“We are the puppets and the firmament is the puppet-master,/In actual fact and not as a metaphor;/For a time we acted on this stage,/We went back one by one into the box of oblivion.”
The start of February saw a protest outside the Danish embassy in London against the famous cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.
Evidently it isn’t straightforward to discern provocation from counter-provocation; the participants in this protest nevertheless offered an authentic renunciation of spectacular politics in aligning themselves with an even more degraded spectacle, itself singularly shrill, senile and vindictive. Any kind of particularly Islamic content had been carefully withheld. The violent slogans reproduced in the press, all seemingly written in the same hand, conformed more closely to valorisations of extremism as such, as the press itself understands it. It seems reasonable to suppose that although those involved in this protest were obviously vehemently opposed to the publication of the cartoons, their actual support for the beheading of the cartoonists was questionable to say the least.
The Sun headline “jail this sick nut” apropos of Omar Khayam, who had been imprudent enough to dress up as a suicide terrorist, offered a wilfully distorted analysis. The authorities, already committed to a certain affectation of naivety, inevitably followed the analysis of the Sun in taking Mr Khayam’s affectation of naivety apparently entirely seriously. Since Mr Khayam had previously been convicted of possession with intent to supply cocaine and heroin, his immediate return to prison meant only the revocation of a license. Despite his public apology, in which he stated, credibly enough, that he had been more or less a spectator, and that consequently he had neglected to take into account his particular case history.
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