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| Bill Maher: When Anger Dresses Up as Humor it is no less toxic |
I am a fan of The Big Bang Theory and there probably
isn’t an episode I haven’t seen at least once, but I still get a bit queasy and
want to change the channel when I see Howard do his imitation of Stephen
Hawking’s synthesized speech. Professor
Hawking has been on the show and almost certainly doesn’t mind, but I am not
sure where the line is on making fun of a person with a disability or a
challenge. Just because the person being
mocked doesn’t mind doesn’t make it right.
I think we have, at least in
the United States and at least among those of us who weren’t raised by wolves (or
white trash), a social consensus that we don’t make fun of people with
disabilities or with what we often call today “special needs.” To make fun of a person with Down’s Syndrome
or with Cerebral Palsy is called bullying.
We don’t do it; we don’t tolerate it.
Similarly the sort of mockery of people for distinctive racial or ethnic
features that was the staple of cartoonists such as Thomas Nast or Friz Freleng
would not be tolerated today. Julius
Streicher was the Nazi Cartoonist whose anti-Semitic drawings in Der Stürmer helped
turn the German people against the Jews in Hitler’s Reich; we recognize the
evils to which he made a significant contribution. One certainly doesn’t denigrate women in
today’s responsible press. Nor is it
acceptable to make broad statements or reinforce stereotypes of the LGBTQ
community. But isn’t it great fun to
mock people for their religious beliefs?
There are people who have
reacted strenuously to Pope Francis for saying that people should not be mocked
for their religious beliefs. This is
seen as an attack on “freedom of expression.”
What many people today do not realize is the difference between
“freedom” and “license.” Freedom
recognizes that it carries along with it responsibility. License is nothing more than the unbridled
indulgence of self-willed egotists. It
refuses to be accountable to either objective truth or to the sensitivities and
rights of others. Those who make fun of
others for their religious beliefs are simply schoolyard bullies on a larger
scale.
Several weeks ago I saw Bill
Maher on Conan. Mr. Maher is one of religion’s most
irresponsible critics and produced and starred in Religulous, the 2008 documentary that pretty much tarred all
religion with the same choleric brush.
He also is not a nice man. Anger,
no, actually a discretely muffled rage, best described his performance on Conan.
Rage is no foundation for humor.
Anger in any and all forms, the Dalai Lama says, is poison. And it is.
Nothing more; nothing less. It
destroys people from within like a cancer, spreading out from the gut into the
whole person and becoming an obsession that distorts the individual’s power for
healthy relationships and eats away their capacity for joy. Anger or Rage is also highly contagious and
spreads like a spiritual cholera from one person to another by even the most
casual of contact. Just look at how the
bias against Muslims has spread in our society and in Western Europe, spread to
the point where Duke University had to rescind its permission for the Adhān (the Call to Prayer) to be
chanted from the chapel bell tower for fear of violence against the University
and its campus. Of course there are
those who want to silence the bells in church towers as well or prohibit the
display of crosses on the outside of church-owned buildings. We must be careful because to undermine the
freedom of public expression for one religion is potentially to undermine the
public expression of any and all religion.
This is not to say that
religion must be above criticism. Rational
argument is far different from mockery whether the mockery is in the form of
cartoons, films, jokes, literature, or art.
Religion, like every other aspect in our lives, needs to be put under
the microscope of free, rational, and responsible critique. But the Pope is right. It is no more legitimate to mock the
religious beliefs of some or any or all than it is to bully the developmentally
challenged, the transgendered, the economically disadvantaged, the ethnic
minority, or the physically handicapped.
It is time we grew up and faced our biases rather than make them clever
conceits that massage our egos into thinking that we are superior to others who
are different from us.
