Seers and madmen

• Malcolm Gladwell gets profiled by the New York Times.

I admit, it does make me nervous when writers become more famed for their personalities than their work, but hell, if you can get a lucrative side career making $40K per speech and still get to call yourself a writer, then so be it.

• Editorial writers dismiss Islamic-fundamentalist foolishness.

I’m thankful that people now have something more constructive to debate than James Frey. At Slate, ol’ Hitchens lets off a glorious tirade:

I am not asking for the right to slaughter a pig in a synagogue or mosque or to relieve myself on a "holy" book. But I will not be told I can't eat pork, and I will not respect those who burn books on a regular basis. I, too, have strong convictions and beliefs and value the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object. It is revolting to me to breathe the same air as wafts from the exhalations of the madrasahs, or the reeking fumes of the suicide-murderers, or the sermons of Billy Graham and Joseph Ratzinger. But these same principles of mine also prevent me from wreaking random violence on the nearest church, or kidnapping a Muslim at random and holding him hostage, or violating diplomatic immunity by attacking the embassy or the envoys of even the most despotic Islamic state, or making a moronic spectacle of myself threatening blood and fire to faraway individuals who may have hurt my feelings. The babyish rumor-fueled tantrums that erupt all the time, especially in the Islamic world, show yet again that faith belongs to the spoiled and selfish childhood of our species.

At Spiegel Online, “Ibn Warraq” takes a stand as well:

A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth. Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.

Cartoonists under siege

The problem with fundamentalists is that they lack irony. Look no further than the current brouhaha across the pond over an editorial cartoon published in a Danish newspaper, which satirically depicts Mohammed with a bomb wrapped in his turban. It gets worse, though. Recently Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah maintained that “insults against Islam” would have stopped had the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie been successfully carried out. Rushdie, you remember, penned a novel called The Satanic Verses, which the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini deemed blasphemous to the Islamic faith in general and the prophet Mohammed in particular. So the logic goes: someone disagrees, and has the temerity to say so? Kill the infidel!

That’s the problem with these people: there’s just no reasoning with them. Recently I read Under the Banner of Heaven, a fascinating book written by journalist Jon Krakauer about religiously-motivated murders within the Mormon community in the western US. Krakauer makes the important distinction that fundamentalists aren’t hampered by second thoughts, or even the framework of “belief”; to them, they don’t have beliefs, so much as they follow what they consider an incontrovertible truth. They don’t believe something; it just is that way, and if you can’t see it, too, then you’re an enemy. Period. It’s a disturbing thought to consider, especially when you turn on the television and see Governor Bush & Co. trumpeting, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us!”

In our neck of the woods, editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette recently told Editor & Publisher that he’s moving to the family-owned Tulsa (OK) World because “’I like the idea that there's a human aspect,’ said Marlette, especially given that ‘it's a harrowing time for political cartoonists’ as jobs disappear.” Human history is defined by the tug-of-war between differing belief structures; one rises in response to another. The arrogance that fundamentalist religious beliefs instill in distressingly large numbers of followers is an incredibly powerful force, and lately it seems as though the counterbalance is awfully late in swinging into action; more and more it appears that it’s increasingly dangerous to speak your mind anywhere. I wish I had a cute little wrap-up for this, but I don’t. This situation is getting increasingly insane, and generation upon generation of tribal warfare and religious persecution have made a solution harder and harder to grasp.