I Support Your Right To Watch Crap
Aziz is a good man. He’s hosting Fitna, that awful anti-Islamic movie that’s gotten so much press. Many of the sites and theatres that originally planned to host the film have ended up removing it from their content, citing security concerns and possible threats. Naturally, the release of the film was followed by a great heaving passive-aggressive free-speech lovefest (the Muslims will kill us all for expressing ourselves!) by the same people who like to pull comics with nudity in them out of public libraries, because the human body is so much more offensive than violence and carnage.
Aziz is doing a public service: he’s saying “This tripe offends me as a Muslim and a human being, but it should not be censored.” I admire people who have the moral courage to do things like this--the Jewish ACLU lawyer who defended the KKK’s right to hold public rallies comes to mind. However, I won’t be following Aziz’s example. The reasons why are purely aesthetic. I decided long ago not to defend crap on principle--I’ll defend people’s right to make crap, watch crap and consume crap, but I refuse to defend the crap itself. Distributing crap is, on some level, defending it. Why won’t I defend crap? Because in this society, we’ve come to the mind-numbingly stupid, poseurish, self-congratulating conclusion that anything controversial must be good. This is nonsense. I will not contribute. The agitprop emperor has no clothes. Since most people only discover their free speech gene when it comes to hateful smut (you don’t see any of the people who defended the original Mohammad cartoons also defending the journalists and opposition leaders who are censored around the world every single day), I feel totally justified conserving my free speech energy for genuine art. If you want to start a campaign to put Titian nudes on display at your local art museum, give me a call.
However, the crappy and the controversial have a right to be made available just like the transcendent and the truthful, so if you have a burning desire to waste half an hour of your life, you can do so at City of Brass.
Though I confess that my motivation is less a principled stand for free speech, and more about giving the jafis their own length of rope. I mean, its so bad, it refutes itself.