Everyone seems to love “On Satire,” Joe Sacco’s cartoon for the Guardian responding to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but some may not. Some may detest “On Satire” because the cartoon was reverent toward the victims. They may think Charlie Hebdo‘s Muhammad cartoons justified the attack, or were straightforwardly racist. On the other hand, some may detest Sacco’s cartoon because it portrays a mob chasing Muslims. Knowing that he made an earlier ethnographic comic about Palestine, they may suspect Sacco of trying to distract viewers from the real business of condemning Islam wholesale, stepping up drone attacks, and leveling Gaza.
For my part, however, I detest it for being so thoroughly middle-of-the-road and ambivalent even as it affects a seemingly bold, seemingly nuanced stance on an subject that is not simply abstract “issues,” but a messy, bloody conflict with a long history. Allow me a condensed close reading.
First panel: Oh, Joe Sacco is passionate to be sure, but he is not hotheaded! He is sincere and reverent, and looks good in a loincloth.
Second panel: Pens made into crosses, how very poignant, yet so visually klunky. Hey, you know who kills lots of journalists? The U.S. But their victims mostly aren’t Christian, so you’d have to figure out how to make a laptop into a crescent and star, so never mind. And there were Muslim Charlie Hebdo victims too, but whatever.
Third panel: Walks away still musing metonymically on “the pen.” If only it were a clever reference to Le Pen, but it isn’t.
Fourth panel: Black man falling out of a tree with a banana but no loincloth, with a big branch suggestively hiding his indubitably endowed groin, equals not racist because aware of its racism! Why don’t you just burn one of those pen-crosses on his lawn? Oh, because he lives in a tree. Ooo, Joe Sacco is such a firebrand, I can’t wait to see an anthropomorphized Koran going down on a pig!
Fifth panel: “The More You Know,” the less you worry about offending Israel. France actually has laws on the books prohibiting hate speech, and it has recently used those laws to shut down anti-Semitic Twitter users. Now hundreds of French troops are deployed protecting Jewish sites. Where are the troops protecting Muslims? Why don’t you look THAT up?
Sixth panel: The professor plods on- remember anti-Semitism? Subtext: perhaps Muslims are anti-Semitic, perhaps? And by the way, what is this about the evil Jew preying on the “working class?” Stalin was a genocidal anti-Semite, but in the West the conflation of Jews and Communists should be so familiar as to be unworthy of mention. Get your hate straight. And of COURSE anti-Semitism matters in 2015, just like in 1933- France has had dozens of hate attacks against Jews in the last few years.
Seventh panel: More rambling prattle, but I’m getting distracted by Sacco’s face– are those eggs with eyelashes strapped to his head?
Eighth panel: Again, so brave! Martyred for his bold stance on reasoned meandering ambivalent equivocation. “But perhaps when we tire of holding up our middle finger we can try to think about why the world is the way it is…” So mature, so stoic, so profoundly deserving of the royal “we.” Sure talks a lot for a guy with a severed larynx.
Ninth panel: Abu-Ghraib Joe sez, “What is it about Muslims?” Wait, what is what about who? Who tortured who again? Traumatized prisoners say the darnedest things!
Last panel: Oh, I get it! “Drive them from their homes,” sort of like Israel right? He is part of an angry mob now– Israeli settlers? the IDF? Right-wing European nationalists? Well, there’s no hilarious stereotype to explicate that tragic-ish image- you just figure out that the woman being chased has a headscarf, the guy being chased has a beard and a taqiyah, and there’s Joe Sacco looking tough and angry again, this time holding a club while ironically continuing to mouth reasoned platitudes. But wouldn’t “sorting out how we fit in each others’ world” be illustrated better by the Prophet getting a back-door fist-bump from Gene Simmons of KISS—a Jew who genuinely doesn’t give a fuck who he offends?
But seriously, did Sacco say, “What is it about Muslims?” Not “some Muslims,” not “jihadi Muslims” or “fundamentalist Muslims” or whatever, but “Muslims in this time and place” (so qualified, yet so totalizing). The issue here is all about context. Explicit context: the jungle Negro and the hook-nosed moneylender are inoffensive because we are told not to be offended. Implicit context: the reader is not a Muslim, and can relate to crosses and complaints about those Muslims nowadays. Ignored context: radicalized Muslims are responding to a state of indiscriminate, cowardly, automated, endless imperial warfare. Arbitrary murder is answered by arbitrary murder.
