“That differences of opinion should arise among men on politics, on
religion and on every other topic of human inquiry, and that these should be
freely expressed in a country where all our faculties are free, is to be
expected. But these valuable privileges are much perverted when permitted to
disturb the harmony of social intercourse, and to lessen the tolerance of
opinion.” –President Thomas
Jefferson, 1809.
That 1970s Show, Again. This current situation reminded me of a similar event in the Summer after my freshman year at W.&L. In that year, neo-Nazis planned a march, in their full dress and wretched regalia, through a Jewish suburb of Chicago. Local elected officials sought to forestall the event. Yet the American Civil Liberties Union – an organization I perceived as ‘Jewish’ (shame on me) – came to the aid of the neo-Nazis so the latter could march.
Like most others whom I knew, I wondered at the time, ‘What in the Hell is the A.C.L.U. doing?’ As the Summer moved along and I listened to interviews of the Jewish attorney taking up the case on behalf of the A.C.L.U., I gained immense respect for him and his organization for standing by the Freedom of Speech, even in this obviously odious expression of it.
After working its way up through various benches to the Supreme Court, the march proceeded without incident a year later as a counter-rally shouted down the handful of hate-meisters.
Hope is a Many Splendoured Thing. Then
imagine if Charlottesville’s Mayor had requested that no one from the town
attend the march or for outsiders not to participate in counter-demonstrations
on site? Yes, there would still be Press coverage but, perhaps, less than
complete, especially if the national outlets had decided not to show up (CNN, The
NYT, The WSJ, et al.).
Imagine the optics of vacant streets portraying marchers with police protection…and nobody else around! That would likely have deflated the importance of the event, at least to all onlookers outside the Bannon-bubble. Imagine if Governor McAuliffe or Mayor Signer had not to condemned the speech so stridently, resorting to meeting fire with fire, preferring instead to attend to their routine affairs with Charlottesville and the Lee statue a million miles away?
“I must respect the decision of the Supreme Court allowing this
group (the Nazis) to express their views, even when those views are despicable
and ugly as they are in this case. But if such views must be expressed, I am
pleased they will not go unanswered. That is why I want to voice my complete
solidarity with those citizens of Skokie and Chicago who will gather Sunday in
a peaceful demonstration of their abhorrence of Nazism.” —President Jimmy Carter, 1978.
“I was raised in a household in which the only intolerance I was
taught was intolerance of bigotry.” –President Ronald
Reagan, 1982.
---------
BLUF (bottom-line, up-front): We could have made Charlottesville
much ado about nothing. Instead we ushered in tragedy.
INTRODUCTION: Sit-Rep. The sight of white supremacists rallying on the grounds of the co-author of the Bill of Rights and the Founder of the University of Virginia, one of the nation’s great learning centers, will remain grimly ironic. Few people – liberal, conservative and moderates alike – really have the time of day for these unsavory human beings.
These ‘Unite-the-Right’ (sic) types openly challenged the sacrosanct ideal of the Freedom of Speech. Yet, sacrosanct that ideal remains. Earlier this week-end, we confronted the real-world, real-time dilemma of Free Speech.
What to do about odious speech, publicly expressed? The First Amendment intends to protect ‘protected speech’ only.
That statement is circular and anyone can see that. But its being circular does not make it specious. What it really says is that there has to be flexibility in setting limits to this precious right since unfettered Free Speech could lead, for example, to the murderous disorder we witnessed in Virginia, directly harming the more peaceable citizenry.
Dealing with Hard-Core and Political Porn. The Supreme Court grappled with this issue in the area of pornography in a case from 43 years ago, deftly deferring to community standards for the definition of obscenity (i.e., in that case, ‘hard-core’ porn). There has been controversy over the subsequent decades on how to apply that vague and federalist wisdom.
During the 1980s, a Republican U.S. Senator sought to withdraw financial support for a sacrilegious photograph and a big-city Democratic Mayor pressured vendors to pull off their newsstands an equally sacrilegious magazine. Generally, these issues revolved around how community standards were, and are, to be identified and enforced.
Something like this idea of local agency applies to what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday 12th August 2017. Can elected officials act as agents of community standards in responding to openly disseminated hate-speech? That is what the Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the Mayor of Charlottesville were trying to do.
While they were in the right, as any reasonable man or woman could see the right, these leaders mismanaged a situation through political bungling. The idea of local agency to suppress bigotry makes sense. What became very difficult was agreeing upon just how much latitude these local agents should properly have.
