Friday, March 10, 2006

"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.

1 Comments:

Blogger Blogger said...

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...

2:58 PM  

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