Charlie Hebdo's funny kind of love

The overwhelming reaction to the attack on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo this week has been one of solidarity. "Je Suis Charlie" — "I Am Charlie" — is the expression of the hour. But how would the wags at Charlie Hebdo have responded to their own massacre?

When the magazine's office was firebombed in 2011, they responded with a cover of a Muslim man and a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist locked in a passionate (and salivary) kiss, under the message, "Love Is More Powerful Than Hate" — the naughty suggestion being that hate is sublimated desire. Perhaps, in response to this week's attack, they would have done a cover comparing the meager male endowments of the killers with their oversized AK-47s. Or perhaps they would have depicted a young Prophet Muhammad as a pimply, overweight kid who couldn't draw, and was the butt of humor by his more graphically adept classmates.

However they would have chosen to satirize their murderers, I feel comfortable saying that they would not have taken them seriously.

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But the more common response so far from their fellow cartoonists has been a kind of pious defiance. The solidarity of "I Am Charlie" has not, generally, been a solidarity of comic spirit.

Of course, Charlie Hebdo's style of ridicule isn't to all tastes — and a good thing it isn't. Nor is its approach the most apt for all occasions. "I Am Charlie" should not have to mean, "I love what Charlie Hebdo did" much less,"I plan to write, draw, and incite the way it did."

But at a minimum it needs to encompass the sentiment, "Charlie Hebdo had its place, and I'm glad it did." And to be able to say that, one has to be able to say what that place was.

Ross Douthat, in his blog at The New York Times, made an interesting stab at defining the magazine's role:

The argument is compelling, but I don't think it is correct, and the easiest way to see why is to imagine what Charlie Hebdo would have been if it had only applied its brand of outrageous satire to Muslims, as opposed to being an equal-opportunity offender. As should be obvious, such a publication would not have deserved the kind of solidarity that Charlie Hebdo has rightly earned even from those who never much liked it.

Charlie Hebdo regularly mocked Islam and Muslims in gross sexual, anatomical, and scatological fashion. But it also regularly mocked the Catholic clergy. And it mocked orthodox Jews. And it mocked France's political elite — and not just establishment figures like Francois Hollande or Nicolas Sarkozy. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing Front National, came in for the same treatment; one cover used a Le Pen campaign slogan to compare her voters to a stinking pile of merde.

In a very important sense, Charlie Hebdo's eagerness to attack Islam in the same gross terms it used for other important streams of French life is an index of its comfort with Islam as just another one of those streams — an index of integration. To single Islam out — either by protecting it from ridicule, or ridiculing it exclusively — would send exactly the opposite message. If Douthat is right that liberalism depends, on some level, on blaspheming those who respond to blasphemy with violence, then liberalism needs somebody who will continually offend everybody, as opposed to everybody continually offending somebody.

Or, to put it in terms Charlie would probably prefer: if somebody needs to depict Islam's greatest prophet being sodomized by a camel, then only an outfit like Charlie Hebdo can fulfill that need — because only Charlie Hebdo could contextualize a gross insult not as hate, but as a funny kind of love.