Who's to Say What's Obscene?

by Paul Krassner

  However, the German newspaper Die Welt, which reprinted the Danish cartoons, editorialized: “We’d take Muslim protests more seriously if they weren’t so hypocritical. The imams were quiet when Syrian television showed Jewish rabbis as cannibals in a prime-time series”—much like the late Isaac Hayes’s delayed departure from South Park because animated kids had poked fun at his “religion,” Scientology, though he had never complained about their use of Christianity as a satirical target. Although South Park allowed a scene in which Jesus Christ and George Bush fling excrement at each other, Comedy Central censors yanked their depiction of Muhammad, prompting critics to suggest that the network be renamed Cowardly Central.

  A military commander for the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan was quoted in Arab newspapers as claiming that the Taliban had recruited at least 100 new suicide bombers as a result of the cartoons. And the BBC reported that the Arab boycott of Danish food products was costing the Danish company Aria millions per day. The company complained that full-page ads they took out in Saudi Arabia, explaining that they had nothing to do with the cartoons, had no effect. In Iran, as if imitating our own country changing the name of French fries to “Freedom fries,” those wishing to purchase Danish pastry now have to ask for “Roses of the Prophet Muhammad.”

  In November 2007, Sudan charged a British teacher, Gillian Gibbons, with inciting religious hatred—a crime punishable by forty lashes, six months in prison and a fine—because she had allowed her 7-year-old students to name a teddy bear Muhammad. She was arrested after some parents of her students objected. Although Muhammad is a common name among Muslims, they considered it an affront to use his name for a toy. After worldwide indignation against the Sudanese government, followed by a quickie seven-hour trial, she was found guilty of “insulting the faith of Muslims” and sentenced to fifteen days in prison.

  In the United States, Harper’s magazine published reprints of the original Danish Muhammad cartoons, along with an article by Art Spiegelman relating the history of the controversy, providing his explanation and review of the cartoons and giving each one a rating, from one to four bombs.

  Among those U.S. newspapers that declined to reprint the Danish cartoons, only the Boston Phoenix editors admitted that they made the decision “out of fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. This is, frankly, our primary reason for not publishing any of the images in question. Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy.”

  Many American artists did not shy away from reacting to the Danish cartoon controversy. Wiley Miller’s syndicated comic strip, Non Sequitur, presented a sidewalk artist who “finally achieves his goal to be the most feared man in the world,” his placard advertising “Caricatures of Muhammad While You Wait!” Chip Bok in the Akron Beacon Journal depicted a CNN correspondent displaying one of the Danish cartoons featuring a pixilated head of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, and a viewer observing, “Well, no wonder Muslims are upset. Muhammad looks like he’s on acid.” And Pat Oliphant in the Washington Post limned a meeting of The Deities Association gathered on a cloud, where various spiritual icons were laughing hysterically as one of them said, “Hey, Muhammad, take a look at this cartoon! They’ve got you being hijacked by Muslim extremists—it’s a riot!”

  However, the Post has since become somewhat cautious. In 2007, it was one of at least twenty-five newspapers that declined to publish a couple of Berkeley Breathed’s Opus Sunday comic strips, afraid that his character Lola Granola, by dabbling in Islam and adopting its conservative dress code for women, could be offensive to Muslims. A week later, she dons a Burquini—a bathing suit that covers her entire body—in preparation for a visit to the beach, while her boyfriend, assuming that she’ll be wearing a yellow polka-dot bikini, says in the final panel that this “is how we’re gonna straighten out the world.” Only, in the original, he doesn’t say “the world,” he says “the Middle East.”

  It seems safer to target America’s leading misleaders. When George Bush and Dick Cheney appeared together before 9/11 commission members—in private and not under oath—they inspired several editorial cartoons around the country showing Cheney as a ventriloquist and Bush as his dummy. One caption read, “No wonder Cheney talks out of the side of his mouth.” And no wonder that, when Bush had a colonoscopy, doctors discovered the fingerprints of Cheney’s right hand on those five polyps. The polyps turned out to be benign, although the host was malignant.

