Dear Reader (including all you yotches* who said you’d send in new “Dear Reader” gag suggestions),
There’s a strange contradiction inside the conservative mind. You often hear that we are less free today than we were a generation ago or a hundred years ago or pretty much any time between yesterday and the Founding.
I’ve never been too sympathetic to this notion. It’s not that we haven’t lost some freedoms or seen them constrained. Anyone who’s tried to burn leaves on their front lawn or get the kind of flush from his toilet that makes a man proud can attest to that. But we have gained other freedoms as well.
If you’re going to use a simple binary system of “more free” versus “less free,” in which you add up all of the available freedom today on one side of the scale and all the freedom we had in year X on the other side, then it becomes very difficult to defend the proposition we are clearly less free today. Two gold ingots of freedom in particular throw off the scales: The liberation of blacks and women. It is impossible, using simplistic accounting methods, to say that we were freer in 1811 or 1911 than we are in 2011 if you take it as a given that women and blacks are people and citizens too (a point the Cato Institute was forced to concede thanks to Clarence Thomas).
I could talk about this all day, but I want to get to the point. Lots of people on the right (and the left) are absolutely terrified about losing their free speech rights. I know this not least because I’m getting lots of e-mail from them in response to my column today. In one sense that’s fine and good and healthy. In another it’s bizarre.
It reminds me of Victorian England, where everybody was terrified of public sexuality at precisely the moment that public sexuality was the least of society’s problems. Taken as a whole, we have a monstrous glut of free expression in this country. My kid can find things on the Internet in one minute that even 15 years ago a grown-up would have had to spend days searching for in the red-light district. And whenever anyone suggests regulating any of it, everyone freaks out as if our very future as a nation hinged on open and free access to videos of transvestites playing both sides of the field at once, if you know what I mean.
The simple fact is that “expression” is more free today than at any time in American history, period, full stop. Check local cable listings for details.
But not all expression is speech (hint: If you put a dollar bill in its G-string, it’s not “speech”). And not all speech is political speech, and not all political speech is the same.
The First Amendment right to free speech is first and foremost the right to engage in politics, not the right to a subsidy from the NEA to crap in a can and put it under a halogen lamp for morons to admire and the New York Times to hail as a transgressive breakthrough.
And for the several years prior to the Supreme Court’s repeal of McCain-Feingold, political speech in America was one of the most regulated forms of expression we had.
This was not only a travesty, it was a complete inversion of how we understand the protection of our liberties. Normally, the argument goes, we have to protect this absolutely crazy, whacky expression of freedom so we can protect our core freedoms. It’s a version of the “First they came for the Jews” trope. If we protect the outliers, the outposts on the frontiers of freedom, we can be sure that the home fires of liberty will continue to burn bright. So the ACLU and others claimed that we had to protect the rights of performance artists, strippers, and crazy homeless people.
I’d be fine with all of that if it were true. But it ain’t. It turns out that when you dispatch your most ardent forces to the frontier, they go native. Worse, they tend to look contemptuously at how we do things back home. Just look at the Hollywood base of the Democratic party. It has convinced itself that the Founding Fathers were more concerned with protecting porn than with the ability to run “stealth ads” during a presidential campaign. TheFederalist papers were stealth ads! The threat to our freedoms isn’t at the outposts on the frontier, the threats come through the front doors of our homes and offices.
And that brings me to Fred Phelps and the Westboro posse. The idea that our freedom hinges on whether or not these psychopaths can torment grieving families is just flat-out absurd. There are any number of areas in life where Phelps’s antics are already banned — inside Churches, near schools, whatever. The idea that if we add funerals to the list, we’ll all be talking Newspeak by morning is borderline paranoid.
For a big chunk of American history, if someone had desecrated a military funeral the way the Westboro fanatics do, they’d have been beaten by the good and decent townfolk and maybe even horsewhipped by the sheriff. And yet to listen to some conservatives, if Phelps is restrained, we’ll all be a little less free. Feh. I’m more dismayed that we’ve lost the freedom to beat the tar out of funeral desecrators with impunity.
Take a Letter . . .
Here’s another question: Why is “cordially” an appropriate way to end a letter? I get signing off with “sincerely,” because that’s a subjective statement about your own state of mind. But isn’t “cordial” descriptive of an atmosphere? Either the letter is cordial or it isn’t; saying it is doesn’t make it so. Imagine if I wrote you a letter in which I told you I was going to repossess your grandmother’s coin-operated dialysis machine, but I signed off “Generously, Jonah Goldberg.” That wouldn’t make the letter generous, would it? And if I wrote a letter in which I told you to eat excrement and perish, the letter wouldn’t magically become more cordial with the inclusion of “cordially.”
Speaking of letters, if you’re unaware of the Cleveland Stadium Corporation’s 1974 letter in response to some complaints, then you are ignorant of one of the Greatest Moments in Letter Writing.
Potpourri
I want to thank everyone who has sent their condolences, insights, best wishes, and prayers in regard to my brother’s passing. I can’t respond to them all, not least because it’s simply so emotionally draining. But as I deal with all of the emotional, spiritual, and, alas, financial fallout of Josh’s death, I want you folks to know that your support is greatly appreciated.
On to happier things.
Jimmy Fallon does an excellent Charlie Sheen.
Here’s some old Friday stuff from Debby that I missed:
Why everything tastes better when it’s beer-battered: A Scientific Explanation.
The greatest trick-shot quarterback of all time?
Great (and cheap) Valentine’s Day gift.
Catholic Confession app launched for iPhone.
Headline of the Week: “A happy ending to farmer’s anus woes.” The story is pretty disgusting, but the gist is you can apparently live without an anus, which raises the question: Why do we still have Paul Krugman?
Speaking of anus headlines (Hah! This is the only “news”letter you subscribe to that begins sentences that way, isn’t it?), here’s an interesting item: Inmate Caught with 30 Items in Anus: ”Upon removing the condom, they discovered many more items: 17 blue pills, 1 cigarette, 6 matches, a flint, a syringe, lip balm, a CVS receipt and a coupon.”
I guess I can understand the receipt, if your prison boss was a stickler for strict accounting. But the coupon?
Announcements
There will be more announcements next week!
* I used the word “yotch” in the salutation. This is a slang word I picked up from my wife. She acquired it during her time at Marquette University. As I gather, it’s used vaguely like “shmuck” among Midwesterners. I await further guidance on usage, etymology, and spelling from readers.
Until next time,
Cordially,
Jonah Goldberg