A few days ago I joined a facebook group called "
1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T Colbert," a campaign group for Colbert's bid for presidency in South Carolina (unrealistic, no doubt). I was browsing through the pictures, many of them random and having nothing to do with Colbert, when I came across a picture of the
Twin Towers being destroyed - except there were a bunch of pixelated video game characters all over the picture, including
Donkey Kong. Obviously enough, the picture was a joke, meant to suggest the humorous notion of Donkey Kong & Co. destroying the Twin Towers. Well, as you can surely imagine, a
storm of protest erupted in the form of posts underneath the picture ranging from conservative rants of "
NEVER FORGET" to liberal rants of.. oddly enough, "
NEVER FORGET." I will very readily admit that
I laughed. I found it humorous. I don't know why. Yet reading all of the ridiculous comments about the stupid picture made me wonder why the concept of "getting over" an event like 9/11 makes people think one is unpatriotic or inhuman? Just because someone is able to
look past something horrendous like those attacks does not mean that person has not "forgotten" the event in any way or doesn't appreciate its impact to society, humanity, history, whatever. I fully
respect those who lost someone on that day, just as much as I respect those who died or lost loved ones in the
Holocaust, the
Rwandan genocide, or in the
Cambodian killing fields. But my questions are, one, what makes people think that humor is not an acceptable means of dealing with an issue/event/crisis, and two, what makes the attack against America so much more important than any other terrorist attack or humanitarian crisis that it warrants never being "forgotten?" Three thousand people died that day, but a
sixth of the Cambodian population died in three years in the 1970s, and
six MILLION people died in the Holocaust, from multiple nations and states. And look at that.. something else that confuses me.. even I myself called it the "
attack against America." The paper I am researching for now answers the question "
discuss the adoption by Japan of 'human security' as a key consideration in its foreign policy." The issue of human security is something that has come about because the concept of "
security" itself has
changed - that is to say, threats to world security are no longer only considered within the context of state v state, and ideas like borders, government patrol, and state security are being completely screwed up by the advent of new threats that transcend those ideas (like terrorism, international disaster, poverty, AIDS, child soldiering........it goes on).
So how the hell does this connect with the Donkey Kong picture? Well, my questions that I had raised above are questions a lot of rationally-thinking people are asking (not meaning to call myself rational, just saying I share the view with them). That is, since things like
terrorism can no longer be considered national issues, seeing as they
transcend borders, how is it that something like September 11th is considered an "attack against America?" There is, of course, the obvious fact that many people will mention that those responsible for the attacks had an
agenda adhering specifically to the goal of
attacking America. It's all very confusing but very interesting.
How do you think you'd react to the Donkey Kong picture? Would you be horrified and disgusted? Would you laugh? Would you complain about the poor photoshop job? There are a lot of pictures out there (notoriously made by people like SomethingAwful goons or 4chan freaks) that we admit are horrible in concept but yet we still laugh at, like one I am thinking of that shows a picture of Holocaust victims.
Is humor really an acceptable way to deal with atrocities?
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