Cheap Speech

by Kerry Joyce
illustration by Dave Coscia

Satan’s spawn are at it again. Every leap year ten thousand bums in suits descend on the granite place (New Hampshire) in a vain effort to get their guy elected the leader of the free world. Already the chimps are bearing their capped teeth, thumping their imported-cotton chests, and throwing dirt, lots of dirt, into the air.

The early bird catches the presidential worm, and if you want to be taken seriously as you press the flesh in front of some lumber mill at 6 a.m. in Laconia next January, you’ve got to gather up as much hot air as you can possibly muster during the summer.

Back on the front burner is flag burning. Gee, I haven’t heard about this one since the last presidential election. This is a serious issue. Every time I drive through Harvard Square it’s not the idiots who don’t know how to cross the street that get me. It’s not the panhandlers. It’s not even the guy in the pink shorts who makes it down Mass. Ave. faster than me on his Roller Blades. It’s the acrid smoke from all those burning flags. I can’t believe the Founding Fathers wanted this to be a nation where it’s legal to burn Old Glory and illegal to burn oak leaves in your own back yard except for two Saturdays in November.

Turns out all those glassy-eyed guys down at the V.F.W. hall weren’t fighting for honor, glory, or to make the world safe for democracy. They were fighting for the very flag those pussies in Cambridge are constantly burning. Well it’s election time, pal. And if you want the votes, don’t talk about the deficit, Medicare, or the spotted owl. Talk about a real endangered species – the American flag, or at least the red blooded Americans willing to get all worked up about phantom flag burners. There’s only a hundred million of ’em left.

And if you college educated types are too abstract to get upset about the symbolic destruction of a symbol, what about the decline of Western Civilization? Back in the sixties, Charles Keating, of Citizens for Decency in Literature warned us that Russ Myer (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Faster Pussy Cat Kill Kill) was responsible for the moral decay of the country. But did we listen? No.

Neither did Keating. The Scarlet Letter, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and even Crime and Punishment couldn’t save Keating from a life of crime and punishment after watching all those Russ Myer films. He’s now doing time for engineering the most costly bank swindle in history, and he’s too old to be anybody’s bitch.

Whenever Keating needs help getting his business down the love train he’ll just have to trade eight packs of cigarettes for a back issue of Penthouse. That is, if the Republican controlled Senate has its way with us. That nakedly transparent body passed the Exon Communications Decency Act by a huge majority, a bill that would bar even fairly tame smut like Playboy from the Internet.

But my guess is that any guy who bilked the feds out of billions, can figure out a way to download porn from Lichenstien, Switzerland, or the Cayman Islands, and make a tidy sum explaining how to the rest of us.

Meanwhile, presidential candidate Bob Dole has gone on the attack against “Hollywood” in general and Time Warner in particular. Dole is the leading Republican contender who did not invest $7500 in a titty flick back in 1972. That would be Phil Gramm – once a Democrat, now a Republican, ever ambitious.
Dole called some of Time Warner’s musical fare “a nightmare of depravity” and asked, “Is this what you intend to do with your careers? You have sold your souls, but must you debase our nation and threaten our children for the sake of corporate profits?”

Very eloquent, Bob. Why didn’t you ever say something like that to Nixon when you had the chance?

“This could be a defining moment for Dole’s campaign,” Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition said hopefully of Dole’s remarks. Conservatives know all about art, except how to make it. Conservatives attack all cultural innovation so that future conservatives can defend whatever survives the onslaught. And as a former Republican Agriculture Secretary said of the Pope in a different context. “He no playa the game, he no make-a the rules.”

Bob has no time for art but plenty of time for making lots of rules and for throwing raw meat at the conservatives he needs to get the nomination. He attacked Hollywood again when a few nut cases murdered an unarmed man, and then mentioned the movie Natural Born Killers after the fact.

Not surprisingly, Bob Dull didn’t attack the Gideon’s Society for putting all those Bibles into hotel rooms or even the Pope for that matter, when religious psycho John Salvi opened fire on abortion clinics, killing two and wounding several.

T.S. Eliot wrote that poets are both the most civilized and the least civilized of people. The same is probably true of other artists. Like democracy, art is a dirty business, and artist shouldn’t be faulted for only barely exceeding the moral low water mark set by politicians.

The conservatives believe that people they designate “adolescent” (an invention of the 20th century), should endure a decade or so of sexual frustration, before they get married. And that the best way to ensure this result is to protect them from understanding why Mommy and Daddy grunt like boars, and hoot like barn owls occasionally. Gansta rap is one of the prime targets of the conservatives. Gangsters are fine as long as they’re white guys named Brando or Pacino. But black guys named Ice T and Flava Flav are definitely a danger to Western Civilization as we used to know it.

Censorship is nothing new. A kidnapping victim turned missionary, Ulfilas (311-381) who first translated the Bible into a Germanic writing, deliberately left out some books (First and Second Kings and First and Second Chronicles) on the grounds that the Germans were too fond of fighting already. It didn’t work.

Nothing in gangsta rap seems likely to inspire the kind of organized murder and mayhem of the Inquisition or the Crusades. It’s a fairly new form of expression, and like the Bible, deserves a few thousand years or so to work the bugs out before it’s censored.

Liberals are just as bad, only less efficient. They’ve given up on nationalizing the oil industry, and health care (for now) but are waxing wroth because the government recently turned over control of the information superhighway to corporate giants like I.B.M. and M.C.I.. Being the techno-simps that they are, they can’t figure out a way to have picket lines and sit-down strikes in cyberspace (yet) without the government electronically strong arming their “advocacy.”

Allen Shapiro in The Nation complains that a free-market controlled cyber-space will not allow for an environment where “bothersome, in-your-face expression flourishes and is heard,” which he says is “essential to an informed citizenry and to pluralistic, deliberative democracy.” So what are we going to do, give all the guys hawking Spare Change their own e-mail address? Shapiro’s more realistic but equally absurd solution is for the government “to start (on the internet) the virtual equivalent of PBS or NPR. These forums must be visible, accessible and at least occasionally, unavoidable.” Speech still isn’t free but it’s getting cheap, so now liberals want to put a time-tax on cyber-communities, consisting of their own uplifting messages.

There you have it folks, conservatives who want the government to stop up your ears, liberals who want the government to scream in your ears, and a passel of vote mongering candidates, who just need a sample poll to know which way the wind blows. Republicans prefer to forget that Reagan, the best candidate they ever had, was a product of the very Hollywood they hate so much. What we need now is for Hollywood to give us another candidate. One who’s neither conservative nor liberal. Maybe Hollywood already has:

Gump! Gump! Gump! Gump!