TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/073189/07318900.000

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 12KB | 213 lines

ESSAY, Page 71

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.