February 9, 2006
Drawing the Line
By Mark
Davis
A pair of cartoon
controversies has provided an interesting opportunity for a consistency
check.
There are a lot of
people throwing down a lot of harsh opinions about the violent
Muslim reaction to a series of Danish cartoons depicting the prophet
Muhammad in a terrorist light. "Those Muslims need to understand
something about free speech," say the scolders. "When
someone prints something offensive, they need to realize that's
just part of life in a free society. They need to respect the
right to express a view, even if they find it infuriating."
That is a proper observation,
of course. How odd that plenty of people asserting it have been
unable to apply it to themselves.
Washington
Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles cranked out a panel last
week that struck a nerve so deep that the Joint Chiefs of Staff
took time out from assessing their various branches' combat readiness
to scold the cartoonist for drawing it and the paper for running
it.
Plenty of
Americans also found the Toles cartoon horribly offensive, heaping
their own condemnations on the artist and the paper. It is worth
noting that no one so far has set fire to the Washington Post
building.
It does seem, however,
that there is a big lesson that needs to be handed around and
studied hard in both America and the Muslim world: Freedom means
people will sometimes do things you don't like.
But since freedom
also brings responsibility, it is worth examining whether each
example of provocative cartooning pushes beyond a certain line
of decency or extends to outright recklessness.
The political point
of the Toles cartoon is that the Army is in far worse shape than
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lets on. That strikes me as
uninformed and absurdly pessimistic, but it is a view that has
been found on plenty of op-ed pages running anti-war columnists.
What threatens
to put readers with pitchforks at the Post's door is
his choice to represent the army as a quadruple-amputee soldier
with "Dr." Donald Rumsfeld at his side describing the
patient with the Secretary's term for our fighting forces: "battle-hardened."
There are too many
real Americans missing too many limbs in real military hospitals
to just let this go. Mr. Toles chose an image he knew would inflame
people in order to add punch to his criticism of Mr. Rumsfeld.
But please note that
it is Mr. Rumsfeld, and not any soldier, who is the target of
the cartoon. See the medical chart with "U.S. Army"
at the foot of the bed? The Army is the patient. It's called a
metaphor.
There is no such device
at play in the cartoon showing Muhammad's turban as a sizzling
bomb. Or the one showing him waving off freshly arrived suicide
bombers in the afterlife because "We have run out of virgins!"
A Danish newspaper
commissioned a dozen such cartoons from various artists to gauge
the European Muslim capacity for enduring the slings and arrows
of free expression at their expense.
I guess you could
say the results are in. Muslim protesters have reacted with arson,
death threats and showers of rocks at Danish embassies and missions
across the Arab world.
While Americans have
limited their anti-Toles rhetoric to angry letters and talk show
calls, I am reaching a matching conclusion about these two cartoon
dramas.
All the artists involved
employed shock value to get their points across. Agree or disagree
with those points, there is no doubt that all succeeded.
But that is not blanket
justification. An artist does not need to ridicule or demonize
the prophet Muhammad in order to make the point that some Muslims
are murderous lunatics. Nor is it necessary to portray the Army
as a limbless soldier just to poke at the Bush administration.
But that's what was
done. The artists had the freedom to do it, and readers have the
freedom to respond with vigorous criticism.
But not with violent
rampages.
Mark
Davis is a columnist for the Dallas
Morning News.
The Mark Davis
Show is heard weekdays nationwide on the ABC Radio Network.
His e-mail address is mdavis@wbap.com.