And there is no reason to think that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were unaware of the threats made to the lives of American cartoonists drawing the Prophet, as well as of the infamous Danish Muhammad cartoon (which the CH staff can be seen discussing on video). They absolutely deserved to draw their cartoons and not lose their lives, BUT what if they deliberately took a risk based on principle? What if they chose a stance that put them in the line of fire? Is that foolish or brave? Are they martyrs or casualties of war? Don’t ask Joe Sacco.
Writing in Slate on French secularism, or laïcité, Rachel Levy points out that in French public schools, “Muslim girls can’t wear their veils, Jewish boys can’t wear their kippot, and Christians can’t draw attention to their crosses.” As a country that has always had religious fanatics and never, despite strenuous fantasizing, a substantial monoculture, Americans don’t readily identify with a political stance that curtails expression of personal beliefs. And yet, America has the enormously successful Family Guy, a show that I think tops South Park, Ed The Happy Clown, Angry Youth Comix, or any Ralph Bakshi movie for unfettered omnidirectional contempt and bile. In France, culture is taken seriously enough to enforce bans on clothing, whereas in the U.S., to paraphrase Slavoj Zizek, culture is what people believe in without taking it seriously.
This is where I come from in trying to explain my repulsion at Sacco’s nonspecific sanctimony. France embraced African-American expatriates, but seems committed to marginalization of religious minorities. America elected a black President, but also keeps imprisoning black men, or just executing them in the street, or in Wal-Mart (maybe they all just fell out of trees?). Plus Americans can’t make art about serious ethical issues without being mealy-mouthed and pompous, unless it’s just a TV show and is thus divorced from any larger meaning. Saudi Arabia, from which the Charlie Hebdo attacks (like the 9/11 attacks) may have been planned, is the country with the most repressive Islamist regime in the world, and is also our key Arab ally. These three seemingly distinct places share one philosophy: money talks. And if all you have to offer by way of protest are overexplained, hyperqualified, utterly trite faux-provocations, that bullshit walks.
________
For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.
This is perhaps the most willfully literal and close-minded misinterpretation of a comic I’ve read in a long time. Almost every single moment of irony in Sacco’s piece is cherry-picked for words or images to take at face value. Whatever elements don’t fit the argument are unmentioned or misrepresented, and the tone and nuance of the piece is completely ignored. Made all the more ironic by the repeated insistence that it is Sacco who is missing something:
“Ignored context: radicalized Muslims are responding to a state of indiscriminate, cowardly, automated, endless imperial warfare.”
Except that this context isn’t ignored — it’s the entire point of a panel depicting the Abu Ghraib atrocities. “What it is” in Sacco’s question about “Muslims IN THIS TIME AND PLACE” (emphasis mine) is exactly that they are “responding to a state of indiscriminate, cowardly, automated, endless imperial warfare.” You write “Who tortured who again?” as if the panel is somehow implying a confusion on the issue of American torture of Muslim prisoners, when it is clearly and unmistakably (except, I guess, through staggering tone-deafness or willful blindness) referencing American mistreatment of Muslims in the “War on Terror.”
There is a similar level of naive/surface misreading and misrepresentation in nearly every line of this essay. For now, I think that one can stand in for the rest of them.
Yeah, I wasn’t so big on Sacco’s comic, but this piece is just weird.
Sacco’s collaborator Chris Hedges wrote an essay that shares Sacco’s point of view but seems a little stronger to me:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_message_from_the_dispossessed_20150111
Both pieces seem to assume that the attacks represent some kind of collective response to Western crimes against Muslims. I’m not sure that’s true, although both of those guys certainly know more than me about the Middle East.
Of course Sacco wants to have his noncommital outrage and eat it too, as regards the Abu-Ghraib image. He just showed you a monkey-person and an evil k*ke, followed by a jihadi executioner, so you will say, “No, I am not angry about these images, because they are drawn in a spirit of liberation and mutual tolerance.” They are “mere images.” Joe Sacco was not beheaded- it’s just an image. So why, he asks on his raised soapbox of electrocution, can’t you Muslims take a joke?
