Missing the Point of Charlie Hebdo. Again. – The Daily Beast on satire

Great point on once again how many critics of Charlie Hebdo don’t get satire (the offending cartoon above):

Satire is, by definition, offensive. It is meant to make us feel uncomfortable. It is meant to make us scratch or heads, think, do a double-take and then think again. It is supposed to take our prejudices, turn them upside down, reapply them, and make us think we’re seeing something we’re not, until we stop to question ourselves.

Yes taste is always in the eye of the beholder. But that’s the whole point of goodsatire. It is not meant to be to our tastes. It is meant to challenge our tastes. Having our fundamental assumptions about life challenged is never a comfortable thing. Bringing this back to the subject at hand, far from insulting him, these cartoons about Aylan are a damning indictment on the anti-refugee sentiment that has spread across Europe. The McDonald’s image is a searing critique of our heartless European consumerism, in the face of one of the worst human tragedies of our times. In particular, this image plays on the notion that while we moan there are not enough resources to cope with the influx of refugees, we simultaneously offer two for one McDonald’s Happy Meals to our own children. The image about Christians walking on water while Muslims drown is — so — critiquing what the magazine views as hypocritical European Christian “love” and truly bigoted claims, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s, that Europe is a “Christian” civilization.

Hebdo is no more racist a magazine than that bastion of liberal media The New Yorker was when it depicted Obama dressed as a Muslim, fist-bumping his angry black-revolutionary wife Michelle.

Not to our taste? Okay. Make us cringe? Fair enough. Don’t like them? Fine. But whatever we do, let us not misrepresent these images. Juxtaposing images of a dead child next to offers of cheap food “meal deals” is not mocking little Aylan, it is mocking us. It is mocking us for what we miss every single day, hidden in plain sight, and we do not see it because this is how desensitized we have become to human suffering. No, those besieged, brave satirists at Hebdo are not mocking Aylan. They are mocking newspaper covers like this from the UK right-wing tabloid The Daily Mail in which an image of Aylan was — in a national newspaper —  placed below an actual food deal. And how many of us noticed that on the day this Daily Mail cover went to print?

Poe’s law refers to a standard by which satire can be judged to be too good, where parodies of extreme views are so well performed that they are indistinguishable from the real thing. Yes, if those courageous disturbers of our conscience at Charlie Hebdo — those who survived the massacre that is —- are guilty of anything, it is that they are too good at their job.

Source: Missing the Point of Charlie Hebdo. Again. – The Daily Beast