TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/073189/07318900.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.1 KB | 229 lines

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In Praise of Censure


By Garry Wills


    Rarely have the denouncers of censorship been so eager to
start practicing it. When a sense of moral disorientation
overcomes a society, people from the least expected quarters
begin to ask, "Is nothing sacred?" Feminists join reactionaries
to denounce pornography as demeaning to women. Rock musician
Frank Zappa declares that when Tipper Gore, the wife of Senator
Albert Gore from Tennessee, asked music companies to label
sexually explicit material, she launched an illegal "conspiracy
to extort." A Penthouse editorialist says that housewife Terry
Rakolta, who asked sponsors to withdraw support from a sitcom
called Married . . . With Children, is "yelling fire in a
crowded theater," a formula that says her speech is not
protected by the First Amendment.

    But the most interesting movement to limit speech is
directed at defamatory utterances against blacks, homosexuals,
Jews, women or other stigmatizable groups. It took no Terry
Rakolta of the left to bring about the instant firing of Jimmy
the Greek and Al Campanis from sports jobs when they made
racially denigrating comments. Social pressure worked far more
quickly on them than on Married . . . With Children, which is
still on the air.

    The rules being considered on college campuses to punish
students for making racist and other defamatory remarks go
beyond social and commercial pressure to actual legal muzzling.
The right-wing Dartmouth Review and its imitators have
understandably infuriated liberals, who are beginning to take
action against them and the racist expressions they have
encouraged. The American Civil Liberties Union considered this
movement important enough to make it the principal topic at its
biennial meeting last month in Madison, Wis. Ironically, the
regents of the University of Wisconsin had passed their own
rules against defamation just before the ACLU members convened
on the university's campus. Nadine Strossen, of New York
University School of Law, who was defending the ACLU's
traditional position on free speech, said of Wisconsin's new
rules, "You can tell how bad they are by the fact that the
regents had to make an amendment at the last minute exempting
classroom discussion! What is surprising is that Donna Shalala
(chancellor of the university) went along with it." So did
constitutional lawyers on the faculty.

    If a similar code were drawn up with right-wing imperatives
in mind -- one banning unpatriotic, irreligious or sexually
explicit expressions on campus -- the people framing
Wisconsin-type rules would revert to their libertarian pasts.
In this competition to suppress, is regard for freedom of
expression just a matter of whose ox is getting gored at the
moment? Does the left just get nervous about the Christian cross
when Klansmen burn it, while the right will react only when
Madonna flirts crucifixes between her thighs?

    The cries of "un-American" are as genuine and as frequent
on either side. Everyone is protecting the country. Zappa
accuses Gore of undermining the moral fiber of America with the
"sexual neuroses of these vigilant ladies." He argues that she
threatens our freedoms with "connubial insider trading" because
her husband is a Senator. Apparently her marital status should
deprive her of speaking privileges in public -- an argument
Westbrook Pegler used to make against Eleanor Roosevelt.
Penthouse says Rakolta is taking us down the path toward
fascism. It attacks her for living in a rich suburb -- the old
"radical chic" argument that rich people cannot support moral
causes.

    There is a basic distinction that cuts through this
free-for-all over freedom. It is the distinction, too often
neglected, between censorship and censure (the free expression
of moral disapproval). What the campuses are trying to do (at
least those with state money) is use the force of government to
contain freedom of speech. What Donald Wildmon, the free-lance
moralist from Tupelo, Miss., does when he gets Pepsi to cancel
its Madonna ad is censure the ad by calling for a boycott.
Advocating boycotts is a form of speech protected by the First
Amendment. As Nat Hentoff, journalistic custodian of the First
Amendment, says, "I would hate to see boycotts outlawed. Think
what that would do to Cesar Chavez." Or, for that matter, to
Ralph Nader. If one disapproves of a social practice, whether
it is racist speech or unjust hiring in lettuce fields, one is
free to denounce that and to call on others to express their
disapproval. Otherwise there would be no form of persuasive
speech except passing a law. This would make the law coterminous
with morality.

    Equating morality with legality is in effect what people do
when they claim that anything tolerated by law must, in the
name of freedom, be approved by citizens in all their dealings
with one another. As Zappa says, "Masturbation is not illegal.
If it is not illegal to do it, why should it be illegal to sing
about it?" He thinks this proves that Gore, who is not trying
to make raunch in rock illegal, cannot even ask distributors to
label it. Anything goes, as long as it's legal. The odd
consequence of this argument would be a drastic narrowing of the
freedom of speech. One could not call into question anything
that was not against the law -- including, for instance, racist
speech.

    A false ideal of tolerance has not only outlawed censorship
but discouraged censoriousness (another word for censure). Most
civilizations have expressed their moral values by mobilization
of social opprobrium. That, rather than specific legislation,
is what changed the treatment of minorities in films and TV over
recent years. One can now draw opprobrious attention by gay
bashing, as the Beastie Boys rock group found when their
distributor told them to cut out remarks about "fags" for
business reasons. Or by anti-Semitism, as the just disbanded rap
group Public Enemy has discovered.

