In Pakistan, a Muslim cleric is offering a million-dollar reward, plus a new car, to anyone who brings him the head of one of the 12 cartoonists who contributed caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed to a Danish newspaper last September. In India, despite its reputation as a source of cheap, outsourced labor, the stakes are even higher. There, a cabinet minister in the state of Uttar Pradesh has offered 510 million rupees, or roughly $11 million, plus the assassin's weight in gold, per cartoonist head.
Which, of course, has many Westerners in a state of utter disbelief. Sure, we riot over World Series victories, and the occasional court-room verdict, but riot over offensive cartoons? With million-dollar death bounties to boot? Now, it may just be that these death bounties are variants on the kind of overheated rhetoric that routinely informs our own public discourse now. (Remember, for example, when Bill O'Reilly invited Al Qaeda to blow up San Francisco last November?) But the Danish cartoonists are certainly taking them seriously. Flemming Rose, editor of the paper that published their work, reports that his workplace has been "evacuated several times due to bomb threats" and that the cartoonists are all now in hiding.
All of which has me thanking Howard Stern, Marilyn Manson, Girls Gone Wild, Hugh Hefner, Lenny Bruce, Internet pornographers, gangsta rappers and anyone else who's ever been charged with coarsening public discourse, eroding traditional values and destroying American culture. I'm even feeling a new appreciation for Justin Timberlake, simply for the role he played in exposing Janet Jackson's weaponized nipple two years ago.
Because, really, when you think about it, America is a pretty civil place. And one reason is because we're so used to being offended. TV shows mock Christians. Right-wing radio hosts savage gays. Clothing stores carry T-shirts with offensive racial stereotypes. Obviously, we don't simply shrug off these things—boycotts are launched, people who say controversial things get fired and, sometimes, just a wearing a T-shirt to an appearance by the president can get you arrested. No doubt our most irreverent provocateurs suffer their share of private death threats, too.
But because whatever beliefs we hold are constantly being challenged—often in deliberately offensive ways—we typically respond to criticism with a fair degree of restraint. A few hundred Dixie Chicks may get ritually slaughtered from time to time, but publicly issued death bounties for drawing cartoons? That generally doesn't happen.
Instead of celebrating the positive way in which the anything-goes irreverence of South Park, Family Guy and other pop-culture phenomena temper public discourse, a legion of finger-waggers condemn them. In his book, Porn Generation, for example, young fuddy-duddy Ben Shapiro argues that Madonna, teen magazines, rap music and "the 'live and let live' societal model" are undermining America. This is the standard battle cry of today's moral scolds, of course; one reason it retains a certain degree of power is that its advocates rarely present a detailed portrait of what the country might look like if they were able to reign in pop culture the way they'd like to. That's why the antics of Pakistani clerics and Indian politicians are so enlightening: They live in a world where expression is tightly controlled, where speech has limits, where, in the end, an insensitive cartoon can inspire million-dollar death bounties.
But do we want to live there too? In the wake of the Janet Jackson incident, the FCC issued record fines against CBS, Clear Channel, Fox and Viacom for airing offensive content. Then it asked Congress to raise the maximum fine it could impose on those who violate its fairly abitrary standards, to $500,000 per incident. (The Senate is still considering the bill; the House has already passed it.) Now, a fine isn't quite the same thing as a death bounty. But it's certainly a step in that direction. Personally, I'd rather stick with the civilizing influence of South Park.