Garfield, Your Ass is Next!

Ever dated a manic depressive? I’m pretty sure I did. I can’t say with certainty, because I bailed before a proper diagnosis could be made. I wasn’t about to stick around for the boiled rabbits to debut.

On the bright side of her spectrum of neuroses, this girl was a delight: smart, charming, witty. I had no idea this other malevolent force festered within her dainty frame. Then one night she threw a plate against the wall. Now, I’ve seen this done in the movies and TV. If Carmella Soprano has never thrown a plate against a wall I’ll eat my shoe. I certainly can’t argue its value as dramatic punctuation. Yet when it happened in my kitchen, I had an entirely different reaction. I froze with a fork of pasta dangling at my mouth, and then turned to see the glob of fettucini alfredo making its slow slide to the floor. Then, suddenly, I heard Mike Myers’s alter ego, Austin Powers, in my head.

“Who throws a plate? Honestly?”

Now, as my online persona will attest, my whole personality is based around an inherent grouchiness and repressed anger. Yet, I’ve never thrown a plate. It’s just not civilized, and I usually look for similar etiquette from my companions. But clearly I misjudged this girl’s manners.

I handled the situation like a rider handles a spooked horse – being very still, speaking in hushed tones – meanwhile two opposing thoughts sparred in my mind.

1) This girl is crazy, and I need to get out of this relationship.
2) This girl is crazy, and if I leave she might get really crazy.

I have to believe the US government is dealing with those same two sentiments when it looks at the unrest in the Arab world this past week over… wait for it… a cartoon. Hundreds of protests have erupted across the world over an editorial cartoon published in Denmark depicting the prophet Mohammed with a bomb for a turban.

How bad is this cartoon? I don’t know. The American press, to my knowledge, has not printed it for fear of turning the Arab Street on us. Let them burn the Dutch, we say. Just don’t make eye contact with them and they’ll leave us alone.

If there was ever a time for the US government to stand up and say to the Arab world “You want our respect? Stop acting fucking crazy!” this is it. Yet, we’re caught in a delusional relationship with a culture so far behind our modern (and democratic values) that chastising them at this point would mean undercutting our “progress.”

So, what has the government done? They’ve come out and given a half-hearted statement about that essential cog -- freedom of the press -- in the machine of democracy. For people like me, who desperately want to maintain some optimism towards the Iraq experiment, the riots across the Arab world are the most brazen indicator that “democracy,” as the United States intends, will never survive in such a repressive, angry culture. On the same day that my brother lit up a riverbank like the opening shot of Apocalypse Now, this cartoon absurdity is what leaves me feeling hopeless.

A cartoon! Let us not forget that. Ponder that for a moment, won’t you? Now, I really hate Family Circus. There is something intensely aggravating about banality as entertainment. Still, you won’t find me outside Bill Keane’s home with torches anytime soon (although that might change the tone of those insipid one-liners for a time).

If much of the American public is like me, they’re finding less and less to empathize with when it comes to the Arab world. When the villain in your morality play is Denmark, you’ve taken anger issues to an unprecedented level. Part of the mistaken idealism of heartland America and the Bush administration is that everybody wants what we want, that everybody is essentially “just like us.”

I call bullshit. Americans only burn down buildings when their sports teams win championships. We don’t torch the New York Times when Odie gets the best of Garfield.

Two things terrify me most about this whole ordeal. The first is that it becomes apparent with every passing day that we are in the groundswell of a mythic civil implosion in the Middle East. The tensions between the West and the Arab world will continue to grow, and with Iran flashing its ass to the world with its nuclear program the positive scenarios continue to get pulled off the bulletin board.

But in an ironic twist, the most frightening thing about the recent cartoon controversy is that America has pulled back on its idealism in a fear of inflaming the Arab world’s lunatic sensibility. By not condemning this behavior outright, we’re kowtowing to incivility, and if we intend to solve anything in that region of the world, that’s the last thing we should be doing. We need to step up and set some fires about what we believe in. Freedom of the press. Separation of church and state. Separation of powers.

Whoops. For a second there I forgot which country I was in.