Are more people than I know reading my blog and FB posts?
(*GRIN*)
Or has Rich Lowry simply been channeling me?
* * *
The instant online symbol of global support for Paris
after last week’s attacks was a roughly rendered peace symbol with an Eiffel
Tower in the middle of it.
* AND OF COURSE THE FACEBOOK PROFILE PICTURE OVERLAY OF
THE FRENCH FLAG...
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
The French designer Jean Jullien sketched it as soon as
he heard the news of the atrocity. He called it “Peace for Paris,” and it
immediately became a sensation on social media.
* PRETTY "SKETCHY" PEACE! (GET IT?! I MADE A
PUNNY!)
Its success is a sign of the times.
* YES... WESTERN IDIOCRACY...
(*SIGH*)
We have become experts at treacly online mourning.
* DON'T BE SHY, FOLKS; THAT'S WHAT ONLINE DICTIONARIES
ARE FOR!
(*GUFFAW*)
We take grotesque atrocities and launder them into trite
symbols and slogans that are usually self-congratulatory and, of course, wholly
ineffectual.
* I DON'T. MORONS DO. AND AS I KEEP ON TELLING YOU
FOLKS... THE WORLD IS FULL OF FRIGGIN' MORONS...
The 19th-century author William Dean Howells once said,
“Yes, what the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.”
* AND WE USED TO GET IT! BUT THAT WAS THE "OLD"
AMERICA.
On social media, the happy ending is the widely shared
and tweeted image or hashtag.
* REPEAT AFTER ME: "MORONS! MORONS! MORONS!"
After the slaughter at the offices of the satirical
French magazine Charlie Hedbo earlier this year, it was “Je suis Charlie,” or
“I am Charlie.” It was a well-intentioned expression of solidarity, so long as
you overlooked the absurd presumption of it.
You are Charlie? Oh, OK. Then draw a sketch of Muhammad
and post it online.
* HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!
Better yet, do it over and over again, until you get
constant threats and your office is firebombed - just as a warm-up.
(*THUMBS UP*)
* YEP. THE AVERAGE MORON CAN'T TELL FANTASY FROM REALITY.
No, you aren’t Charlie. (For that matter, Charlie isn’t
even Charlie anymore — it’s given up on mocking Islam for understandable safety
reasons.)
Last year, when the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram
kidnapped 200 schoolgirls, Twitter exploded with the hashtag
#BringBackOurGirls.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
* TWITTER. FOR TWITS. (PLEASE IDENTIFY YOURSELF IF YOU'RE
A TWIT!)
First lady Michelle Obama held up a sign with the phrase
on it.
(*ROLLING MY EYES AGAIN*)
If Boko Haram was shamed by its Twitter feed, it showed
no signs of it.
* FRIGGIN' TWITS...
The only girls who were brought back escaped on their
own.
The Nigerian military has rescued other girls, armed with
weapons considerably more powerful than a hashtag.
The “Peace for Paris” image is simple and emotive, if
inapt. The peace symbol sprang out of the nuclear disarmament movement in the
1950s and gained wider currency in the protests against the Vietnam War. It
still carries a strong whiff of its original purpose of hectoring the West for
its alleged militarism and, as such, is off-key as a reaction to a barbarous
assault on helpless civilians in a peaceful city.
Paris doesn’t need to give peace a chance. It doesn’t
need to make love, not war. It doesn’t need to be more understanding or more
hopeful. It needs to be better protected by all those unsentimental means that
have been neglected in recent years, or overwhelmed by the growing threat of
ISIS.
(*NOD*)
Paris — and more broadly, France and the West — needs
more surveillance of suspected terrorists and police raids; a more restrictive
immigration policy that doesn’t create large, unassimilated Muslim populations,
or welcome terrorists as refugees; and a serious, multi-layered campaign to
destroy ISIS and deny it the safe havens from which it recruits, trains and
plots against the West.
If someone can come up with a catchy symbol for that,
I’ll embrace it. (Although “La Marseillaise” isn’t so bad: “To arms
citizens/Form your battalions/March, march.”)
Meanwhile, spare me the #PrayforParis hashtag.
* AND THE OVERLAY OF BLUE, WHITE, AND RED OVER YOUR
"NEW" FACEBOOK PROFILE PHOTOS...
Forgive me if I’m unmoved by lighting world landmarks up
in red, white and blue, or your putting a tricolor filter on your Facebook
profile picture. And please don’t tell me, in the words of the designer Jean
Jullien, that “in all this horror there’s something positive that people are
coming together in a sense of unity and peace.”
Nothing positive comes from innocents getting shot down
in cold blood for the offense of going to a concert on a Friday night.
It there aren’t going to be more — and worse — attacks in
our cities, the path ahead won’t be one of unity and peace. It will be the
hard, thankless work of protecting civilization from its enemies.
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