“Can’t the cat look at the queen?” This is the saying my mother invoked to deal with surly teenage attitude. It was, of course, a rhetorical question. Darn right the cat—one’s mother—has the right to pay unsolicited attention to the self-declared royalty of a hypersensitive teen.
It came to mind in connection with the controversy over the Danish cartoons and the muslim reaction to them. Can’t a cartoonist, who is paid to make fun of everything, make fun of a religion? Well, of course he can; he has a perfect right. But the current situation would seem to expose the limits of the old saying.
The philosophical underpinning of the rhetorical question about the cat and the queen is contained in another bit of wisdom from one’s early years: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Since the cat isn’t really hurting the queen, she is being unreasonable in objecting to being looked at by him. Of course, as the cartoon controversy shows, the names vs. sticks and stones d ichotomy is wrong in suggesting a clear distinction between real weapons and mere words. Sometimes, words can hurt more than sticks and stones.
The Danish cartoonists say: Hey, wait a minute, we didn’t hit you with sticks and stones or shoot you. This is only a cartoon, for heaven’s sake. Argue back with cartoons of your own, if you want, but all this torching of embassies and threatening our lives is pretty tacky. You guys are so sensitive.
The Muslims say: Those cartoons hurt more than sticks and stones. But since words apparently have no power to hurt in your culture, we will have to behead you to make the point.
The assumption behind all this uproar is that had Party A been a little more sensitive, had Party B been a tad less sensitive, all this pain and conflict could have been avoided. But it is naïve to think that the exercise of freedom of expression can be so simple and pain-free—and not just dealing with a culture lacking the separation of church and state.
Over 10 years ago, responding to a murder/rape/suicide just off Cape, I wrote a column about the responsibility of a community to let the angry men in its midst know just how unacceptable and downright unattractive bullying is. The morning the column appeared, I answered the phone to venomous obscenities: “Why you ——. What is this —- you wrote?” Surprise! It was an angry man—that’s how he identified himself.
He was calling to let me know that my uncomplimentary comments about his kind didn’t sit well with him. Having exhausted his supply of names, he moved on to threats of sticks and stones. I was shocked. I learned that I had been naïve to think I could just have my say against angry men without arousing some of that anger against myself.
The lesson is not that the angry man was in the right to call or that I should relinguish my right to freedom of expression but that it doesn’t help to be naïve in my exercise of it. Why bother to write if the words don’t hit home, perhaps with the force of sticks and stones? And if they do, don’t be surprised if people respond in kind.
It was a terrible ordeal for Salman Rushdie when he fearfully hid out all those years of the fatwa against him. But it was perhaps naïve of him to think the Muslims he had hurt with his uncomplimentary portrayals of their religion, however indispensable to his novel, would turn the other cheek (wrong religion, for one thing).
Neo-Nazis have the legal right to demonstrate and to flaunt their obscene ideas. (I feel safer saying that here and now than I would have in Germany in 1937.) But, given the history of those ideas, for them to expect a meticulously law-abiding response from those whom those ideas grievously wound—that’s naïve and stupid.
“Use your words,” is the standard parental advice to their kids in the settling of playground disputes. It’s what we want to say to violently demonstrating Muslims. But it’s naïve to think that we get to dictate the choice of weapons.
The cat can look at the queen, sure, but there may be unforeseen consequences.
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