Are Written on the Subway Walls

“No one has a right to not be offended.”
    Salman Rushdie

But what does Salman know? Just because they want to kill him for being offensive, why should we listen to him? What does Desmond Tutu say, he’s an inoffensive guy? 

Today (9/17/12) it was announced that some Muslim group is calling for an international law protecting the three Judeo-Christian-Muslim religions from defamation. Make it an international offense to flick your finger at the mosque, church, or synagog. If you have a Baha’i temple, tuff shit. Buddhists, bend over. I hope I can say without fear of mistake that such a proposal will go nowhere. Not that it won’t have its advocates, but that too many big nations—like China, India, or Japan, say—will take exception.

But, Jesus, what a distasteful proposal. Who do they think they are? Okay, we know who they think they are, but still… Can’t they go back to tending sheep? Must the world still suffer Muslims roaring out of the desert? Does the sand get in their eyes?

We aren’t going to begin to get a grip on the situation, though, until we get realistic about the root causes of the violence and stop passing it off as the work of extremists or terrorists. It’s certainly true that strapping bombs to oneself and setting them off in crowded marketplaces is both extreme and engenders terror; but if that’s as far as you’re going in understanding what’s happening, you’ll never come to deal with it. What’s causing the violence in the Middle East, what’s causing the rift between Israel and its neighbors, what’s dividing America down the middle, is all the same thing: religion. Plain, old, everyday religion. Just like the people you know practice. Maybe you yourself.

Someday, folks, we’ve got to start talking about it. Religion. What it does to people. How it affects government. This schtick with the Muslims isn’t going to be over anytime soon. We can’t keep our collective heads in the desert sands forever.

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The other amazing example of people not getting it was much more local: the Chinese government sent a delegation from San Francisco to Corvallis, OR to pressure the mayor of that city into pressuring a local business to take down a mural promoting freedom for Tibet and Taiwan. After all these years, have they not figured out the basics of American rights? Not that I’m suggesting the Chinese officials were out on a junket, but, surely, they knew their errand was ill-fated from the conception. Surely, they must have seen it as a good excuse for a drive up north. Or however they got here. I can see wanting to get out of The City. But did they have to look silly doing it? Couldn’t they have classed-up their act somewhat?

The Mullah Protection Racket

One has to admire the mullah protection racket: say anything against the Big Mullah and we kill you. Now there’s a secure religion, one confident in itself. Is it just me or do the muzzle-mouths have a particularly weak self-image? It seems the whole religion is built around the fear of being known as gay. As if the whole Muslim world turns around its inability to handle sex. Does it have something to do with the desert air? What’s wrong with Arab guys that they should feel themselves A) inadequate, and B) uncontrollable? I don’t know that I’d want to admit that to the world, much less advertise it.

I don’t want to castigate the entire Muslim world for being namby-waists and fop-dolls, but those little guys running around in their nightgowns and Balishnikovs could stand a shipment of flashlights because they aren’t too bright. They’re giving a bad name to troglodytes.

Nonetheless, the current attack on the US embassy in Lybia which killed the ambassador and three other people, illustrates how far we are from addressing the problem. Ostensibly, the attack was reprisal for something derogatory said about Mohammed, not the boxer, the prophet. The response, as I hear it, falls into two camps: A) you gotta be careful tip-toeing around those Moslems, because they’re touchy; and B) those weren’t real Muslims, real Muslims don’t kill for that reason. As to “A,” it’s true, ya gotta be careful around them, they’re uncontrollable, they’ve already told you that. Whether or not that’s reasonable is an entirely separate question, but there’s no doubt they’re a weird bunch.

But “B”? Naw, I’m not buying B. They were real Muslims. Just like the Christians who kill abortion doctors; they’re real Christians, too. Definitely one of the hardest concepts to get through a Christian’s head is that there is no such thing as an unreal Christian. Can’t be. Religions are made up institutions; one can’t have an unreal vision of what they are. Everyone gets to make up their own version and they are all equally Christian. Being Christian is a self-definition. If you say you’re one, you’re one. End of argument. Likewise with Muslims; you say you’re one, you’re one. End of argument.

The problem is that as a society we have yet to confront what it means to still have a majority of our population believing in fantasies. From a psychological standpoint, this is not good. Mother Terresa notwithstanding, not being able to separate reality from fantasy in an adult population portends trouble. Until we can understand the dangers which religions present us, we’ll never get a handle on controlling them. We’ll always be at the mercy of fanatics who are “touchy.”