Tell me seriously that you think he intended his statement on “mere images” to be read as sympathy for Muslims who react violently to the Abu-Ghraib images. The bad people respond with violence, the good people respond with “thinking about why the world is the way it is.” I’m not endorsing the opposite; I’m just saying that acting like this is some kind of profound “nuanced” insight is pretty irritating.
“The professor plods on- remember anti-Semitism? Subtext: perhaps Muslims are anti-Semitic, perhaps?”
I read it as the subtext being Muslims are victims of racism like jews were in 1933?
“And by the way, what is this about the evil Jew preying on the “working class?”
It’s clearly a reference to stereotypes about Jewish moneylenders. Your comment on this is confusing.
Pallas, in the U.S., any reference to “the working class” implies a socialist worldview. Even believing that classes exist is “in this time and place” a stance that differs sharply from the Nazis, who referred simply to an undifferentiated mass of “people,” and not a multiplicity of classes.
Jack, thanks for the Chris Hedges link. It underscores the fact that leftist types really like the “On Satire” comic, for reasons which seem to me to be confused. Hedges says, “The message to Muslims is clear: Your traditions, history and suffering do not matter. Your story will not be heard… And as Sacco pointed out, if we cannot hear these stories we will endlessly trade state terror for terror. ” Where is Hedges getting that? What “Muslim story” is being told- other than in the last two panels?
To be clear, Sacco is unambiguously attempting to condemn anti-Muslim violence in the last panel. But at that point it really doesn’t matter- “Muslims in this time and place” are the ones who can’t take a joke, and basically we should avoid sinking to their level (hence my title).
But Sacco is emphatically arguing that these are NOT “just images.” That’s why he pointedly asks if the anti-Semitic “joke” would have been received the same in 1933, which (through both narrative structure and layout of the page) ties the anti-Semitic atrocities of the Nazis to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. He says outright that drawing these images is “A Vapid Use of the Pen.”
“Pallas, in the U.S., any reference to “the working class” implies a socialist worldview.”
That is simply incorrect, as are so many other things you state as “fact” or obvious. Which leads me to believe you are simply interpreting everything (the cartoon, other people’s comments) from within a very rigidly structured worldview of personal definitions and understandings, which we cannot possibly hope to access or argue with.
Hmmm everyone but Bert seems convinced that Sacco can parade a bunch of stereotypical and offensive images and just say “but I’m being ironic” and get not only some kind of free pass, but credit for some sort of depth of insight. I don’t get it. It reminds me of many other forms of self-congratulatory liberal self-indulgence masquerading as sympathy for the oppressed. The whole comic convinces me that Sacco is very convinced that Sacco is very clever and very moral, but doesn’t do much to convince me to share those beliefs.
But he isn’t just parading these images, like Crumb might, but in his text is actively deriding them. He is asserting that, of course, we have a right to draw these images, but then multiple times, and across the entire bottom tier, explicitly (not even implicitly!) saying that it’s vapid, a waste of time, merely holding up a middle finger, and that we need to think about what is actually happening in the world that leads to events such as these rather than taking a puerile and simplistic stance towards “freedom of speech.”
I think the Nazis portrayed Jews both as predatory capitalists and as puppeteers of international socialism, didn’t they? But the “working-class” reference did seem a little off to me the first time I read the comic, in what remains my sole instance of semi-agreement with Bert’s reading.
Also Hedges quotes an Islamic scholar, who says of legal systems that allow for honor killings, “It’s no excuse for murder, but it explains things in terms of honor, which no longer means anything in the West. ” With his leaden use of stereotypes, is Joe Sacco saying that he is fine with initiating a vendetta against Jews, Muslims, and blacks? Or is he saying precisely the opposite- that nobody should ever get mad about an image, because then the terrorists win?
“I did not feel like beating my chest and reaffirming the principles of free speech.”
“My first reaction was sadness.”
“It has never struck me as anything other than a vapid way to use the pen.”
“Can I lay this game too? Sure…I’m allowed to offend, right?”
“Would it have been as funny in 1933?”
“When we draw a line, we are often crossing one too. Because lines on paper are a weapon, and satire is meant to cut to the bone. But whose bone? What exactly is the target? And why?”
“Yes, I affirm our right to ‘take the piss’…But perhaps when we tire of holding up our middle finger we can try to think about why the world is the way it is.”
“If we answer ‘because something is deeply wrong with them’…then let us drive them from their homes…for that is going to be far easier than sorting out how we fit in each other’s world.”
