Garry Trudeau on Charlie Hebdo: ‘At Some Point Free Expression Absolutism Becomes Childish and Unserious’
12th April 2015
Much like the work of Garry Trudeau.
TrudeauLike Doonesbury itself, Garry Trudeau’s speech yesterday at Long Island University was entertaining at the beginning but eventually became tedious and smug. After opening with some funny reminiscences about his early struggles with unsympathetic editors, the cartoonist tried to tackle the topic of the murders at Charlie Hebdo. He did not take the position you might expect from a professional satirist. “Freedom should always be discussed within the context of responsibility,” he lectured. “At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious.”
Trudeau’s talk took its turn for the worse halfway in, when he offered a garbled account of the Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005. “Using judgment and common sense in expressing oneself were denounced as antithetical to freedom of speech,” he told the audience. I seem to remember some responses to those cartoons that were more clearly antithetical to freedom of speech, including death threats and assassination attempts. Trudeau alluded to some of this, but he blamed the speakers, not the censors: “Not only was one cartoonist gunned down, but riots erupted around the world, resulting in the deaths of scores. No one could say toward what positive social end, yet free speech absolutists were unchastened.”