Editorial | Wednesday, 18 February 2009

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In defence of humour

There is always a somehow uncanny feeling whenever a newspaper is forced into defending a cartoon. It’s a stark reminder that someone out there is missing the point entirely, but also an indication that things, even the trivial ones, can get out of proportion.
Be that as it may, defending a cartoon is never a trivial thing, especially in a democracy. One would expect a dictator, a totalitarian regime, or religious integralists – with all their notions self-importance and totalising worldviews – to miss the irony in a cartoon, take offence, and even seek the cartoonist’s death, imprisonment, excommunication or fatwa. Totalitarians and fundamentalists take themselves too seriously to allow anyone to laugh at their expense or suggest that they might be funny. Humour is, after all, the one human attribute that reminds us all of our fallible, accident-prone and subjective nature. Tyrants always want to appear beyond human characters.
But in a democracy one would believe that cartoons come with the territory, and that if anyone takes offence, even if he or she is the subject of the cartoon, then he or she has to deal with it and consider it his personal problem.
Such seems to be the case with the cartoon MaltaToday published last Sunday. Taking the cue from the whole St John’s Co-Cathedral underground extension saga, the cartoonist took arguably the most iconic symbol from this church, Caravaggio’s masterpiece of the Beheading of St John, and replaced the latter with the figure of Richard Cachia Caruana.
It’s obviously a clever and witty metaphor of the only unelected Cabinet minister whose power seems to be eroding by the minute, especially when for reasons known only to himself he was pushing this crazy extension plan against public opinion and common sense. With his plans scrapped for good, the image of decapitation of an all-too-powerful man is more than apt. Astrid Vella’s signature in blood further down is the cartoonist’s master stroke.
The PN does not agree. It registered its “strong condemnation” in a press release issued on Monday, titled “Insulting and unacceptable caricature in a democratic society”.
Our first concern is that this party has lost its sense of humour. Never mind Cachia Caruana, who likes to behave like all those who dislike cartoons, but for the PN to issue a press release about a caricature, it is really positioning itself with the Islamic fundamentalists who got all edgy upon seeing cartoons of Mohammed in print. At least, unlike the PN and Cachia Caruana, the Islamists had some claim to sacrality, but even then, cartoonists teach us time and again that nothing is sacred.
What really betrays the PN’s confusion however is the last two words in the title of its own press release. The party is perfectly entitled to feel the cartoon to be “insulting” and condemnable, but saying it is unacceptable “in a democratic society” just shows the shallow-minded pettiness with which this ruling party treats democracy.
Because a democratic society cannot exist without freedom of speech, and as the landmark human rights court ruling says, that implies the freedom to offend, shock and disturb, even someone as unaccountably powerful as Cachia Caruana.
The PN went on to evoke the incident of Cachia Caruana’s attempted murder case some 15 years ago, showing clearly that even the metaphor of the beheading was lost on him. In taking Caravaggio’s masterpiece, the cartoonist was emphasising the beheading as a metaphor of a fall from power. It has nothing to do with stabbing, much less with the Mdina case. But in evoking the Mdina stabbing case, it shows how far the PN is willing to go when it tries to elicit some sympathy for its least sympathetic officials. Thanks to our clever cartoonist, we are reminded that even they are all too human.

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