To some, the bigoted nature of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons is clear. “It’s a racist publication,” Ms. [Francine] Prose, a former president of PEN, told The Nation last week. “Let’s not beat about the bush.” (nytimes)
since when is islam a race? not to beat around, or even about, the bush, but i always thought it was a gender.
i do think that shooting people over cartoons is a sort of hyperbolic pc: they kill you for caricature; we just exile you for using the wrong phonemes, thug. but people really do confuse being offended with being assaulted, which would indicate that, unaccountably, they have never been assaulted. no one has a right not to be offended, or else each of us has a concomitant duty to maintain absolute silence. christ i'm offended all day every day, for example by the words 'impactful', 'relatable', and 'proactive'. it feels like an attack on my family and my identity: i come from a long line of prose stylists. consider the latest ad for microsoft robotics: 'the real question that needs to be aksed is, what can we do that is impactful?' fetch me my club, b, and i'll show you.
