Tag: liberal

Free Speech III – Are Today’s Liberals Killing It?

Because there are laws against certain expressions of neo-Nazism in Germany, and because my history-buff son and I are slightly amused by the satire inherent in that otherwise understandable fact, we will jokingly conjure the image of some official kicking a would-be fascist and screaming, “You vill be tolerant!”  But if you really like your irony served thick and over-salted, consider the likelihood that if I made that same joke on an American college campus today, not only might it be utterly misunderstood, but it might get me into actual trouble — especially with anyone unfamiliar with the satire of Mel Brooks.  In fact, in a recent reply to my last post about free speech, the respondent suggested that I have made comments on this blog that would get me fired from American colleges today; and he or she is probably right. Because if this article by Kristen Powers for The Daily Beast is an accurate portrayal of today’s “liberal” college students, they really don’t get free speech at all.

In the context of this blog, I keep insisting that the Internet is not the greatest tool for free speech ever invented. But I should clarify.  The more accurate thing to say is that it doesn’t actually matter if the Internet is the greatest tool for free speech ever invented, if in fact a whole generation of American university students don’t understand free speech in the first place — why we have it, and the often painful experiences through which it has been preserved. “… the politically correct university is a world of land mines, where faculty and students have no idea what innocuous comment might be seen as an offense,” writes Powers.  She also cites an article from Atlantic in which attorney and free speech advocate Wendy Kaminer states, “The belief that free speech rights don’t include the right to speak offensively is now firmly entrenched on campuses and enforced by repressive speech or harassment codes. “

I don’t know if Powers is cherry-picking exceptions and making them sound like rules. She may be pointing to a phenomenon rather than a trend. The article references her book The Silencing:  How the Left is Killing Free Speech, and she identifies as a liberal, so I assume this is not just some Bill O’Reilly-style attack on liberals in general. Additionally, what she says does jibe with anecdotal evidence I hear through acquaintances and that I have read in some online commentary by contemporary college students. And if this is truly what is happening to the liberal tradition of socratic disciplines in higher education, then it is impossible not to sneer every time the heralds of Silicon Valley declare that freedom of speech is the motive behind whatever policy they seek to enact or destroy. I don’t want to suggest that these voices don’t ever mean what they say, or at least think they mean it, but rather how empty their gestures are in contrast to the censoring trends that their wonderful tools of speech have helped create.  After all, Powers’s description of the self-righteous mob shutting down ideas based solely on some hair-trigger offense at the speaker’s choice of words sounds a hell of a lot like life imitating social media to me.

So, let Google & Co. abuse the concept of “chilling” free speech by chucking every artist’s takedown request into the “Chilling Effects” database and tell the kids they’re standing up for the First Amendment.  Whatever.  If Powers’s article is a fair reflection, the kids don’t understand free speech anyway. It’s a lost cause. The irony, of course, is that what preserves both the right of speech and the intellectual rigor to use speech is the conscious choice to be Jacob and wrestle with the damned Angel, to welcome the confrontation and turn it into something new rather than to silence it or pretend it isn’t there. And isn’t it funny that this is exactly what artists do?  We’re just barely victorious over conservatives banning creative works or investigating artists for “obscenity” or some other offense to our half-Puritan nature. Are self-proclaimed liberals now going to write their own black lists and host their own Bradburyian bonfires?

Maybe not.  But Powers does quote comedian Chris Rock who says that playing colleges isn’t fun anymore because people are so easily offended.  And this is truly a sign of the intellectual apocalypse:  when we no longer have the mental fortitude or cultural literacy to be able to laugh at our own folly, to satirize our worst selves, we breed fanatics who would smother genius in a ball of coexist bumper stickers.  I have no idea what the ultimate solutions are to the new rise in racial tensions in this country, but understanding why Chris Rock is funny would probably be a step in the right direction.  It’s sad to think about the fact that Lenny Bruce was arrested for obscenity in the 1960s, that Richard Pryor had racially mixed audiences pissing their pants together by the 1970s, but that a legacy of those two comedians can’t get a smile out of college kids in 2015. I’m not sure that’s progress toward any kind tolerance at all.

