This post follows Fine’s reflections on Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. –Jeff

As we begin to find ourselves numbed by the tsunami of news, videos, and twittering from Sendai, we are moving from the tragedy (which is, of course, really, really sad) to find other topics that speak to our assorted emotional needs. We are not quite done with Japan, but our tears have dried. Soap operas can’t run over an hour. (The naïve Libyan rebels didn’t realize that their reality show was in reruns. But we have scheduled prime time grief for them next week).

Like clockwork, the topic du jour is joking after disaster. Af-lac! As folklorist Bill Ellis noted in his dissection of the jocular aftermath of 9/11, “Making a Big Apple Crumble: The Role of Humor in Constructing a Global Response to Disaster,” it routinely takes about three days for the first jokes to appear. Right on schedule, Mr. Gottfried, Mr. 50 Cent, and Mr. Haley Barbour’s press secretary.

Mr. Gottfried perhaps has it the worst of all as his gig as the voice of Aflac’s duck has been washed away. The duck will be “revoiced.” Hearing such offensive poultry would be too much. Who knew that Japan was the company’s largest market? (Fill in your own joke about the meaning of Aflac in Sendai.) Rather than quacking, Mr. Gottfried tweeted. His jokes struck me as rather mild (I have a strong stomach). For instance, “My Japanese doctor advised me that to stay healthy, I need 50 million gallons of water a day.” Drum roll, please.

Mr. Gottfried might be forgiven for thinking that he could ride out the storm since he had previously gained notoriety for his 9/11 joke at a comedian’s roast for Hugh Hefner in late September 2001. He joshed that he couldn’t find a direct flight because the plane had to connect with the Empire State Building first. After his roast appearance, he became something of a folk hero among comedians. One wonders what people thought they would get when they signed up for his tweets. Now we wait for Sarah Silverman.

Losing one’s livelihood for some middling funny jokes is tough business. Gottfried was forced to retreat, tweeting, “I meant no disrespect. My thoughts are with the victims and their families.” Of course he meant disrespect. That is his job. That is what we want from him. He was shredded by the buzzsaw of our hypocrisy.

But Gottfried was not alone. Dan Turner, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s press secretary, was rapidly fired for a rather convoluted witticism about Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay” not being so popular in Japan. Oy! And then there is rapper 50 Cent who was forced to apologize for commenting that he had moved his ho’s out of danger from LA, Hawaii and Japan. It was the Japan part that got him in trouble, not the ho’s.

Our discussion of the dangers of humor is bogus. Perhaps it offends, but free speech can offend. And when we go searching for speech that offends us, we should not blame the speaker when we find it. Let us not retreat to the treacly defense that the need to joke reflects our common humanity when faced with overwhelming pain. That line is worse than the jokes. These guys weren’t feeling overwhelming pain; they were moving on.

Jokes are told because we have a nasty, cutting streak. This contrarian view is part of our charm, just as the kind of political discourse that people bemoan is critical to a healthy democracy. Tough talk jazzes us; creating jokes allows us to grow tougher skin. It is not part of the grieving process; it is part of us that doesn’t wish to grieve. And we shouldn’t be ashamed of savory discourse.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should not also be aware of the plight of others. But this is not all of what we are. Anyone who spends time in an emergency room, in a social work office, or in a police station knows that rough humor goes with the territory. So, let us treasure those who begin the process by which we realize that we cannot change the world, but must distance ourselves from it, amused. We can wallow in the pain of others or we can recognize that our life continues.

No amount of sentimentality and faux outrage will change the reality that humor is happy talk from a sometimes cruel species. Today Aflac’s duck is protected; tomorrow he may be foie gras.

While I have been observing  Feisal Abdul Rauf’s actions and reactions to the public controversies surrounding his work as the the chairman of the Cordoba Initiative and the imam of the Farah mosque in Lower Manhattan, I have been thinking a lot about my book, Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society.  I think that in democracies, intellectuals are talk provokers who help the general public confront and address serious political problems by informing discussion.  I think that they do so by civilizing differences so that enemies can become opponents and opponents can become collaborators, and by subverting commonsense that hides problems, so that these problems then can be discussed.  I, of course, know that no one intellectual is always a subversive, and no one intellectual is always an agent of civility.  Yet, certain key intellectuals have primarily played one or the other role.  This for example is how I think about the intellectual work of Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King Jr.

The tragedy of Feisal Abdul Rauf is that he has intended and has dedicated his life to the role of civility, while more brutal figures in our public life, perhaps Newt Gingrich is the primary culprit, have intended to turn the persistently patriotic imam into a subversive.  He has been labeled an agent of Islamic, indeed radical Islamist, subversion of the good moral order, just when he has done everything in his public pronouncements and actions to support the good pluralistic moral order that he understands, along with many of his fellow Americans including his President, to be the great American achievement.

Thus consider deliberately Feisal Abdul Rauf’s words in his recent op-ed piece. He is even willing to see this episode in which he has been systematically and viciously slandered as a positive development in the project of civil religious interactions:

“Lost amid the commotion is the good that has come out of the recent discussion. I want to draw attention, specifically, to the open, law-based and tolerant actions that have taken place, and that are particularly striking for Muslims.