Just thought I would pull out all these very pertinent pieces of the narration that seem to be getting lost in an inability to understand the relationship of pictures to words, words to each other, and how irony or nuance actually function.
Stepping back now because I’m getting irrationally annoyed, I’ll check in later to read responses and probably apologize again for being so easily agitated.
“With his leaden use of stereotypes, is Joe Sacco saying that he is fine with initiating a vendetta against Jews, Muslims, and blacks? Or is he saying precisely the opposite- that nobody should ever get mad about an image, because then the terrorists win?”
He is saying neither, and the fact that you think this is the dichotomy we have to choose from is precisely the foundational problem with your interpretation.
Okay, actually leaving for a while now. Sorry to pull a classic Internet-comments freakout and jump right back in after saying I was leaving. Why do I feel like I’m fifteen and just learning how to have a fight on the Internet right now?
And of course Joe Sacco isn’t “vapid,” which is what truly grinds my gears. Everyone else is (Christian-God rest their souls), but HE is using the stereotypes to recall us to our true shared humanity and begin the serious work of sincere and thoughtful dialogue. Now, look at a bucktoothed Chinaman!
Is there at least some agreement that saying “what is it about Muslims in this time and place” rather than “some Muslims in this time and place” is an unfortunate misstep?
I think it’s maybe interesting to compare this to Caro’s piece, in terms of the rhetorical place of the first person speaker. Caro in her essay asks pretty specific questions about satire, and tries to investigate it from a number of angles, ending without necessarily arriving at an answer. Sacco’s ambivalence is much more definite and authoritative, and leaves you with a fairly neat moral. I wasn’t as put off as Bert, but I do find the elevation of the cartoonist as distributor of pearls of nuance fairly grating.
And saying “what is it about Muslims” while standing on the fucking Abu Ghraib torture box??? Why the hell is that okay?
Sorry– I’m micro-commenting on my own post I realize– but please don’t tell me “he’s kidding.” All the ultra-grownup anti-vapid martyr-of-sincerity stuff that Jason helpfully quotes above rules that out as an aesthetic option.
Well…I think the point of the Abu Ghraib image is supposed to be, “why are Muslims upset?” and the answer is supposed to be, “because of things like Abu Ghraib.” So the image is supposed to answer the question by pointing to the way that Muslims have been oppressed.
Or that’s how I read it….
But only the Muslims are killing cartoonists, right? Jews, blacks, and the families and governments of beheaded Western journalists are apparently all relatively fine with being portrayed in malicious ways. And how is his tone supposed to have suddenly shifted from sincere to ironic?
I actually think Bert might be doing some kind of parody here.
Not that anyone has been killed for showing images of Abu-Ghraib (as far as we know), but doing so irreverently would probably raise some hackles. This all reminds me of the whole “you have to be French to get it” thing. If Sacco’s cartoon is going to use all these loaded images and make no clear statement, why is everyone praising it for being “nuanced” (my new least favorite word) as opposed to irresponsibly insufferable?
I see Jack is familiar with my work on Caro’s thread. Well played.
Actually, strike that. Plenty of people have been killed because of the Abu-Ghraib image- it just happens not to be a fictive stereotype, but an actual event.
Some elements have heard news of “terrorist” outrage in Paris … “muslim extremism” … “atrocity” … JeSuisCharlie … and have thought to themselves “o bloody ‘ell” not another excuse for a crusade against muslims haven’t we done enough already … and so part of this group became part of the JeNeSuisPasCharlie Campaign etc. Not all of course – there are also well meaning JeNeSuisPasCharlie Campaigners. The JeSuisAhmed campaign is basically part of this – saying look this has nothing to do with moderate Islam – don’t use this as an excuse to bomb more mosques etc. Overall it is a bit of a mess of conflicting positions, agendas, ideology … but it is interesting for sociology analysis.
I have read Joe Sacco – I read him when I wanted to get the downtrodden muslim perspective but his politics are no secret – his points are unchanged “Joe Sacco”. There’s also Robert Fisk et al good for perspective but their politics is fixed.
Sacco’s comic is pretty much a guy processing his feelings over a safe, cartoony depiction of a horrific crisis– that everyone is responding to as if it were brave and heroic. This comic is basically Maus. And if Noah still purports to dislike Maus, I challenge him to tell me why “On Satire” is better (besides just being shorter).
