Charlie Hebdo and PEN

Are you still Charlie? I never was, but the question of what to do bout Charlie Hebdo has come up again thanks to PEN America giving the French comic paper PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award. At the award dinner, famous writers typically play table hosts, but this year several have declined and have called for a boycott as the racist and Islamophobic imagery Charlie traffics in is beyond the pale.

Did you know...I'm actually a member of PEN America? And did you know that there is another universe, that is much like this one, except that in that universe I'm a well-respected literary writer? In this one, I'm just full of myself, so of course I wondered what I would do.

I'm against the sort of racist imagery used in Hebdo—it strikes me as a step too far. For whatever reason, and this may just me being steeped in a US cultural context, I can totally understand R. Crumb's infamous "When the Niggers Take Over America!" and "When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America!", though what is really telling is that the first strip can be most easily found online as a pirate scan on a pro-Nazi website, so I won't be linking. Crumb finally stopped drawing his Angelfood McSpade character because some things just cannot be fully repurposed.

Alison Bechdel has an interesting, if too short, blog post on why she has decided to step in and fill a seat opened by the boycotters. She links to this site, which attempts to explain the Hebdo cartoons. It's interesting, but ultimately not persuasive. Hebdo is left like Crumb, or Screw were left—they're libertines more than leftists, and juvenile. And few people end up more racist than an aging libertine who encounters a new generation of easily offended pearl-clutchers to piss off. Hebdo has routinely seen sales double or magazines sell out each time it has run controversial cartoons of Muhammad.

At the same time, there was a massacre. It was not a guerrilla counter to a military incursion, or a firefight in response to imperial takeover, exploitation, and occupation—and it certainly wasn't done with the tacit or explicit support of France's marginalized Muslim population. Deborah Eisenberg asked if PEN shouldn't give "the award retroactively to Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer and its satirical anti-Semitic cartoons?", which is one of those clever-sounding things that make zero sense when you think about it for more than two seconds. How many militaristic and oppressive Jewish states and international Jewish terror networks were there in the 1920s and 1930s? One can also tell the difference between a Nazi publication and a formerly leftist publication gone rotten from age and idiocy.

The main issue is one of the Spectacle: dubious attempts to explain the shooting as a response to provocation grope toward the issue, but miss it. Both the drawings and the the shootings are Spectacle. (Hebdo is specifically linked to century of bad taste as avant-garde, and there can be no greater critique of the commodity-form while encouraging its perpetuation than shooting up a place. How many Hebdo cartoons did you see in January and February?) How do you fight Spectacle? You demystify it.

So in the other universe where I was asked to attend the gala as a table host, I would, with an iPad full of cartoons by Hebdo, Crumb, the awful Mike Diana, Haderer, and the large number of cartoonists worldwide who have been imprisoned or tortured by various governments, and the folks who spend a grand to sit next to me can hear and see aaaall about 'em.

Well, until security removed me.