Dirt into diamonds

I tend to be a free speech absolutist, and some of the equivocating I saw on my Facebook wall yesterday after the Charlie murders from fellow liberals infuriated me at the time, but I take their point, especially when this Al Jazeera post clears the air in the correct ways:

Reproducing the imagery created by the murdered artists tends to sacralize them as embodiments of some abstract ideal of free speech. But many of the publications that today honor the dead as martyrs would yesterday have rejected their work as tasteless and obscene, as indeed it often was. The whole point of Charlie’s satire was to be tasteless and obscene, to respect no proprieties, to make its point by being untameable and incorrigible and therefore unpublishable anywhere else. The speech it exemplified was not free to express itself anywhere but in its pages. Its spirit was insurrectionist and anti-idealist, and its creators would be dumbfounded to find themselves memorialized as exemplars of a freedom that they always insisted was perpetually in danger and in need of a defense that only offensiveness could provide. To transform the shock of Charlie’s obscenities into veneration of its martyrdom is to turn the magazine into the kind of icon against which its irrepressible iconoclasm was directed. But as the poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote of Edgar Allan Poe, death has a way of revealing the essence of things — and the essence of Charlie Hebdo was to express the inexpressible in images with the power to shock and offend.

You can believe, as I wrote elsewhere, in free speech as an unassailable liberty to be upheld in the face of atrocities and think “the West” has antagonized the shit out of Muslims for centuries with conquest, rapine, war, drones, and bombs.