No Laughing Matter

I received an e-mail message today informing me about another controversial cartoon that's been in the U.S. news:

The radical Islamists are not the only ones who get their knickers in a knot over cartoons. Read this article (Bush Propaganda Machine Twist Message of Toles Cartoon) about the fuss over a Tom Toles cartoon. If you google the topic you get a series of shrill conservative websites all saying the same thing - no accident there.

Thanks for the tip, Mom. I may end up writing about this cartoon and the Muhammad cartoons in a section of my dissertation dealing with the concept of symbolic violence and what it means to take offense at verbal and visual representations.

For now, I'll refrain from saying anything more except to note that today I came across a passage in Hannah Arendt's On Violence that explains why both the Bush regime and various Muslim fundamentalists have reacted so strongly to political cartoons. On the one hand, it's obvious that they are opportunistically using these cartoons to generate 'political capital' by appealing to their base, whom they suggest should be 'offended' and outraged by the respective images. On the other hand, the reactionary responses to cartoons is, from a theoretical standpoint, understandable. Both the Bush regime and the Islamic fundamentalists fear, correctly, that their authority is being undermined by the cartoons.

Arendt writes:

To remain in authority requires respect for the person in office. The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

No wonder, then, that these cartoons are being treated as 'no laughing matter' by the extremist ideologues.