  THE DISNEYLAND MEMORIAL ORGY

  In August 2008, thirty-two individuals—many wearing costumes of Disney characters such as Minnie Mouse, Snow White, Cinderella and Tinker Bell—were handcuffed and arrested outside Disneyland after an hourlong march from one of three Disney-owned hotels involved in a labor dispute. They were protesting Disney’s proposal that makes health care unaffordable for hundreds of employees by creating a new class of part-time workers who would receive no sick or vacation pay and would not be given any holidays.

  A week later, the Los Angeles Times published a long report about Mickey Mouse’s possible copyright problem. This cute little rodent who became an intellectual property was now 80 years old, with a 97 percent recognition rate in America, overshadowing even Santa Claus. Brand experts estimate Mickey’s value to the Disney empire at more than $3 billion.

  The day after Walt Disney died in December 1966, stock in his company rose one point and continued to ascend. The studio earned $100 million the next year. No wonder Disney once said, “I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I’ve ever known.” Now Disney was gone, but Mickey Mouse would continue to bask in his own immortality.

  I asked a Disneyland spokesperson, “Was there any special ceremony when Walt Disney died?”

  “No, we kept the park open. We felt that Mr. Disney would have wanted it that way.”

  “Well, wasn’t there any official recognition of his passing?”

  “We did fly the flag at half-mast for the rest of the month.”

  In the midst of Disneyland’s recent fiftieth anniversary celebration, DisneyLies.com claimed to be serving 50 to 100 gigabytes a day of online imagery: a couple of newlyweds caught consummating their marriage on Tom Sawyer Island after dark; major nudity on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride; a virtual orgy on Pirates of the Caribbean; a steamy incident with a couple of cast members in the secret room at the top of the Matterhorn. Ah, but what about all those cartoon characters themselves?

  There was a rumor that Disney’s body had been frozen, but actually it was cremated. Somehow I had expected Mickey and Donald Duck and the whole gang to attend the funeral, with Goofy delivering the eulogy and the Seven Dwarfs serving as pallbearers. Disney’s death occurred a few years after Time magazine’s famous “God Is Dead” cover, and it occurred to me that Disney had served as the Intelligent Designer of that whole stable of imaginary characters now mourning in a state of suspended animation.

  Disney had been their Creator, and he had repressed all their basic instincts, but now that he had departed, they could finally shed their cumulative inhibitions and participate together in an unspeakable Roman binge, to signify the crumbling of an empire. I contacted Wally Wood—who had illustrated the first piece I sold to Mad magazine, “If Comic Strip Characters Answered Those Little Ads in the Back of Magazines”—and without mentioning any specific details, I told him my general notion of a memorial orgy at Disneyland to be published in The Realist. He accepted the assignment and presented me with a magnificently degenerate montage.

  Pluto was pissing on a portrait of Mickey Mouse, while the real, bedraggled Mickey was shooting up heroin with a hypodermic needle. His nephews were jerking off as they watched Goofy and Minnie Mouse fucking on a combination bed and cash register. The beams shining out fr
om the Magic Castle were actually dollar signs. Dumbo the elephant was simultaneously flying and shitting on an infuriated Donald Duck. His nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie, were staring at Daisy Duck’s asshole as she watched the Seven Dwarfs groping Snow White. The Prince was snatching a peek up Cinderella’s dress while trying a glass slipper on her foot. The Three Little Pigs were humping each other in a daisy chain. Jiminy Cricket leered as Tinker Bell did a striptease causing Pinocchio’s nose to get longer.

  Actually, Mickey Mouse had been a convict in a chain gang when he originally met Pluto. In World War II, Mickey’s name was the password for the D-Day invasion. And Snow White warned military personnel about the dangers of venereal disease. In the Disneyland Memorial Orgy, although none of the characters’ genitalia is shown, Wood had nonetheless unleashed their collective libido and demystified an entire genre in the process.

