Yesterday, without so much as a peep from Gabriel’s trumpet, Armageddon was declared.
No, I am not referring to the Armageddon heralded by that corpulent holdout at the Oregon bird sanctuary who, as of this writing, is probably stuffing his face hole with the last of the gummi dicks he and his fellows were sent as a joke. That was a nice effort guys, trying to shock the conscience of this country with your pathetic armed protest, but shocking the country is my job. I’m sorry that cowboy with the blue tarp didn’t get the memo.
Now…where was I? Oh yeah… so anyway, yesterday my comic book PEEK! The First hit the nation’s comic shops, and in it was a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed.
In normal times that announcement would be as newsworthy as adding milk to Cheerios. However, as far as I know, this marks the only occasion of a cartoon of that particular historical character being printed in a nationally distributed American publication in the past year, and probably the last ten.
Following the slaughter at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the major media tried to spin their unwillingness to publish any of Charlie’s Mohammed cartoons, or even a Mohammed cartoon of their own making, as either being a sign of “respect†for a potentially offended community, or else as a refusal to be goaded by terrorists into serving their purposes.
Nice try. It was horseshit then and, a year later, with the chill of that act of self-censorship still in the air, it remains a pile of horseshit. There is not a single published editorial cartoonist worthy of the tradition who, had they been allowed to, would not have drawn a cartoon of Mohammed in tribute to the courage of the fallen. And had only a handful of them been permitted to do so, that foul superstition that became a weapon against free thought and a free press would have been snuffed out forever.
Instead it persists, and even grows. The opportunity was lost.
My cartoon is not against Mohammed, Muslims or Islam. It is against censorship. This country will not escape the straightjacket of “the new normal†until it recognizes that it has been, quite effectively, terrorized. But the enemy has also made it clear, very clear, the thing that they are afraid of.
They are afraid of being laughed at.
So get laughin’.