My favorite part is your takedown of Panel 7. Personally, I’d prefer wearing a hood over my head and standing on a box to being forced to view so many Sacco self-portraits.
I didn’t say I liked it! I was just explaining how that panel is supposed to work.
It leaves me mostly indifferent. Shorter than Maus is in fact way better than Maus, though I think Spiegelman’s Maus character is less annoying to look at in panel after panel than the Sacco-I-wish-I-was-Crumb character.
I mean…to me, I think he’s taking a leftist position that free speech is good and Islamophobia is bad and we should think about how we use free speech so as not to promote Islamophobia and imperialism. It seems like it ends up being more about Joe Sacco, Feeling Cartoonist! though — the multiple self-portraits, the “daring” imagery, the walls of text nattering on and on…. it doesn’t seem very well done, and the message seems like it gets drowned out in the blare of the Crumb-derived self-loathing/self-hagiography.
I just found Joe Sacco’s response boringly Joe Sacco. He is good when he is telling someone else’s story – giving voice to people that are normally ignored. So I like Joe Sacco when he vanishes and becomes the voice and eyes of someone else in complete hell on Earth situations. But when he returns to being Joe Sacco he becomes superficial and one dimensional. To me his message in this piece is plain as day but maybe to others his message is constipated.
Basically he is comparing Charlie Hebdo to those creating racist images of black people and the Nazi Germany (1933 …) imagery of Jews, then he shows the Jihadi cutting off a westerners head image but says the west are responsible for the situation, then Abu Ghraib, then says as a westerner he will be expected to respond to the Charlie Hebdo outrage by taking part in another round of reprisals against muslims.
It’s basically a dialogue as to what he is expected to do as a westerner compared to reality as perceived by Joe Sacco. It is an authentic Joe Sacco piece.
He is using everything the JeNeSuisPasCharlie campaign have used against Charlie Hebdo including the firing of a cartoonist for anti-Semitism.
So Charlie Hebdo – racist – tick
Charlie Hebdo – islamophobe – tick
Charlie Hebdo – like propaganda arm of Nazi Germany – tick
Charlie Hebdo – Under Jewish influence – tick
Westerners responsible for Muslim extremism – tick
Joe Sacco has a few fair points but everything else is bent to his own agenda.
It’s weird- it seems like if you’re worried about Islamophobia, you have to like this comic, and if you’re more worried about free speech, you don’t. I for one am more worried about Islamophobia (not saying cultural community values always trump freedom, it’s just in this particular circumstance), and I don’t read it as a comic that tries especially hard to avoid Islamophobia. It seems to me to say (to the extent it can be said to be saying anything, despite all the talking), Muslims couldn’t be bothered join the community of freethinking hate-peddlers, so they brought this on themselves. Which i think is because of how images work. Anti-Islamophobes trust Sacco to be using hate images in the service of free speech, while free speech advocates don’t trust Sacco’s hate images to be saying anything other than “Islamophobia is bad.” His hate images are not too hateful- the multicultural types are convinced by their restraint, and the Occidentalists are angered by their restraint. And what amounts to restraint? Sacco’s big bath of empty dithering verbiage seems to work like a mist, diffusing the force of the image like, if you will, a hooka. Why does the last image escape? Why do people see that last image and say, I didn’t believe in the monkey-man, I didn’t believe in the Shylock, the words make the beheading and the torture scene a regrettable error, but I fear the mob?
I’m trying to tease this out…I’m pretty sure Sacco does not intend to be saying this “Muslims couldn’t be bothered join the community of freethinking hate-peddlers, so they brought this on themselves.”
You’re arguing that the images work against what seems to be his intention, right? There’s lots of verbiage, but the energy of the comics, such as it is, is in showing a bunch of racial stereotypes and then imagining a purge against Muslims?
“Bothered TO join the community of freethinking hate-peddlers.” Sorry in advance and in retrospect for typos past and future.
I appreciate your good will, Noah, and you have the right gist, but I maintain that the words are just a bunch of noises that make no sense, other than to sound reassuring and rational. Visually, the comic is basically a dystopic fantasy (i.e. nightmare) of scary hate-bait, with Joe Sacco trying to wake himself up from going to the cartoonists graveyard, then seeing subhuman reflections of his racist unconscious, then being beheaded and tortured as punishment. He winds up with a club in his hand chasing a Muslim.
