ongoing slaughter of innocents.