President Obama and Mayor Michael Bloomberg both spoke out in support of our project. As I traveled overseas, I saw firsthand how their words and actions made a tremendous impact on the Muslim street and on Muslim leaders. It was striking: a Christian president and a Jewish mayor of New York supporting the rights of Muslims. Their statements sent a powerful message about what America stands for, and will be remembered as a milestone in improving American-Muslim relations.

The wonderful outpouring of support for our right to build this community center from across the social, religious and political spectrum seriously undermines the ability of anti-American radicals to recruit young, impressionable Muslims by falsely claiming that America persecutes Muslims for their faith.”

Yesterday, in an interview on the ABC news program, “This Week,” the imam expressed his dilemma.  He is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t, and therefore he states if he had known the controversy he has provoked would happen he would have never proceeded.   He wanted to civilize differences, instead he has provoked them. He has against his own sensibility revealed the ugly virus of hatred, as he was trying to nurture civilized understanding. This is tragic for him as an individual, but reveals something critical for us, his fellow citizens.

In order for us to be true to our principles, Park 51 must be built, as President Obama suggested in his most recent remarks at his news conference.

“With respect to the mosque in New York, I think I’ve been pretty clear on my position here, and that is, is that this country stands for the proposition that all men and women are created equal; that they have certain inalienable rights — one of those inalienable rights is to practice their religion freely. And what that means is that if you could build a church on a site, you could build a synagogue on a site, if you could build a Hindu temple on a site, then you should be able to build a mosque on the site.”

I fear that this clear message we should tell ourselves and others about ourselves may not be sent.  American civilization warriors, those who seek a war with a world religion, may get their way.  It may be suggested that moving the mosque just a bit uptown is a reasonable compromise, a small price to pay for social peace at home.  This is the “modest proposal” (in the sense of Jonathan Swift in my opinion) of Governor David Paterson. (link)

But as an American, as a New Yorker, as someone who works in lower Manhattan and lost a dear friend in the World Trade Center, I think this is exactly wrong and not moderate at all.  We will not only be less safe as a result, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s major concern, we will also be diminished as a country dedicated to fundamental civil and democratic ideals.

My recent reflections on the debate over the Park Islamic Cultural Center have been fueled and inspired by my personal experiences surrounding the September 11 attacks and their aftermath.

After 9/11, I despaired.  As I put it in The Politics of Small Things, it hurt to think.  I knew that the people who attacked the World Trade Center really were a threat, but the political responses to the threat seemed to me to be wrong.

The attack hit very close to home.  Two close friends were in the Towers, one survived, a childhood friend, Steve Assael, but one was killed, Mike Asher, my closest adult friend . On that fateful day, I didn’t know what had happened to either of my friends.  In the days, weeks and months that followed, as I attended to personal consequences of the attacks, I was dismayed by the public response.

A war on terrorism was declared which didn’t make much sense, as the very real threat of Al Qaeda was not sufficiently recognized by anti-war critics.  Terrorism and anti-terrorism seemed to be replacing Communism and ideological anti-Communism (the most radical and resolute form of which were Fascism and Nazism), and many who were critical of these tendencies were not realisticly facing up to the challenges of the day.  Simple Manichaeism again overlooked global complexity across the political spectrum. There did not seem to be any alternative, as the Republican President was getting carried away, pushed by a broad wave of popular support, and the Democrats in Congress, and reporters and commentators in the media, dared not question the patriotic effervescence.

My book, which was dedicated to Mike, was an attempt to explore how alternatives on the margins did provide grounds for hope.  Specific small interactions provided alternatives to faulty grand narratives, people meeting each other on the basis of shared concerns and commitments, speaking and acting in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert, i.e. constituting political power in the sense of Hannah Arendt.  I knew how important such power was in the development of the democratic opposition in Poland as it formed and supported the development of the trade union Solidarity.  I examined how the same sort of power developed in the anti-war movement and the Dean campaign, opening space for the cultivation of critical opinions and policies among people who were concerned about the state of world affairs.  Obviously, the same sort of power supported the Obama campaign, as I have explored on earlier posts.

I was very impressed to see how a focused political campaign provided coherence to a broad array of dissenters, observable in anti war demonstrations and on many websites.  But the strength was not just the unity. It also was grounded in the diversity of experiences, opinions and actions that made up the movement.  People concerned about a broad array of immediate circumstances came together in opposition to the Bush administration and its policies.  But as important as the opposition was, their primary concerns were perhaps even more important.  A broad coalition concerned with a broad set of issues, foreign and domestic constituted an impressive social movement and political campaign leading to the election of Barack Obama.

And herein lies the significance of the Park 51 Islamic Community Center.  It is a local example of the politics of small things.  Those involved have rejected civilizational conflicts and are promoting civilized inter-religious and inter cultural dialogue.  They have planned a community center in their community, with places for people to hear lectures, discuss problems, play and exercise, and pray.   They are clearly open to discussion, already engaging in it with their fellow New Yorkers.

In the planned activities and in the way they have engaged the broader community to date, they enact dialogue as the alternative to clashes of civilizations.  This is ground zero of the opposition to terrorism and ideological anti terrorism.  These are important facts on the ground that are in opposition to dogmatic truths of the Islamic and the Islamophobic fundamentalists.  Intelligently thinking about their activities, taking them seriously beyond simplistic ideology doesn’t hurt at all. It is a way that honors my friend and many others who were lost on that bright and sunny September day.