By Dr. Earl R. Smith II
Chief@ComeOnSense.com
www.ComeOnSense.com
For a person who had come of age during the sixties, these are frightening times indeed. I came of age during the period between the Viet Nam War and Watergate. My first awareness of censorship came on February 10, 1960 when Jack Parr’s Tonight Show was abruptly cut off the air because of a reference he made to the ‘water closet’. The resulting uproar started a great debate that highlighted freedom of speech and artistic freedom from censorship.
The debate spread to the movie business with writers, directors and producers lining up to protest the entire idea of censorship of their projects. Free speech was defended as the very core of the American experiment – an idea so important that the framers of our Constitution addressed it in the First Amendment. I remember those heady days when the government and corporate interests had to give way to Freedom of Speech and the Constitution.
Comedians like Richard Prior, Mort Saul and Lenny Bruce taught us not to be afraid of language – to speak our minds in words that conveyed what we were thinking. Prior spent his life trying to teach Americans that the way to diffuse hateful language was to use it every day – use it with a sly smile – laugh at it. Once those words became the butt of jokes – once they were transformed from terms of derision and oppression – they were no longer exclusively the private arsenal of the hate mongers.
Mort Saul spent his career trying to get us to think before we acted – before we censored – before we debased ourselves with shallow, grandstanding, knee-jerk behaviors. His message was uplifting – tit-for-tat lowers you to the level of the haters and fear mongers – you can rise above them by co-opting their weapons and turning them into wry and humorous observations about life and living.
Lenny Bruce worked to teach us that authority is almost always our enemy when it comes to our rights – that government is an avarice and offensive undertaking that will gradually strip away our rights under a paternalistic and patronizing effort to ‘protect us from ourselves’ or to ‘keep us safe’. We are the source of government not the other way around. He successfully and almost singlehandedly rolled back the coordinated force of authority and opened up the possibility that freedom of speech might become a reality for Americans.
I started this piece by saying that the times are frightening. They are because all of what was gained during the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s now seems to have been lost – sacrificed on the twin alters of political correctness and immensely expanded government control and censorship. Freedom of Speech – indeed the First Amendment to the Constitution – is now a sad and ironic joke – more a statement about the ideals of the framers and a reference to the way things once were and might have been than anything else.
I cannot watch movies on television anymore because of the butchery that parades as ‘content adjustment’. It is not content adjustment – it is censorship plan and simple. One of my favorite movies is Blazing Saddles – that wonderful and groundbreaking film that Mel Brooks gave us all those years ago. Now when I watch it on television, all I am reminded of is that it is now politically incorrect to use the word nigger or to allow the audience to hear a man pass gas. We were much braver back then – we were not afraid of those words or sounds. I do not see the movie anymore – what I see is some anonymous censor with a finger on the button determining what I can and cannot see.
What happened to artistic integrity? Has it been sacrificed on the Alter of gain and greed? Have the moneychangers so taken over the temple that the priests bow down before them and quietly and meekly take their bag of silver coins in exchange for their integrity – compliant and timid?
Moreover, what does all this say about Americans? Have we decided to accepted censorship as long as the special effects are spectacular enough? Have we decided that the Constitution and Freedom of Speech is less important than the fictional representation of a hero who fights for both but in real life – away from the camera – believes in neither? I suspect that is exactly the deal Americans have made with the Devil. However, before we take too many steps on the downward path towards eternal damnation, perhaps we should remember something that a poet wrote over twenty centuries ago:
… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses
Dr. Smith is a political and social theorist who lives in Georgetown, Washington DC
Entries (RSS)