    It is said that only the narrow-minded are intolerant or
opprobrious. Most of those who limited the distribution of
Martin Scorsese's movie The Last Temptation of Christ had not
even seen the movie. So do we guarantee freedom of speech only
for the broad-minded or the better educated? Can one speak only
after studying whatever one has reason, from one's beliefs, to
denounce? Then most of us would be doing a great deal less
speaking than we do. If one has never seen any snuff movies, is
that a bar to criticizing them?

    Others argue that asking people not to buy lettuce is
different from asking them not to buy a rocker's artistic
expression. Ideas (carefully disguised) lurk somewhere in the
lyrics. All the more reason to keep criticism of them free. If
ideas are too important to suppress, they are also too important
to ignore. The whole point of free speech is not to make ideas
exempt from criticism but to expose them to it.

    One of the great mistakes of liberals in recent decades has
been the ceding of moral concern to right-wingers. Just because
one opposes censorship, one need not be seen as agreeing with
pornographers. Why should liberals, of all people, oppose Gore
when she asks that labels be put on products meant for the
young, to inform those entrusted by law with the care of the
young? Liberals were the first to promote "healthy" television
shows like Sesame Street and The Electric Company. In the 1950s
and 1960s they were the leading critics of television, of its
mindless violence, of the way it ravaged the attention span
needed for reading. Who was keeping kids away from TV sets then?
How did promoters of Big Bird let themselves be cast as
champions of the Beastie Boys -- not just of their right to
perform but of their performance itself? Why should it be left
to Gore to express moral disapproval of a group calling itself
Dead Kennedys (sample lyric: "I kill children, I love to see
them die")?

    For that matter, who has been more insistent that parents
should "interfere" in what their children are doing, Tipper
Gore or Jesse Jackson? All through the 1970s, Jackson was
traveling the high schools, telling parents to turn off TVs,
make the kids finish their homework, check with teachers on
their performance, get to know what the children are doing. This
kind of "interference" used to be called education.

    Belief in the First Amendment does not pre-empt other
beliefs, making one a eunuch to the interplay of opinions. It
is a distortion to turn "You can express any views" into the
proposition "I don't care what views you express." If liberals
keep equating equality with approval, they will be repeatedly
forced into weak positions.

    A case in point is the Corcoran Gallery's sudden
cancellation of an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs.
The whole matter was needlessly confused when the director,
Christina Owr-Chall, claimed she was canceling the show to
protect it from censorship. She meant that there might be
pressure to remove certain pictures -- the sadomasochistic ones
or those verging on kiddie porn -- if the show had gone on. But
she had in mind, as well, the hope of future grants from the
National Endowment for the Arts, which is under criticism for
the Mapplethorpe show and for another show that contained Andres
Serrano's Piss Christ, the photograph of a crucifix in what the
title says is urine. Owr-Chall is said to be yielding to
censorship, when she is clearly yielding to political and
financial pressure, as Pepsi yielded to commercial pressure over
the Madonna ad.

    What is at issue here is not government suppression but
government subsidy. Mapplethorpe's work is not banned, but
showing it might have endangered federal grants to needy
artists. The idea that what the government does not support it
represses is nonsensical, as one can see by reversing the
statement to read: "No one is allowed to create anything without
the government's subvention." What pussycats our supposedly
radical artists are. They not only want the government's
permission to create their artifacts, they want federal
authorities to supply the materials as well. Otherwise they feel
"gagged." If they are not given government approval (and money),
they want to remain an avant-garde while being bankrolled by the
Old Guard.

    What is easily forgotten in this argument is the right of
citizen taxpayers. They send representatives to Washington who
are answerable for the expenditure of funds exacted from them.
In general these voters want to favor their own values if
government is going to get into the culture-subsidizing area at
all (a proposition many find objectionable in itself).
Politicians, insofar as they support the arts, will tend to
favor conventional art (certainly not masochistic art). Anybody
who doubts that has no understanding of a politician's
legitimate concern for his or her constituents' approval.
Besides, it is quaint for those familiar with the politics of
the art world to discover, with a shock, that there is politics
in politics.

    Luckily, cancellation of the Mapplethorpe show forced some
artists back to the flair and cheekiness of unsubsidized art.
Other results of pressure do not turn out as well.
Unfortunately, people in certain regions were deprived of the
chance to see The Last Temptation of Christ in the theater.
Some, no doubt, considered it a loss that they could not buy
lettuce or grapes during a Chavez boycott. Perhaps there was
even a buyer perverse enough to miss driving the unsafe cars
Nader helped pressure off the market. On the other hand, we do
not get sports analysis made by racists. These mobilizations of
social opprobrium are not examples of repression but of freedom
of expression by committed people who censured without
censoring, who expressed the kinds of belief the First Amendment
guarantees. I do not, as a result, get whatever I approve of
subsidized, either by Pepsi or the government. But neither does
the law come in to silence Tipper Gore or Frank Zappa or even
that filthy rag, the Dartmouth Review.