Like pornography, one is hard-pressed precisely to define hate-speech, beyond the well known slurs and epithets, but yet any dunce, even Dylan Roof, knows it when he hears it.
INTRODUCTION: Sit-Rep. The sight of white supremacists rallying on the grounds of the co-author of the Bill of Rights and the Founder of the University of Virginia, one of the nation’s great learning centers, will remain grimly ironic. Few people – liberal, conservative and moderates alike – really have the time of day for these unsavory human beings.
These ‘Unite-the-Right’ (sic) types openly challenged the sacrosanct ideal of the Freedom of Speech. Yet, sacrosanct that ideal remains. Earlier this week-end, we confronted the real-world, real-time dilemma of Free Speech.
What to do about odious speech, publicly expressed? The First Amendment intends to protect ‘protected speech’ only.
That statement is circular and anyone can see that. But its being circular does not make it specious. What it really says is that there has to be flexibility in setting limits to this precious right since unfettered Free Speech could lead, for example, to the murderous disorder we witnessed in Virginia, directly harming the more peaceable citizenry.
Dealing with Hard-Core and Political Porn. The Supreme Court grappled with this issue in the area of pornography in a case from 43 years ago, deftly deferring to community standards for the definition of obscenity (i.e., in that case, ‘hard-core’ porn). There has been controversy over the subsequent decades on how to apply that vague and federalist wisdom.
During the 1980s, a Republican U.S. Senator sought to withdraw financial support for a sacrilegious photograph and a big-city Democratic Mayor pressured vendors to pull off their newsstands an equally sacrilegious magazine. Generally, these issues revolved around how community standards were, and are, to be identified and enforced.
Something like this idea of local agency applies to what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday 12th August 2017. Can elected officials act as agents of community standards in responding to openly disseminated hate-speech? That is what the Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the Mayor of Charlottesville were trying to do.
While they were in the right, as any reasonable man or woman could see the right, these leaders mismanaged a situation through political bungling. The idea of local agency to suppress bigotry makes sense. What became very difficult was agreeing upon just how much latitude these local agents should properly have.
Like pornography, one is hard-pressed precisely to define hate-speech, beyond the well known slurs and epithets, but yet any dunce, even Dylan Roof, knows it when he hears it.
That 1970s Show, Again. This current situation reminded me of a similar event in the Summer after my freshman year at W.&L. In that year, neo-Nazis planned a march, in their full dress and wretched regalia, through a Jewish suburb of Chicago. Local elected officials sought to forestall the event. Yet the American Civil Liberties Union – an organization I perceived as ‘Jewish’ (shame on me) – came to the aid of the neo-Nazis so the latter could march.
Like most others whom I knew, I wondered at the time, ‘What in the Hell is the A.C.L.U. doing?’ As the Summer moved along and I listened to interviews of the Jewish attorney taking up the case on behalf of the A.C.L.U., I gained immense respect for him and his organization for standing by the Freedom of Speech, even in this obviously odious expression of it.
After working its way up through various benches to the Supreme Court, the march proceeded without incident a year later as a counter-rally shouted down the handful of hate-meisters.
Back then, however, the country was still held together, with
increasing frailty, by what many of today’s self-labelled conservatives (sic) would
deride as a ‘leftist consensus’. Truthfully, it was an expectation of public
civility. This more liberal consensus of decorum was fraying; its ideology exhausted. The
mainstream G.O.P. was dissolving and a Democratic President struggling.
Nevertheless, the Kulturkampf had yet to arrive as a regrettable by-product of President Reagan’s conservative ascendancy. There is little doubt in my mind that President Reagan would not have countenanced today’s rally in Virginia and would have said so, decisively. But we do not have a principled Republican like President Reagan in the White House to remove this blemish publicly and pro-actively.
Nevertheless, the Kulturkampf had yet to arrive as a regrettable by-product of President Reagan’s conservative ascendancy. There is little doubt in my mind that President Reagan would not have countenanced today’s rally in Virginia and would have said so, decisively. But we do not have a principled Republican like President Reagan in the White House to remove this blemish publicly and pro-actively.
The Loss of Principle and Purpose in Personalities. Instead
our current President is a demagogue, though he deserves some credit for his delayed and piping tepid response, to the bedlam of bigotry in Virginia. Previously, President
Trump had created today’s context with slurs uttered against whole segments of
the population – call them the 3M post-its written with passwords to revile Mexicans,
Muslims and Mixed-genders – in word, deed or tweet.
