Speech

By Sunny Fry

Theo van Gogh was a bit of a dissolute character, known for saying outrageous and offensive things to a large number of people and groups.  It was sufficient to get him fired from any number of publications, but none of those dismissals were sufficient to silence him.  About anything.  He made a short, 10-minute film entitled "Submission," which translates the same as "Islam," featuring semi-nude women talking about their victimhood, with Quranic verses justifying that treatment projected onto their skin.  He received death threats, laughed them off, continued showing his film, and was murdered.

The creators of South Park are also groundbreaking, in that they said increasingly outrageous things, skewering everyone and everything, and nothing was out of bounds.  In their recent two-part show, the plot line involved the characters trying to figure out a way to skewer Islam, since depictions of Mohammed are forbidden (at least by strict Wahhabist/Sunni sects).  Mohammed was portrayed in a bear suit, never actually shown, and yet a thinly veiled threat from an Islamist site based out of New York suggested that the disrespect shown the man venerated by Islam would result in their deaths.  Comedy Central subsequently bleeped out a good portion of the second episode and pulled the videos of both from their online streaming.  They caved.

A friend told me long ago that he thought the greatest threat to free speech came from people like Howard Stern, people who make a living being more extreme and outrageous, pushing the envelope past the point of what most people consider proper.  Remember the two DJs who called for Condi Rice to be gang raped?   And we're all familiar with the terrible, harmful things said by representatives of both parties about the other.  South Park is hardly unique -- it sprang influenced by the irreverence of Bart Simpson and Beavis and Butthead, and has any number of imitators, all of them striving to be _the_ most offensive. 

Mostly, I think it's great.  Fine.  It's cable, after all, and I don't have it.  You have to actually choose to watch it.  Except ...

My friend was probably right.

Because words have power.  Words convey ideas, inspire action.  Germany didn't all by itself decide to take back the Rhineland and start rounding up Jews; it took Hitler's speeches, and centuries of words portraying Jews as thieving, conniving, subhuman.  The colonies didn't wake up one morning and decide to divorce England.  It took words of Patrick Henry and Tom Paine, Jefferson and Sam Adams.  Christianity formed around the reported words of Jesus; Islam formed around the words written by Mohammed.  And in 2009, at an evangelical conference in Uganda, American preachers described homosexuality as an evil institution dedicated to wicked promiscuity and the destruction of marriage, and indicated it could be "cured," despite all statistical evidence to the contrary.  A month later, and the bill passed to make homosexual acts in Uganda punishable by death.  During the Bush years, even sensible parameters were stretched when it became trendy to call for the president's death.  And now people profess to be shocked when another preacher simply says he prays for Obama's death (or more specifically, prays Psalm 109).  In New Jersey, the teacher's union is disseminating a prayer for the death of Gov. Christie. 

We forget the power of our words.  Or pretend ignorance.

Americans assume their freedoms.  We've all grown up taking it for granted that, save for some sensible guidelines, we could say anything we liked.  It was an article of faith, and circumscribed only by a reasonable social decorum.  Which decorum has eroded to the point of non-existence.  Instead, we are rewarding people for racing to the lowest denominator, reckless in our utterances.  Nothing is sacred.  In fact, the notion of the sacred itself serves only as an invitation for mockery, all of which is justified by the secular value which *we* purport to hold sacred -- freedom to speak as we choose. 

Free speech.

Tom Paine wrote: "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value."  We, most of us, have paid nothing for that freedom to speak our minds and consciences, though the men and women who purchased it for us pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to do so -- and many of them paid that, and more.

And so, having treated that freedom to speak our minds as not only a liberty, but a license, and without a concomitant responsibility for our words, that very liberty is threatened.  Not by the hand of a powerful government, but by fear of assassination by an unknown someone who _does_ hold something sacred, more sacred than we hold that precious freedom. 

We are silenced, and our capitulation gives encouragement to those who would use violence to silence us further, because nobody is willing to die to put Mohammed in a bear suit.

The creators of South Park are also groundbreaking, in that they said increasingly outrageous things, skewering everyone and everything, and nothing was out of bounds.  In their recent two-part show, the plot line involved the characters trying to figure out a way to skewer Islam, since depictions of Mohammed are forbidden (at least by strict Wahhabist/Sunni sects).  Mohammed was portrayed in a bear suit, never actually shown, and yet a thinly veiled threat from an Islamist site based out of New York suggested that the disrespect shown the man venerated by Islam would result in their deaths.  Comedy Central subsequently bleeped out a good portion of the second episode and pulled the videos of both from their online streaming.  They caved.

A friend told me long ago that he thought the greatest threat to free speech came from people like Howard Stern, people who make a living being more extreme and outrageous, pushing the envelope past the point of what most people consider proper.  Remember the two DJs who called for Condi Rice to be gang raped?   And we're all familiar with the terrible, harmful things said by representatives of both parties about the other.  South Park is hardly unique -- it sprang influenced by the irreverence of Bart Simpson and Beavis and Butthead, and has any number of imitators, all of them striving to be _the_ most offensive. 

Mostly, I think it's great.  Fine.  It's cable, after all, and I don't have it.  You have to actually choose to watch it.  Except ...

My friend was probably right.

Because words have power.  Words convey ideas, inspire action.  Germany didn't all by itself decide to take back the Rhineland and start rounding up Jews; it took Hitler's speeches, and centuries of words portraying Jews as thieving, conniving, subhuman.  The colonies didn't wake up one morning and decide to divorce England.  It took words of Patrick Henry and Tom Paine, Jefferson and Sam Adams.  Christianity formed around the reported words of Jesus; Islam formed around the words written by Mohammed.  And in 2009, at an evangelical conference in Uganda, American preachers described homosexuality as an evil institution dedicated to wicked promiscuity and the destruction of marriage, and indicated it could be "cured," despite all statistical evidence to the contrary.  A month later, and the bill passed to make homosexual acts in Uganda punishable by death.  During the Bush years, even sensible parameters were stretched when it became trendy to call for the president's death.  And now people profess to be shocked when another preacher simply says he prays for Obama's death (or more specifically, prays Psalm 109).  In New Jersey, the teacher's union is disseminating a prayer for the death of Gov. Christie. 

We forget the power of our words.  Or pretend ignorance.

Americans assume their freedoms.  We've all grown up taking it for granted that, save for some sensible guidelines, we could say anything we liked.  It was an article of faith, and circumscribed only by a reasonable social decorum.  Which decorum has eroded to the point of non-existence.  Instead, we are rewarding people for racing to the lowest denominator, reckless in our utterances.  Nothing is sacred.  In fact, the notion of the sacred itself serves only as an invitation for mockery, all of which is justified by the secular value which *we* purport to hold sacred -- freedom to speak as we choose. 

Free speech.

Tom Paine wrote: "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value."  We, most of us, have paid nothing for that freedom to speak our minds and consciences, though the men and women who purchased it for us pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to do so -- and many of them paid that, and more.

And so, having treated that freedom to speak our minds as not only a liberty, but a license, and without a concomitant responsibility for our words, that very liberty is threatened.  Not by the hand of a powerful government, but by fear of assassination by an unknown someone who _does_ hold something sacred, more sacred than we hold that precious freedom. 

We are silenced, and our capitulation gives encouragement to those who would use violence to silence us further, because nobody is willing to die to put Mohammed in a bear suit.