I agree that the last panel is, in the most straightforward sense, a depiction of defenseless Muslims being persecuted. But essentially that is all on which you have to hang this idea of “intention.”
It is completely about himself, to an extent that he probably doesn’t realize he’s using crosses and blaming Muslims for his (Joe Sacco’s) inner visual monologue- a tension resolved by picking up a stick and getting revenge.
I don’t know that anyone is still following this, and to attribute neurotic impulses to Sacco’s comic might lose even Noah, but that’s ultimately what I’m left with. This thing is a masochistic mini-seizure (petit mal), and it has no coherent narrative. The only reason I dislike it so much is because it’s another example of enlightened lefties finding absolution in their navel lint.
Bert, if you read the text that goes with the torture image I think you’ll see that it’s being used as an example of the kind of image Muslims find difficult to laugh off.
I think some of these articles are to an exceptionally high standard – I am sure you would agree with me Jason. I have learnt a lot on this forum. Time to take a step back.
You haven’t lost me, Bert! I like that reading. Sacco is ostensibly responding to fanatic iconoclasm by creating a potpourri of frightening images, and then taming them through sensitive monologue. But in fact, you’re saying that it just ends up being a narcissistic panicked fever dream, deploying nightmare images from the racist id while the ego preens itself on liberal boilerplate. I can see that.
Well, it’s no In the Shadow of No Towers, that’s for sure.
But I stand in envious awe of your moral certitude, Bert.
It’s like going to the shops for a bag of potatoes and returning home with a bag of carrots.
I only wish that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons had been examined to the same level of detail and standard.
Thanks Jones. Shock and awe was my aim. David Petraeus is my life coach. (Don’t believe the hype David!)
ZAN, perhaps you thought I didn’t read the full word bubble when I voiced my aversion to ‘saying “what is it about Muslims” while standing on the fucking Abu Ghraib torture box.” But since we know that the actual Abu Ghraib image was not laughed off, but has swelled the ranks of jihadi factions, Sacco’s statement from the torture box is either a sincere indictment, or a sudden attempt, after eight panels of blank-spectacled straightfaced wisdom, to be tongue-in-cheek and/or droll.
Sure, Sacco was reeling us in for the first eight panels, so he could snag us at the end with his scare-quotes plan to drive the humorless Arabs into the sea. And if we aren’t laughing, are we not the true humorless Arabs? If we don’t laugh at Charlie Hebdo, is it not because we are insufficiently Charlie?
I could be quite happy to have a hooded prisoner saying any number of absurd things. “The RPG launcher was THIS big.” “What, me worry?” “I forgot to cut eyeholes, so sue me.” “Okay, you guys, it’s getting cold. Can I have my pants back? Guys?” Whatever.
But to me this image was saying, this is a dangerous image that I, Joe Sacco, am not afraid to use. But I, Joe Sacco, feel guilty for using it, so I will put myself under the hood abd blame Muslims for making this a dangerous image, and not just a tragic image.
Joe Sacco is beheaded, and Joe Sacco is tortured, and Joe Sacco seeks revenge. The same Joe Sacco who was tiring of the middle finger is now, two panels later, in need of a dramatic ending, and catharts our anxiety with an unfunny pogrom.
We are all Charlie, and we are all Joe Sacco, If we aren’t all inside the head of some sensitive white male provocateur, there’s no point in trying to fit together.
This essay, that predictably receives Noah’s support, is prime Hooded Utilitarian style: a vindictive, thudding literalism disguised as psychological subtext. Dan Clowes gives himself a minor, self-deprecating cameo as a middle-aged pervert in Ghost World and Noah takes this representation as as definitive truth and proceeds to interpret everything in the comic down to perceiving secret, coded panel compositions as evidence of an evil, invisible authorial presence throughout. Clowes pens a screed against self-absorbed internet critics in his short story Justin M. Damiano and the Utilitarians applaud it as a self-portrait. And Joe Sacco’s use of offensive images is treated as a representation of his actual views, not with any evidence but as a faith proposition.
