There are times when I can't hang up my pen even if I wanted to. It sighs like a dog. Other times I would sorely miss it. And while I might be a minor uncelebrated poet and not a widely-read cartoonist, I am still a Francophile, so please let me buy in, for two cents, about the recent Charlie Hebdo massacres in Paris. (May the dead all rest in peace.) One could say that a grievous blasphemy was properly silenced by rubbing out disrespectful infidels, who got what they deserved, and let that be a lesson to them (and aren't we lucky that you are nowhere near being in charge of anything); or that such cartoons should henceforth be more carefully considered, and exercising the freedom of speech should be tempered by an understanding of what will likely flow from it; or that the subject really isn't that funny (fools find everything funny), and anyway it's high time to move on from subjects that we don't really care enough about to understand, because the desperate fixations of culture are inherently non-dialogic and non-negotiable. Or finally, that there is a hard grim line that must be drawn in blood, to continue in blood, until there will be no more discussion in blood. But I won't say any of that. See the links to the two artists below, Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco, who can say it much better.
http://theremainsoftheweb.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Drawing_Blood-copy.pdf
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/jan/09/joe-sacco-on-satire-a-response-to-the-attacks
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