Narrative

 

Last week, when I logged onto Facebook, two stories were near the top of my feed.  The  first was about the plot of at least four U.S. soldiers who had plans to carry out acts of domestic terrorism, including assassination of President Obama, and who had killed a fellow soldier and his girlfriend in order to stop them from reporting the group’s intentions.  Their sated goal:  “To give America back to the people.”

The second story was a post by a friend, a Vietnam War veteran who writes beautifully about his journey through the world, still grappling with PTSD, still seeking peace.  He was very upset to have stumbled upon a grotesque, right-wing image, a variation on the famous Obama “Hope” poster depicting the president hanged in a noose with the word Hope changed to Rope.

I recognize with some amusement that some readers of my commentary will make the mistaken assumption that I am a right-wing conservative, which only underscores for this mostly liberal Democrat just how incoherent political dialogue has become.  When we speak in memes instead of nuance, and when all issues are associatively lumped together, our narrative becomes useless at best, and the raw ingredients for the ambitions of psychos at worst.

For the first podcast on this site, I had the pleasure of speaking to Christopher Dickey about journalism in the digital age, but Dickey is also an expert on extremism, terrorism, and counter-terrorism, having reported on these issues for thirty years.  In a discussion that didn’t make the cut for the podcast, Dickey described the three elements one always finds in the anarchist, extremist, or terrorist.  Neatly packaged into the acronym TNT, the components are Testosterone, Narrative, and Theater; and it is that middle component, narrative, that compels me to focus on many issues in the way I do.

Narrative, as Dickey defines it in this context is “one of oppression, some wrong that is being righted,” and after all, what politically or humanistically motivated citizen does not possess such a narrative?  Doctors Without Borders are righting a wrong, are they not?  But when that sensibility combines with stupidity (testosterone), and egomania (theater), it becomes a volatile mixture that I believe is actually fueled by even relatively innocuous anti-establishment rancor. For instance, what OWS and the Tea Party inadvertently have in common is a generalized agenda of tearing down institutions without envisioning new institutions in their place.  Our critical narrative has shifted so that bad or failed policies within our institutions are not the enemy, but the institutions themselves are.  And we all feed this narrative from our own political points of view, preaching to our own little choirs in cyberspace.

This excellent article in The Daily Beast suggests that the Fort Stewart F.E.A.R. plot is indicative of “rising domestic terrorism,” and the article explains how a DHS report on right-wing extremist organizations was criticized by conservative pundits (and John Boehner) as “an attempt to smear or criminalize right-wing free speech.”  There it is again — the First Amendment being used as an excuse to apply blunt thinking to a complex issue, to capitulate to the notion that we cannot possibly make a distinction between conservative ideas and violent extremists. And perhaps that’s because the narrative of the two is way too similar. I think it’s fair to say that if the voice of the contemporary right wing sounded like William F. Buckley instead of FOX News, these dumb soldiers would have been less likely to hear their misguided sentiments echoed in the mainstream.  That is not a cause and effect assertion. I don’t propose that FOX News causes these acts of violence any more than Marilyn Manson was responsible for Columbine; but the psychotic hears the coded messages he wants to hear; and there is no question that the conservative plank of “small government” has mutated into a more virulent strain of anti-government (often laced with racism).

But I don’t single out conservatives in dialing up the destructive rhetoric.  While liberals tend toward fewer violent metaphors, I do find parallel fear-mongering among my liberal friends. It’s hard to tell the difference, for instance, between liberals insisting earlier this year that the NDAA gives the feds the right to “assassinate citizens in the streets” and conservatives labeling HR347 an “anti-peaceable assembly bill.”  In these instances, everybody has a motive for writing a narrative of oppression, and that motive is often the aforementioned theater itself.  TV, radio, print, and web pundits need to make theater (and individuals want stuff to post on their walls). So everybody adds a little spectacle to otherwise mundane bits of legislation, and we’re off to the races.

I pick these two examples because the rhetoric from both the right and the left on each bill is completely interchangeable. It really doesn’t matter if it’s Glenn Beck or my liberal friends predicting Storm Troopers in the streets. Both are making theater, and I believe both are in some way feeding the very real paranoia of the next violent extremist.  And that brings me back to my underlying point regarding the lens I apply to the issues discussed here. When the narrative coming from opposing sides on a given subject begins to produce identical rhetoric, it’s probably a good sign that we’ve stopped discussing anything grounded in practical or humanistic reality.