The thing is, unless you think artists can get very far telling stories about picnics in fields of daisies, any art and storytelling that our culture considers worthwhile will incorporate negative things. There’s nothing more to this interpretive method than the determination to treat the artist as being on the side of the negative thing, and the substitution of a narrative about the artist’s journey through the work for engagement with the art. Are you writing about cancer? You’re on the side of the cancer. Taking on racism? Any representation of racism will be interpreted as a straightforward expression of your views. Or, maybe: have you gotten it together enough to draw a comic? Anything you put on paper is ammunition for these critics to avenge that essential insult.
Now, to save Noah the trouble, any attempt, however painstakingly justified, to argue with this twaddle will be met with the facile invocation of subtext and layers to claim the defense is diminishing the work while their cartoonish demonization is lending it depth.
Hah! I thought, “hey, it’s Deelish on a comments thread that has nothing to do with Dan Clowes! Novel!”
I am sorry I doubted your ability to bring up your driving obsession. Kudos to you, sir.
Re that ninth panel misstep – changing the text to “some Muslims” doesn’t improve it much. That’s Sacco in the hood, right? Does he think theres a reason anyone needs to share a religion with the victim to be outraged by torture? Or, put another way, does he think some Muslims should be – or actually were – less outraged than anyone else by anything that went on in Abu Ghraib before the invasion?
Abu Ghraib before the invasion? Maybe I’m missing something. Anyhow, yes, I am a thudding literalist who never judges the intent behind a racist image. Because there’s not much of a point to figuring out what someone wants you to think that they think that they’re saying. I am not calling Joe Sacco a racist, and am glad he did a comic about Palestine. But being a documentarian and making a cultural allegory are really different things. I think this comic is lame, and the stakes it chooses are pretty high.
Saddam tortured people at Abu Ghraib for years; it was notorious before the American’s got there and continued the tradition.
Pre-invasion torture- that does ring a bell. I could have looked it up.
As to whether Sacco thinks one needs to be Muslim to be offended by torture, I am certain he does not. But it was a Muslim being tortured by an American in the photo he’s referencing. Beyond that it’s speculation as to what he intends, or what it means regardless of his intention. He chooses to wear the hood (we assume, since he’s the only one who has talked the whole time), and while doing so to blame Muslims for overreacting to images. He’s the one singling out Muslims, and Muslims have responded violently to torture photos from Abu Ghraib.
Whether Sacco is being funny, I talked about my thoughts above, you be the judge.
Bert – Well, yes, maybe I was laying it on a bit thick and I’m sure you’re right about Joe Sacco.
Agree with how you see the image in that panel, but as a reader I want to understand the point being made, so I make inferences. Hey, its Joe Sacco, its the Guardian, I understand all that stuff – I could explain it to someone who doesn’t get it – so I infer that maybe placing himself in the hood (that’s where the balloon is pointing) is some sort of statement of solidarity against torture, US imperialism or whatever. Maybe the text will clear it all up…. errr, no.
It is really refreshing to be agreeing with someone other than Noah.
It’s worth talking about the context of the Guardian. I really like the Guardian, but they published plenty of writing by neocon atheists like Christopher Hitchens, and the Charlie Hebdo is the perfect situation to bring the warmongering libertines out of the woodwork. I feel like a ponderous text with a bunch of nonspecific aphorisms over a loosely connected bunch of “trigger” images is open to interpretation, and thus both spineless and irresponsible.
Noah: Hey, I’ll stop mentioning Clowes when I’m satisfied by your explanation for your obsession with him. And you know very well I don’t bring that up in every thread. I’m pointing out a consistent interpretive method. In any other context I’d think Bert’s problem with satire was neurological.
You actually do bring him up in every thread. I haven’t written or thought about him in months…maybe in a year? But if you want to prove that you are not in fact a Clowes-a-holic, you’re welcome to just never mention him here again.
Edit: Yep; haven’t talked about him in more than a year and a half here, and my last post about him was positive.
Sure, just show up and accuse people who don’t share your enlightened views of being brain-damaged. The dialogue can only blossom from there.
And where’s the guy from Facebook who insulted me and then referred to himself as capital-P “Professor?” Still waiting to hear his angle.
So, what about the Guardian? You seem surprised they’d publish the likes of Christopher Hitchens – any particular reason? After all, its a mainstream British newspaper run by vaguely centre-left bourgeois liberals; quite possibly they’d take Hitchens at face value as a lefty with a “controversial” opinion rather than a neocon. Whatever, I don’t think support for military action is the kind of political red line for them that it would be for some of the readership, the Guardianistas that On Satire would be aimed at. Thats liberals for you.
