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i dont understand what relation there is between new and previous posts--if folk do not read the thread before they write things, that is---billege made a couple points that are worth repeating: the actions that all and sundry are complaining about are undertaken by a very small percentrage of the total population, representing for the most part very conservative positions---to act as though all of islam is somehow embroiled in the same way in this tumult is simply wrong.
but....i have been reading a wide range of press reports on this from lots of different places and have noticed something odd...the american coverage, across the variety of conservative positions that folk confuse with an actual political spectrum, tends of be written in a quite sloppy way in that the writers are not contextualizing that information about protests that they present---it is as if the view of islam on the part of many american journalists is as uninformed and undifferentiated as what you see repeatedly in this thread.
on the other hand, across the board complaints about the danish cartoons refer to the same general argument: this is an aspect of a general contempt for islam, a kind of religious or race war mentality in the west. reading through some of the responses above, i think, in this limited regard, these folk are right.
that said, i think the reactions to these cartoons internationally echoes the kind of thing in the politics thread on the washington post cartoon linked above.
in general, it seems a really stupid idea for folk who object to a particular cultural product to mobilize extensively against it because every such move ends up generating huge publicity around the object, changes the status of the artist, makes them stars in potentia.
this is not rocket science.
in this media climate, ignoring objects is far more effective in that it helps speed the disappearance of them into the vast ooze that is the space of the barely noticed, the filtered out, the half-repressed---the space into which fall almost all visual elements that float through the various media that help keep us all narocitzed and feeling-safe...the half-life of barely noticed visual elements in a space as extensive as this visual culture is very very short---folk should make friends with this almost-instant obsolescence.
but no.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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