Liberty, equality, fraternity, Asterix & Obelix

One of the enduring running jokes at our news desk is the one on the “Profit Mohammad,” as referred to by the now southern Manila beat reporter more than a decade ago. The epithet stuck, not so much to the reporter who, possibly in the excitement of trying to beat the deadline slipped up in writing his copy, but in a painfully stereotypical way to anyone peddling pirated DVDs not necessarily of the implied faith.

Religious intolerance is again in the crosshairs of volatile society in the aftermath of the shooting of several French cartoonists of the satirical rag Charlie Hebdo, deemed as an attack on the freedom of speech and expression the likes of which has not been seen since the Maguindanao massacre in 2009. Even the wire reports noted as much.

Among the dead were reportedly some of the best purveyors of French humor, which if largely politically incorrect, was a touchstone of irreverence in the land that lived its nationalist slogan — “liberte, egalite, fraternite” — as though ringing alongside the names of some of the slain cartoonists: Charb, Tignous, Cabu.

Internet surfing reveals some of the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo, notably the contested ones of extreme humor that were said to have provoked and indirectly taunted the extremists into action: one is of an Islamic State executioner about to behead the prophet himself, and another depicting Mohammad as homosexual.

The novelist Salman Rushdie, himself the target of a fatwa for his perhaps unflattering depiction of the prophet in his novel The Satanic Verses in the late 1980s that forced him into years of lying low and constant incognito, has weighed in too on the tragedy in the French capital just seven days into the new year.

Satire is a rare, often misunderstood genre that possibly had its beginnings in the work of Alexander Pope (“The Rape of the Lock”) and Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) in British literature, but in liberal and discriminating Europe it has easily become a way of life if not means of survival in the present day, as seen in that treasure trove of English humor, the magazine Punch, and the double-barreled Asterix & Obelix of the comics set during the Gaul wars also drawn by a Frenchman, and of late the unfortunate Charlie Hebdo which is soon to come up with a collector’s commemorative issue in tribute to the departed.

Maybe it just doesn’t touch Filipinos in a big way, because we, though not without our own touch of irreverence and politically incorrect racist jokes, are also quick to bristle at any offensive reference, however sly, to our own people — and before you know it, edicts and resolutions for personas non grata are issued.

Even the movie Asterix & Obelix played to a nearly empty theater when it was shown in local malls many years ago, and the Obelix character as played by the unsinkable Gerard Depardieu could barely win over the sympathies of the sparse audience as he pined — his proboscis throbbing — for his beloved lady love Panacea. You’d be hard put to find even a pirated copy among the stalls of the profits.

At the visual mix of Book Sale you might be better off scouring for a copy of Granta 59, of vintage autumn of 1997, a special issue on “France, the Outsider.” Part of the back text reads: “France is anxious. So many of its special glories are now under threat. English has triumphed as the world language. Globalization (‘Anglo-Saxon capitalism’) has triumphed as the world economy. Hollywood has triumphed as the world culture.”

But in nooks and crannies of our benighted archipelago there are remnants and active agents of Francophile culture, from the Alliance Francaise along Reposo Street in Makati, to the boondocks of Mindoro known as Malasimbo where organizers of the annual arts and music festival are predominantly French.

Ian Jack, in his introduction to Granta 59, wrote that the pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh first crossed the Atlantic and, after days and days of seeing ocean beneath him, he came upon the gardens of the French countryside, he did not find it in him to throw his sandwich wrapper out the window lest it sully the landscape that greeted him like a welcoming lover.

The account could be apocryphal, but in gist it may be a sign of how many of us would react when first coming across France or seeing at the outset its capital, the City of Lights, now in midst of mourning and unease.

Liberty, equality, fraternity may just be words but they cannot sound hollow when mentioned alongside the names Charb, Tignous, Cabu — artists, but also journalists in the fine art of satire.