A full three months after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Doonesbury cartoonist and “Alpha House” creator Garry Trudeau has offered up his two cents, and they’re worth about half that. Apparently, the 12 people murdered at that office had it coming because they were “punching down.”
Have you heard a more elitist expression in your life? It doesn’t mean “avoiding jokes about babies born with cleft palates.” Nobody makes such jokes. “Punching down” means attacking your lessers. In other words, people who don’t resemble your rich, white, male, Republican, grumpy daddy. It’s the Boomer liberal ethos in a nutshell, and it’s not only classist, it’s cowardly. It can’t be a coincidence that these elitists have chosen to avoid the only victims who won’t punch them in the face (this will likely change if I ever run into Trudeau).
An Egalitarian Targets the Off-Bounds
The whole thing displays a jaw-dropping lack of self-awareness that can only come from growing up in a bubble of self-congratulation. Overindulged cowards such as Trudeau have cloaked their fear of the unwashed masses in some kind of holier-than-thou blanket of superiority, yet both are equally disgusting. It’s vile to refuse to mock one particular group because you’re scared of them, and it’s even worse to pretend you’re doing it because you’re better than them. That’s the very definition of a white supremacist.
A true egalitarian would be an equal-opportunity offender. If something is out-of-bounds, it’s up for grabs. As George Orwell put it, “Every joke is a tiny revolution.” Free speech isn’t about having the right to criticize comfortably. It’s about confronting the unconfrontable.
In France, this act isn’t some irrelevant comic strip that makes the same “Republicans are mean” joke every week. It’s an integral part of their culture. They have been drawing comics that lampoon authority since Napoleon, and cartoonists are rock stars in that country. If you were to watch “The Daily Show” or “Red Eye” in France, it wouldn’t be unusual to have a cartoonist on the panel drawing insulting caricatures of each guest. He would do this whether they were poor and brown or rich and white.
The heroes at Charlie Hebdo committed to continue that tradition, and it cost them their lives. How dare some smug brat who had his career handed to him on a silver platter scoff at their graves. His idea of questioning authority is a comic strip that mocks Texas for suggesting women who are having abortions see how developed the fetus is before they end its life. Gary’s comic depicts this as invasive and another example of the sexist GOP. He’s punching up at them while a baby dies in the background. This is what happens when the Left is in charge of the greater good.
Islam’s Intolerance Is Perfect for Skewering
The intolerance of Islam and the radical embrace of it in Paris is the perfect place for a joke. Their mayor wanted to sue Fox for declaring large swaths of the city no-go zones but when a journalist with a yarmulke did a tour with a hidden camera on him, we heard, “What is he doing here, mommy? Doesn’t he know he will be killed?”
Charlie Hebdo didn’t target Muslims, as the liberal media so often declares. It simply included them. USA Today points out, of the 38 covers Charlie Hebdo published mocking religion, the vast majority (21) attacked Christianity while only seven ridiculed Islam.
So, why can’t we make fun of them, again—because they’re “a powerless, disenfranchised minority” as Gary puts it? Last time I checked, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were doing pretty well. They’re not disenfranchised, either. Islam is too big to be classified that way. The only one thing you can say about a religion that includes 1.57 billion people is it is remarkably intolerant (and disproportionately inbred). Trudeau singles out the extremists as some kind of exception, but, as Ben Shapiro pointed out, this is a myth and the real percentage of extremist thought goes well into the majority.
I understand that not everyone can be brave enough to die for free speech. I can digest that many spoiled Westerners are unaware this freedom includes what some see as “hate speech.” I understand many of us have become so spoiled we now live in a security bubble where petulance abounds. What I can’t stand is when one of these huffy brats wags his finger at the very people who provided him with his bubble in the first place. There is nothing worse than a smug ingrate.