  When the May 1967 issue of The Realist was published, an anonymous group in Oakland published a flyer with our logo on top, reproducing a few sections of the Disneyland Memorial Orgy, captioned “Now on Sale at DeLauer’s Book Store, Your East Bay Family News and Book Store,” and distributed it in churches and elsewhere. In Baltimore, the Sherman News Agency distributed that issue with the centerspread removed. An employee told me that the Maryland Board of Censors had ordered this—that it was the only way The Realist could be sold in the state—though no such committee existed. Sherman’s had merely taken what they considered to be a precaution. I was able to secure the missing pages and offered them free to any Baltimore reader who had purchased a partial magazine.

  In Chicago, a bookstore owner and my distributor (Chuck Olin, who also ran an ice cream company) were charged with selling and distributing obscene material. Theoretically, the charges couldn’t stick legally. The centerspread certainly didn’t arouse anyone’s prurient interest, a criterion for obscenity at the time. I imagined a prosecutor telling a jury how they might get horny—“Just look at what Goofy and Minnie Mouse are doing”—but even if it did arouse prurient interest, the rest of The Realist was certainly not (in the Supreme Court’s language) utterly without redeeming social value.

  However, a judge found the issue to be “obscene.” The charge against the distributor was dismissed, based on his lack of knowledge of the contents. The ACLU sought a federal injunction restraining authorities from interfering in any way with local distribution of The Realist.

  The Disneyland Memorial Orgy centerspread became so popular that I decided to publish it as a poster. A source at the Disney corporation told me that they considered a lawsuit but learned that The Realist had no real assets, and besides, why bother causing themselves any further public embarrassment? They took no action against me; never even ordered me to cease and desist. (They did sue the producer of a pirated Day-Glo version of the poster; the case was settled out of court.) Ultimately, the statute of limitations on me ran out. In 2005, I published a new, copyrighted, digitally colored edition (available at paulkrassner.com) of the originally black-and-white poster.

  As artistic irreverence toward the Disney characters has continued to grow, attorneys for Walt Disney Productions have become busy filing lawsuits to stop the sale of such items, because their corporate client has worked “for many years to acquire the image of innocent delightfulness known and loved by people all over the world, particularly, but not only, by children,” but now these characters are being shown in a “degrading, lewd, drug addictive, offensive and defaced” manner, some of them “in poses suggestive of a love-in.” The lawyers stated, “Some of the cartoons portrayed by these people are pornographic,” and complained about “copyright infringement and unfair competition.”

  In 1971, 60,000 copies of an underground comic book, Air Pirate Funnies, were distributed—an extension of the Disneyland Memorial Orgy concept in story form, complete with bawdy speech balloons. One panel showed Mickey Mouse explicitly performing oral sex on Minnie Mouse. He was saying, “Slup Slup Slup Slup Slup, Gulp!, Slup Slup,” while she was responding, “Ahhh Ng Oh! Yas! Ohhh M!” The Disney empire sued Dan O’Neill, Bobby London and the other cartoonists. One courtroom artist told me he planned to draw all the jurors with Mickey Mouse ears. In 1972, I was asked to submit a sworn deposition in the case. My statement read:

  “I have been the editor and publisher since its inception in 1958 of The Realist, which has been described by Library Journal as ‘the best satirical magazine now being published in America.’ I have read volumes one and two of Air Pirates, and find that their contents remain loyal to the traditional values of legitimate parody. It is always a presumption in this form of humor that whatever institution is criticized is, by definition, strong enough to withstand being made fun of. If a myth could actually be harmed—in this case, Mickey Mouse and his imaginary friends—merely by suggesting ‘imperfectibility,’ well, that is the risk and the blessing of democracy.

