What’s to say about the Charlie Hebdo editorial titled “How did we end up here?” which elaborates their petty-assed racism & Islamophobia?
It lays out in nearly unreadable gibberish what most of us accused them of–save for the minstrel-savants who got a chuckle out of the stuff. It confirms that Islamophobia is petulant, greasy-kid-stuff, drawing on cesspools of ignorance & prejudice, & obsessed with women wearing the veil.
Their apparent lack of facility with language & concepts has to do with finding acceptable expression for their stupidity & bigotry–something they can fly past those minstrel-savants as progressive, cutting-edge social criticism.
If you read their other editorials about religion, the political crisis of the left, the political crises in France, it’s evident that elementary thinking & research skills elude them & they operate viscerally, wallowing in cynicism, unhinged & unmoored from the lives of working people but with their heads stuck up the ass of the ruling elite.
Social critics & satirists don’t have to have all the answers; their job is to ask the questions. Charlie Hebdo doesn’t have enough intellectual depth to do that. We’d suggest they stick to cartooning, since racism & misogyny have regrettably become integral to the genre, often defended by progressives as social criticism. But in an era when the lives of millions of people are disrupted by bombing, plunder, genocide, it’s more appropriate to expose their sarcasms for what they are: small-minded idiocy & bigotry.