While General Kelly may finally be imposing adult supervision on this President, it is sadly too little, too late. The cage doors of civil containment have been flung open, like Pandora’s Box, releasing the evils of the ghoulish, bad and ugly. Like Pandora’s Box, however, there is Hope, the last to exit. And what is this Hope? Three elements, at least as I view them from my limited and conservative view: deflection, humor and refutation.
Remember Skokie. And that brings us back to Skokie, 1977. At the time, one caller, apparently a steel-worker, into a radio talk show on the local mainstream station proposed an interesting response. Why not have the Skokie mayor announce that the town would permit the swastika-laden mob to march, opting for a town picnic on other side of Skokie for the residents to celebrate Judaism?
Why not seal off the parade route, requesting the Press not to cover the event? An interesting idea but one that was easier said than done, obviously. Skokie had a population of 70,000 back then, versus an almost equally unmanageable 50,000 in Charlottesville. Picnics were feasible in neither case. Additionally, the Press arguably had a stronger sense of the higher, common good in 1977.
The Press may or may not have shunned the event in Skokie, thereby effectively castrating the Nazis during their hour of provocation, truncating their fame, or infamy, to fifteen minutes. Yet, in this day of an arid yet rabid journalism that often click-baits men’s darker impulses and grievances to chalk up ad revenue, such a higher restraint seems inconceivable.
Furthermore, this year’s hate parade was many, many times the size of the eventual Skokie dud-march in 1978. Nevertheless, minimization-by-deflection may well have proven more effective and less tragic today. Imagine if a state of emergency had NOT been declared, with government leaders instead opting to call on the Press not to cover the event and to ignore Charlottesville?
While General Kelly may finally be imposing adult supervision on this President, it is sadly too little, too late. The cage doors of civil containment have been flung open, like Pandora’s Box, releasing the evils of the ghoulish, bad and ugly. Like Pandora’s Box, however, there is Hope, the last to exit. And what is this Hope? Three elements, at least as I view them from my limited and conservative view: deflection, humor and refutation.
Remember Skokie. And that brings us back to Skokie, 1977. At the time, one caller, apparently a steel-worker, into a radio talk show on the local mainstream station proposed an interesting response. Why not have the Skokie mayor announce that the town would permit the swastika-laden mob to march, opting for a town picnic on other side of Skokie for the residents to celebrate Judaism?
Why not seal off the parade route, requesting the Press not to cover the event? An interesting idea but one that was easier said than done, obviously. Skokie had a population of 70,000 back then, versus an almost equally unmanageable 50,000 in Charlottesville. Picnics were feasible in neither case. Additionally, the Press arguably had a stronger sense of the higher, common good in 1977.
The Press may or may not have shunned the event in Skokie, thereby effectively castrating the Nazis during their hour of provocation, truncating their fame, or infamy, to fifteen minutes. Yet, in this day of an arid yet rabid journalism that often click-baits men’s darker impulses and grievances to chalk up ad revenue, such a higher restraint seems inconceivable.
Furthermore, this year’s hate parade was many, many times the size of the eventual Skokie dud-march in 1978. Nevertheless, minimization-by-deflection may well have proven more effective and less tragic today. Imagine if a state of emergency had NOT been declared, with government leaders instead opting to call on the Press not to cover the event and to ignore Charlottesville?
Imagine the optics of vacant streets portraying marchers with police protection…and nobody else around! That would likely have deflated the importance of the event, at least to all onlookers outside the Bannon-bubble. Imagine if Governor McAuliffe or Mayor Signer had not to condemned the speech so stridently, resorting to meeting fire with fire, preferring instead to attend to their routine affairs with Charlottesville and the Lee statue a million miles away?
Imagine if these leaders – these local agents of community standards against
hate speech – had preferred humor that could have fed right into ‘Saturday
Night Live’? One such remark might have been, “Boys will be boys. Growing up is
oh so hard to do, from the Oval Office on down…”
If this initial quip were not effective, then creative people and comedians -- ¿Senator Franken, anyone? – could surely have come up with something to say to castrate these ‘tough-guys’ publicly and indirectly. Imagine the pre-emptive optics of transforming these bigots, and the President who had unleashed them, into a collective laughing stock. That would have been Classic Churchill or F.D.R.!
If this initial quip were not effective, then creative people and comedians -- ¿Senator Franken, anyone? – could surely have come up with something to say to castrate these ‘tough-guys’ publicly and indirectly. Imagine the pre-emptive optics of transforming these bigots, and the President who had unleashed them, into a collective laughing stock. That would have been Classic Churchill or F.D.R.!
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