  “In order to communicate an irreverence toward the Walt Disney characters, the original form must be imitated to provide the most effective vehicle of reaching the consciousness of the audience and hopefully causing them to question the one-dimensional infallibility of Disney’s fairy-tale world. For any government to imply otherwise would be to foster brainwashing. In São Paulo, Brazil, a city official in charge of a campaign to exterminate rats said that public support for the program was adversely affected by the popularity of Mickey Mouse among children. It is in the highest tradition of a free society to encourage the testing of conflicting ideas in an open marketplace; the comic books in question, therefore, are classic examples of artistic responsibility in action.”

  In 1975, the defendants were found guilty of copyright infringement. The judge ruled in Disney’s favor and assessed $190,000 in damages. In 1978, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld that decision, denying the cartoonists’ defense that their parodies were “fair use” of copyrighted material and that they drew the Disney characters in more exact likenesses than necessary to get their point across. But the court stated that “The desire of a parodist to make the best parody must be balanced against the rights of the copyright owner and his original expression. The balance is struck at giving the parodist what is necessary to conjure up the original.” In 1979, the Supreme Court let stand the lower court ruling. Yes, the highest court in the land had managed to uphold the honorable image of Goofy.

  But the Disney folks weren’t victorious in every case. The Center for Constitutional Rights represented the Chilean co-authors of How to Read Donald Duck in a battle with U.S. Customs, and won. There was a law stating that if material came in through Customs that officials thought violated an American copyright, they could freeze the material and force the importer to fight for its release. This book was a sociological analysis of the capitalist ethic in Disney comics, illustrated with hundreds of strips. The case was won by proving that the reprinting was necessary “fair use” in order to comment on them.

  However, in 1983, Canadian artist Carl Chaplin created “Wishing On a Star” postcards for free distribution. They depicted Disneyland being blown up by a nuclear bomb. Disney lawyers threatened legal action, demanding possession of the postcards. Chaplin said that “If Uncle Walt were alive, he would know that I did the painting to point up the horror of what could happen to all of mankind in a nuclear war.” (In 1945, Aldous Huxley went to work for Uncle Walt as a consultant on the filming of Alice in Wonderland. There were rumors that Huxley had turned him on with magic mushrooms. “If people would think more of fairies,” said Disney a year later, “they would forget about the atom bomb.”) Nevertheless, Chaplin turned over all the remaining postcards. The irony was that, as a result of the lawsuit, that image was sent over the UPI wire and seen by millions who would otherwise have remained unaware of its existence.

  In 1989, on the same day that Disney stock jumped 6.375 points in active trading, their attorneys arranged to have white paint splashed over the “innocent delightfulness” of Disney characters on murals at three day-care centers in Florida. Th
ey were replaced by Yogi Bear, Fred Flintstone and Scooby Doo.

  In 1992, Britain’s official artist for the Persian Gulf war, John Keane, got in trouble for his painting in which Mickey Mouse appears on what looks like a toilet, with a shopping cart of antitank missiles nearby and a background of shattered palm trees. A spokesperson for Disney said they were considering possible copyright violations. The artist said that the idea came to him in Kuwait City, in a marina used by the Iraqis, where he found a Mickey Mouse amusement ride surrounded by feces.

  And in 2008, Disney sued a home-based business for $1 million after a couple organized children’s parties with imitation Eeyore and Tigger costumes. It was yet another Mickey Mouse decision.

  THE PARTS LEFT OUT OF BORAT

  There are a few private jokes in Borat. One, which might merely be an example of a low-budget flick, is that the same bedspread appears in three different hotel room scenes. Another is that the anti-Semitic protagonist from Kazakhstan occasionally speaks fluent Hebrew throughout the movie.

  An Associated Press dispatch referred to him as a “Jew-fearing journalist” and stated: “In the end, it appeared that naked wrestling, toilet jokes and anti-Semitic satire hold universal appeal.” In fact, Rob Eshman, editor of the Jewish Journal, confessed that he laughed so hard he spit out his gum. Moreover, the following excerpt from a review in Jewish Week was subsequently forwarded on the Internet by an anti-Semitic listserv: