You may recall the sad coda to the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, which occurred a year ago this week. Several months after eleven Parisian journalists were savagely murdered for the “crime” of committing acts of free expression, PEN America, an organization devoted to promoting free speech, planned to give the surviving Charlie journalists a free expression award. That Charlie staffers, who literally put their lives on the line to put out a satirical magazine, would eminently qualify for a free expression award seemed self-evident.

Not to more than 200 PEN members, though, who objected to Charlie‘s being awarded. Apparently ignorant of the magazine’s roots in the 1960s counterculture, or its gleeful slaughtering of any and all sacred cows, the dissident PEN members bemoaned the funky, small-circulation weekly for allegedly attacking the “disenfranchised.” (Garry Trudeau made a similar argument.)