"There has to be a right to insult..."
Excerpted from interviews with Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco which appeared the editorial "Only Pictures?" in The Nation, March 6 2006 issue. The subject of the interview was the worldwide controversy about the Muhammad cartoons published in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten. We realize there are many ways to analyse this episode, but a response from Mr. Spiegelman caught our eye...
Should this controversy really be framed as an issue of freedom of speech?
Spiegelman: There has to be a right to insult. You can't always have polite discourse. Where I've had to do my soul-searching is articulating how I feel about the anti-Semitic cartoons that keep coming out of government-supported newspapers in Syria and beyond. And, basically, I am insulted. But so what? These visual insults are a symptom of the problem rather than the cause.
In 1897 politicians in New York State tried to make it a major offense to publish unflattering caricatures of politicians. They were part of a Tweed-like machine who didn't like insulting drawings published of themselves, so they spent months trying to get a bill passed and make it punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison.
What happened?
Spiegelman: It got killed. We have this thing called the First Amendment that was in better shape, maybe, then than now.
Should this controversy really be framed as an issue of freedom of speech?
Spiegelman: There has to be a right to insult. You can't always have polite discourse. Where I've had to do my soul-searching is articulating how I feel about the anti-Semitic cartoons that keep coming out of government-supported newspapers in Syria and beyond. And, basically, I am insulted. But so what? These visual insults are a symptom of the problem rather than the cause.
In 1897 politicians in New York State tried to make it a major offense to publish unflattering caricatures of politicians. They were part of a Tweed-like machine who didn't like insulting drawings published of themselves, so they spent months trying to get a bill passed and make it punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison.
What happened?
Spiegelman: It got killed. We have this thing called the First Amendment that was in better shape, maybe, then than now.
1 Comments:
Joe Sacco had a quite different and rather surprising point of view than Art Spiegelman on this issue...the original Nation article is worth a look...
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