In Kurt Vonnegut’s darkly prophetic novel, Mother Night, the Reverend Doctor Lionel J.D. Jones is a minor character, but, like so many in that thinly disguised description of the growth of American Nazism in the 1930s and 40s, his character is eerily prophetic. He is the publisher of The White Christian Minuteman, a hate-filled rag, funded by the Nazis, who becomes a close friend of the protagonist, a Nazi propagandist.
The Rev. Jones is eventually put on trial for his actions, and is indicted for, among other crimes, “…conspiring to seize upon and use and misuse the right of freedom of speech to spread their disloyal doctrines, intending and believing that any nation allowing its people the right of freedom of speech is powerless to defend itself against enemies masquerading as patriotic….”
Which brings me to the First Amendment.
If ever there was a ringing endorsement of the protection of thought and expression, it is found in the First Amendment of our Constitution. Of course, it was an afterthought, an addition to the original, a recognition that individual rights against the government may actually need to be set down in writing. Still, in all my years of service in Sacramento and in LA County, I never heard any right claimed so often, and so inaccurately, as this one.
Few seem to understand that this Amendment serves only to protect us from the official actions of a government. For interpersonal interactions, it’s measured more by what my Dad used to call the “Your ability to swing your fist ends where my nose begins,” standard. We can still be sued for libel. We can still, apparently, be fired for what we say. We can still be threatened with losing billions of dollars in research funding if we don’t surrender academic freedom. Oh, sorry, that IS an act by the government.
Lately, of course, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry as the very people who coined the term “cancel culture” to describe efforts to shame people for speech considered objectionable or offensive, are now, predictably, practicing it with a vengeance. It’s one thing to make a political movement out of whining, but another to exercise their addiction to power by pressing the “cancel” button, themselves.
Did you stupidly write something snarky about the latest assassination? Fired! Did you fail to show the empathy that their side seems to forget they have, historically, called “weakness”? Pink slip.
The nature of such punishments, however, varies, depending on which side applies (or fails to apply) them. Recently, for example, Fox News (where else?) host Brian Kilmeade suggested that the perfect solution for homelessness would be lethal injections. “Just kill ’em,” he said. Was he fired? (many laugh emojis). Of course not. He simply admitted that his comment, was “extremely callous.” Flap over. Not so for longtime MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd whose comments on the latest high-profile murder were more on the “hateful words lead to hateful actions” level. He’s gone.
Historically, freedom of speech is protected except in the very rare instances where it can cause real harm. We’ve all heard that, although it is nothing but speech, yelling “Fire” in a crowded theatre, because it can cause a panic, presents a real danger, and would provide an exception to the guarantee of free speech. After realizing that mere words could diminish and demean people in the workplace so badly that actual damage regarding performance and promotion followed, the law regarding sexual harassment changed so that it was actionable in court as a tort.
This has not been the case, however, with words that simply don’t comport with someone else’s religious beliefs, or with the political meme of the moment. Such expressions have not, until now, been considered so dangerous that they are not protected by the First Amendment. But, in these strange and dangerous times, it seems that every difficult, ambitious, far-reaching and aspirational American ideal is up for interpretation, and pressure is exerted on our press, and on our academic institutions, to curb their speech, and alter their communications and employment standards, or face consequences. Such threats and limitations are, it must be clear, the same as simply prohibiting speech. Our job, I think, is to keep up our end of the fight for sanity, and not to bend the knee to the corruption of our most basic freedoms.
Hope Will Not Be Caged
Governments have many ways to exercise control. One of the most powerful, over the centuries, has been the imprisonment of political dissidents and enemies. Vaclav Havel, for instance, the former President of the Czech Republic, spent dark and difficult times in jail as he fought to free the Czechs from Soviet rule.
I was struck by the fact that, like others, perhaps more familiar to us, his writings while incarcerated were mainly about hope. “Either we have hope within us or we don’t;” he wrote, “it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation….it is an orientation of the heart and transcends the world that is immediately experienced.”
Dr. Martin Luther King traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, to bring non-violent civil disobedience tactics to confront segregation there, as he had in Atlanta. He was, of course, arrested, and, during his long stay in the Birmingham jail, wrote a 21-page letter on scraps of paper that were smuggled out, piecemeal, by friends. In the letter, he wrote eloquently of the daily lives, fears, and mistreatment of African-Americans in Birmingham, and elsewhere, and urged the authorities who had incarcerated him to choose to serve justice over injustice, love over hate. He ended the letter with hope, writing, “Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”
The great Nelson Mandela wrote, from prison, “Hope is a powerful weapon, even when all else is lost.” How, I wondered, do they keep hope alive in the darkest of circumstances? They would be the first to tell us that we each have a flame within us, burning for freedom and lighting the way. We simply have to nurture it, like all flames, with our breath.
