Richard King - On Offence: the politics of indignation

Scribe Publications

ON OFFENCE

Richard King was born in 1971 in England, and now lives in Fremantle, Western Australia. He is a freelance writer and has a masters degree in literary history. Richard writes and reviews books for The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald, as well as for numerous journals and magazines, including Australian Book Review, Meanjin, Overland, PN Review Poetry London, Quadrant, Southerly, and The London Magazine.

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First published by Scribe 2013

Copyright Richard King 2013

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National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data

King, Richard, 1971- author.

On Offence: the politics of indignation / Richard King.

9781922070500 (Australian paperback)

9781922247230 (UK paperback)

9781922072641 (e-book)

1. Respect. 2. Honesty. 3. Offenses against the person. 4. Conduct of life.

179.9

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They came through the border post and found themselves in a grey street: the houses, the curtains at the windows, the clothing worn by Rats and people alike (yes, there were people here, Luka was relieved to see), all grey. The Rats were grey too and the people had acquired a greyish pallor. Overhead, grey clouds allowed a neutral sunlight to filter through. They developed a Colour Problem here a little while ago, Nobodaddy said. The Rats who hated the colour yellow because of its, well, cheesiness, were confronted by the Rats who disliked the colour red because of its similarity to blood. In the end all colours, being offensive to someone or other, were banned by the Rathouse thats the parliament, by the way, although nobody votes for it, it votes for itself, and it basically does what the Over-Rat says.

Salman Rushdie, Luka and the Fire of Life

For Sarah

Introduction: The Mind on Fire

1. When Dawkins Met Haggard

2. From Enlightenment to Entitlement

3. Fighting Ire with Ire

4. Thou Shalt Not Judge

5. Dont Tread on Me

6. I Feel, Therefore I Am

7. The Freedom to Offend

Epilogue: Is Nothing Sacred?

INTRODUCTION

Claim that something is offensive, and it is as if the assertion itself has automatically become an argument.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, MAU-MAUING THE MOSQUE

He didnt look like the kind of man who could touch off an international crisis. With his horseshoe moustache and button nose, he looked like Jed Clampett from The Beverly Hillbillies, or Yosemite Sam without the hat. Nor was he any great shakes as an orator; to listen to him talk was to conclude pretty quickly that not much was going on behind that tabloid forehead besides an alarming talent for intolerance. Nevertheless, this Mayflower nutcase sure kicked up one hell of a stink.

His name was Pastor Terry Jones, and on 12 July 2010 hed announced his intention to burn the Quran, a book he described as of the devil. The burning was scheduled for 11 September, the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It was now 9 September and Jones was addressing the waiting media outside the Dove World Outreach Center in Florida, where his congregation of around 30 souls had gathered to receive his message of Christian charity. Rolling his hands theatrically, as if displaying fresh stigmata, the pastor declared that the burning was off. God had given him a sign, he said, in the form of an imam whod agreed to shelve plans for an Islamic centre in downtown New York. Thus Pastor Jones, in climbing down from his threat of libricide, managed to sound even more unhinged than he did when brandishing a box of matches. Well, no matter. Crisis averted. The networks took up their equipment and walked.

The sigh of relief was palpable. In the weeks leading up to 9 September, officials had more or less begged the pastor not to follow through on his threat. The tone was set by General David Petraeus, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, who warned that if the burning went ahead it would endanger the lives of US troops. President Obama denounced the plans, describing them as a recruitment bonanza for al-Qaeda and like-minded groups. Leaders from Muslim-majority countries, including Indonesias Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, warned the United States of the consequences should the Florida pastor desecrate the Quran. Even celebrities chipped in with comments, solicited and duly reported by a media that seems to have decided not only that politics is show business for ugly people, but also that show business is politics for beautiful people. The actress Angelina Jolie was one such. I have hardly the words that somebody would do that to somebodys religious book, Jolie said when asked for her views on the matter.

If the reaction to the threat of the book burning was febrile, the reaction to the reaction was often facile. A few days after the pastors change of heart, an Australian lawyer named Alex Stewart uploaded a 12-minute video to YouTube in which he tears pages from a Bible and a Quran and uses them to make joints. (He later claimed that the smoked substance was not marijuana but grass clippings.) Entitled Bible or Koran which burns best?, the video attracted widespread interest and sparked a number of copycat smokings, as well as solemn denunciations from religious leaders and from Stewarts employers. Its just a book, declares Stewart in the video, still groggy from toking on John 3:15. Who cares? Its your beliefs that matter. Evidently some people cared very much, and they went online to unburden themselves in apoplectic and apocalyptic tones.

This cluster of events and non-events in which media beat-up met political meltdown, and where the determination to give offence was matched by the determination to take it did not materialise in a cultural vacuum. On the contrary, bigmouths and bigots were everywhere in the United States in the summer of 2010. The Islamic centre in New York known originally as Cordoba House, latterly as Park51, and popularly as the Ground Zero mosque was the focus for much of this demagoguery. Its proposed site was 51 Park Place in Manhattan, just two blocks north of Ground Zero too close for those (apparently numerous) Americans who were unable to distinguish between ordinary Muslims and Muslims bent on suicidemurder. Too close, certainly, for Newt Gingrich, who compared the plans for Park51 to placing a Nazi sign outside a Holocaust museum, and who suggested, with even greater cretinism, that there should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia a statement that managed to put the United States on the same moral plane as an absolute monarchy in which women can neither drive nor vote. Too close, too, for Sarah Palin, who was moved to send her now infamous tweet urging all moderate Muhammadans to pls refudiate Park51. And too close for Mark Williams of the Tea Party movement, who described the proposed centre as a monument to terrorism.