PEN Group Blacklists Charlie Hebdo

An attack on free expression has come from one of the most unlikely places. A recent Times headline read “Six PEN Members Decline Gala After Award for Charlie Hebdo," (NYT, 4/26/15). Salman Rushdie, who was the object of a fatwa for The Satanic Verses: A Novel, was not part of the protest. Peter Carey, the novelist was one of the group which included Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, Taiye Selasi and Michael Ondaatje. The Times quoted Peter Carey thusly, “A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about? All this is complicated by PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.” Isn’t this a little like allowing the schoolyard bully to terrorize his classmates by saying that he has a troubled home life?” One of the few good things about the French is the high esteem in which the hold free expression. There's probably no other country on earth where all shades of the political spectrum adhere to a similar veneration for free speech. Yes the French can be arrogant, impossible and even as racially insensitive as liberal American members of organizations of PEN who camouflage their prejudices by signing self-congratulatory petitions against the oppression of  have-nots while lacking countervailing sensitivity to the protecting the rights of the haves--like themselves. But how can they not stand tall for Charlie Hebdo which is after all an equal opportunity employer lambasting both Islam and its most virulent critics. Indeed on January 7, the day of the massacre, Michel Houellebecq, who famously termed Islam “the stupidest religion," was pilloried on the cover of the magazine.

Discussing "The Death of Klinghoffer" or Stepping in It

John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer at the Met

Getting involved in the current debate about the John Adams opera The Death of Klinghoffer (“With New “Death of Klinghoffer,” Furor Only Grows,” NYT 10/14/14)  is like intentionally stepping in dog shit. However, particularly if you haven’t seen the opera, you may be tempted to step in it— even if you're wearing sneakers with crenellated soles. Or perhaps you didn’t see where you were going. But join the crowd. From journalistic accounts it's apparent the opera has elicited passions for and against by many of who have never seen it. “Many protestors, who want the Met to cancel ‘Klinghoffer,’ have never seen the opera,” the Times remarked about the naysayers. But who ever said seeing a work of art is a qualification for making a judgment about it? One thing that can be said is that the venom of many of the opponents who have unleashed torrents of threats is reminiscent of the reaction the cartoons of Mohammad in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten produced among those who felt that certain people and ideas are too sacrosanct to be represented with anything short of a beatific halo, if they’re allowed to be represented at all. This phenomenon might be called "dictatorship of the victimized" and it creates the kind of strange bedfellows you also find among militant feminist and fundamentalist Christians who both oppose the idea that pornography constitutes free expression. All of this is fairly familiar. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses produced a fatwa against the writer and the respected scholar Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History has been banned in India. When Portnoy’s Complaint came out there was an outcry that the portrayal of a Jewish character who masturbated into a piece of liver created a negative view of Jews. How many of those original critics of Portnoy actually read the book? They probably would have said they didn’t need to read such filth to make a judgment. They already know what it’s about. They got the idea. Sound familiar?