It seems as though the key divide in the West isn’t so much between liberal and conservative, urban and rural, or rich and poor. The real question that divides the West is, “Can it happen to me?” It is between those who see the terrorists as real and those who see the terrorists as imaginary. It is between those who assume the West will always be free and those who assume that the West can be enslaved if nobody stops the slavers.

The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art had a recent art competition. The winners were the usual boring “avante garde” who can’t seem to tell the difference between warmed over surrealism and artistic merit. Among the second place finishers is a slave sale poster created by the Joseph Lewis III, Dean of Alfred University’s School of Art & Design.

It may be possible that Mr. Lewis created this “poster” with the intention of being ironic. Certainly, the art contest judges labeled his submission as ironic. However, I fail to see any irony in his poster at all. Such slavery is hardly implausible. Slavery does exist in America (and throughout the world) despite its illegality, and the notion that white people could be enslaved is hardly novel. Such enslavement is precisely what many people want for Americans, not the least of whom are the slave dealers from al-Qaeda. Moreover, it is very unlikely any such poster would have been perceived to be ironic in early nineteenth century American because white Americans were sold as slaves by Barbary pirates.

Such plausibility leads one to wonder if Mr. Lewis’s “slave auction” poster were not really intended as irony, but rather as Mr. Lewis’s wishful thinking.

If a white college fraternity were to promote a “slave auction” of black people, it would naturally be regarded as highly offensive, despite any claim by that fraternity that it was really making a joke. And yet, if a black college dean puts out a poster of a slave auction selling white people, he gets Second Place in an art competition at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.

When one doesn’t take threats seriously, a statement of racist brutality can be taken as an ironic joke. It’s rather like how The Grim Reaper got treated in The Meaning of Life.

Sometimes, it is the evil regarded as the most implausible which triumphs precisely because it becomes so tolerated. All too often, it is the toleration of evil that leads to enslavement.