No, not surprised, just pointing out that Islamophobea read the Guardian. The context is murky- and plenty of folks (even in a New Yorker op-Ed by George Packer) are advocating a violent response to the massacre.
Bert, what do you expect when you say things like, “But the women kidnapped by Boko Haram are not eligible for French government benefits”? I didn’t say I thought you had a neurological problem, I said I would think that in any other context. It’s like you’re conducting some kind of exercise in enumerating all the possibilities for misunderstanding a comic strip. The last thing you seem to be interested in doing is permitting Sacco his actual statement and engaging with it as a commentary on Muslim/Western relations. And yes, I think most readers would conclude you were accusing him of racism. Someone actually used this strip as a hypothetical example of a strategy of misapprehension that could turn it into a racist call to arms before you published this.
Noah, your last post about Clowes was not positive. It was about how you think The Death Ray is just another superhero comic, and that you consider it superior to Clowes’ oeuvre for that reason.
And I don’t bring Clowes up in every thread. Off the top of my head, I commented on that attack piece on Spurgeon and Hodler, your post with the subtitle “Ditko is dead,” your article about how Orange is the New Black underserves the male prison population, and your post about how you /don’t/ think Bart Beaty stole your ideas for his book. All without once mentioning Clowes. I only brought him up in one other non-Clowes related thread that I can remember, and that was also to point out a parallel to your Clowes criticism.
What I’ve done is comment on your Clowes posts to point out the weirdness of your interpretations. You have two canned responses: one, to pretend your attacks are complimentary and that I’m robbing his work of depth, and two, to call me an obsessive. I argued as carefully as I could and you still haven’t explained your own reasons for pursuing him with strained accusations of misogyny, etc.
Like I said, it’s a context. It’s funny, Justin M. Damiano was published before this site came into being, but it seems ever more eerily prescient. As Clowes said on his inspiration, “I felt like a lot of these guys have an agenda that has nothing to do with an honest response to what they’re looking at. And there’s something about them—I don’t know. They are sort of a negation of the artistic process: you become a film critic in order to engage with this art form but you proceed without really engaging it, just trying to find a story that fits some preconceived narrative or settles some unspoken score. I found it really appalling in a lot of cases, and oddly fascinating.”
I guess I expect basic courtesy, but hey, it’s the internet. Free speech! Egalite, liberte, indignite!
And for someone who seems to enjoy nitpicking, I would ask you to find an instance in which I’ve called Joe Sacco a racist. His images are racist, which he knows, and which I know he knows. The actual aesthetic impact of the comic, to me, is a train wreck. A train wreck that happens to have political implications.
As does the Boko Haram cartoon. I discussed it on the Lost in Translation thread as well, where I concluded (as I’m sure you’ll disagree) that it could be transposed with no changes whatsoever into a far-right anti-immigrant publication.
I’m glad you like these cartoons so much. That’s fine. But it just doesn’t help your argument (and yes there’s a larger CH-related carton-allegory-worthy moral here) to just throw around random cruel disparagements and pretend you’ve made a critique.
And just for non-laughs, allow me to break down why the Boko Haram joke is not only racist, but stupid.
The equivalent joke, for an American scenario, would be having the recent wave of child immigrants from Central America, many of whom were undoubtedly abused sexually on their way to the U.S. border, lining up with pregnant bellies and demanding food stamps. That makes sense. It is even absurd enough to maybe be a legible caricature of racist views.
But a more accurate analogy of the CH cartoon would be the students who were kidnapped/disappeared in Guerrero, Mexico, demanding food stamps. Think about it, all you neurologically undamaged Francophiles, and think- does that make any sense?
It only works if ALL Mexicans are immigrants, and frankly, I don’t think that even the biggest anti-immigration racist would think that a Mexican person born in Mexico, living in Mexico, is an illegal alien. Is it funny as an anti-racist to pretend that racists think that all non-emigrating foreign people are immigrants?
The guillotine scaffold where brilliant satire goes to die….
Deelish, this is not a thread about Dan Clowes. Get vaguely on topic, or I’ll start deleting your comments.
And probably best just to close this at this point; thanks for commenting all.