On October 28, 1918, Czechoslovakia became a state. A century later, I take a look back at what its philately can teach us. Originally published in Linn’s Stamp News, Aug. 20, 2018. Besides researching and writing the 4,300-word story, I sourced and/or curated all of the accompanying images and drew the historical map for the opening spread.
I really don’t understand why anyone would want to satirize another person’s religion. It strikes me as immature and pointless — and usually not particularly funny.
On the other hand, neither can I comprehend how such satire — even when it is patently offensive, even when it cuts close to one’s deepest and dearest beliefs, even when it grinds on unapologetically for years — could provoke anyone to such a murderous act in response. It is utterly beyond my grasp.
In the end, I conclude that this is really not about religion at all. It is about discrimination, exclusion, disenfranchisement and, yes, racism.
I don’t know much about psychology, but I sense that a line could be drawn between the barbaric murder of two cops in New York and the terrorist slaughter of cartoonists and others in Paris. Besides being of questionable sanity, the killers seem to have harbored a sense of injustice and oppression. Their actions are as inexcusable as they are incomprehensible – but we can condemn them while still acknowledging that their feelings of injustice and oppression are not unwarranted.
Clearly, though we must support our good and brave police, our police must deal with their endemic racism. So too, while we bemoan threats to our freedom of expression, we need to do a better job of grasping how some of that expression will affect the psychological state of marginalized members of society who may have become unhinged, and who may happen to have trained as militant fighters and have access to powerful weaponry.
You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Perhaps, in today’s world, you just can’t idly satirize another person’s religion, either.
This isn’t a question of allowing crazies to censor the rest of us. This is about acknowledging that we live in a bipolar world. On the one side, we have a civilized, liberal, mostly democratic system where free thought and belief and expression are cherished. Within that (closed) system, free speech is of paramount importance. But outside that system, at the other pole, there is tyranny and repression and insanity. There are people who would like to kill you for your thoughts, or at any rate to have you fear they would. It is foolish to think that our ideal of free expression has any meaning for them.
Once, before the End of History (circa 1991), we lived happily in a world where these two poles existed apart, but since then the two poles have been colliding, for better and for worse. We have tried, perhaps naively, to take over the world with our system, to spread liberty even where it seemed unable to find a foothold. Lately, some of the nastier elements of the opposite pole have been trying to take over us instead.
What do we do? Some say we must “get rid of the crazies”. That is hard to do when crazies are home-grown and their poisoned mentality has metastasized so far among the marginalized members of society. Who knows where the next crazy lurks? The “get rid of them” response also risks veering into Islamophobia, igniting race wars and raising the specter of pogroms. Others say we should embrace the marginalized, cure what alienates and oppresses them, and hope that will lead to fewer crazies popping up. I like the latter approach much better, but it will be the harder of the two to follow.
The only correct response to Charlie Hebdo is to metaphorically bake a cake: support a devout Muslim group that’s fighting extremism, whether by building girls’ schools or publishing a moderate newspaper or targeting poverty. The two poles of our world must come together eventually. We must work to ensure this happens harmoniously, not violently. We must do it with bravery, love and without yelling “fire”.
Somebody posted somewhere (that’s how we say “I heard on the street” in 2015) about the paradox of needing to physically print your digital photographs if you want to have any hope of saving them for posterity. The argument rested on the unreliability of digital media — magnetic hard drives break down or become obsolete, that kind of thing.
Now, I’m old enough to have worked in a darkroom making photographs the old-fashioned way and I love me a good gelatin print. I treasure the photos my family has handed down, including some from the 19th century. But the real threat to future generations’ ability to enjoy our pictures comes not from technological change, to which there will always be a technological fix, but from an entirely different problem: image overload on a proliferation of platforms.
As many of my friends have noticed, I have two small kids. Like many little kids, I daresay they’re kinda cute, and our friends and relatives are endlessly snapping pics and short videos of them on their smartphones. Where do these images go? Dropped into an iPhone message, tweeted out to the wide world, uploaded to a Dropbox folder or saved on somebody’s not-smart-enough phone for retrieval someday (or never). Doesn’t really matter. The images definitely aren’t being lost, but neither are they being gathered, curated, tagged, indexed and otherwise made findable by their two-year-old subjects 20 years from now. So in other words, they are being lost.
Who in today’s world makes the time to assemble even a 10 Best Pics of Me in 2014 collection to store in an archive – digital or physical? We have so much technology for making and storing images, and it is so good, that pictures become ubiquitous and ephemeral. We let them go. Lost a picture? Take another. I dread my children asking me when they grow up: “Daddy, what did I look like when I was small?” I may have very little left to show them, because it will all have slipped away.
The enemy of photographic keepsakes is not the failure of our technology, but its success.
So, don’t worry so much about your aging hard drive. It’s 2015, we have the cloud now anyway. But do find a little time — make it a new year’s resolution — print yourself out a little photo album at the drugstore kiosk and put it in a safe place.
matthewhealey 