“Sometimes it’s better to be brave, than to be free.”
by
Nona
I’ll never forget the first time I read the writing of Skeletal Grace – it was on a bulletin board I’d been posting on for two years, a board known for its rowdy propensity for drawing verbal blood. Nobody could cut through the bullshit of social niceties to leave a pile of hapless e-bodies in his wake like the Swedish émigré with the greatest command of the English language I’d ever observed in a foreigner since Nabokov. Any hapless BB poster who dared attempt a contretemps with Grace was quickly dispatched, often never to return. His style, as our regular DRS readers know, is equal parts dazzling elocution, cutting sarcasm, and the liberal use of absolutes. I’ve always envied people who see things in black and white and to whom absolutes always come so easily. For me, everything is gray, as with the vision of a dog, and I lean more towards nebulous bet-hedging and devil’s advocacy – a trait I find most annoying in others.
Yet I do possess the capacity to be absolutely certain on a couple of topics, one which just happens to be the subject of a Skeletal Grace rant several months ago.
You see, in his article, "The Freedom of Leeches", Gracie got his panties in a wad over the sickening antics of NAMBLA. (No, not the Marlon Brando club – if you need NAMBLA defined for you at this point in time, take a few minutes to Google it and come back. The rest of the class will not wait for you because we have a lot of ground to cover and I have better things to do than define every little thing. Learn to catch up.) I know that at this point you’re probably saying to yourself, “Shit, who doesn’t hate NAMBLA? It’s an organization that promotes the sexual exploitation of underage children by adults. Knowing they’re bad and hatin’ on ‘em is pretty much a no-brainer.” And you’re right, of course. But then Grace goes on to advocate a pretty radical solution to the problem of NAMBLA’s aggressive promotion and recruitment practices – namely, to repeal the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Or rather, if not to repeal it, then to “modify” it so that it doesn’t cover organizations like NAMBLA. That way the government can prosecute them for saying the things they do and handing out their flyers in places like schools, malls, and prisons.
This is where we collide with probably the strongest of my few absolutes. As a writer I have come to value the right to give voice to any thought over nearly every other right and privilege I’m afforded in this country. I don’t let people censor me very easily. Anytime I make the decision to censor myself – and I’ve done it here before – I always feel like I’ve compromised myself. When I hear somebody tell my daughter that when she grows up she’ll find that looks don’t matter and it’s what’s on the inside that counts, I feel a sense of duty to let her know that she’s been told a well-meaning misguided lie. So it goes that when someone who shapes thoughts into words as well as does Grace advocates allowing the US government to place limits on how he can use those words for the sake of the greater public safety, I have to first blanch at the sight of the helpless baby flying out the window along with its bathwater – then laugh at the patent absurdity of such a notion.
Advocating something like this on this particular website brings The_Irony on so many levels that dissecting it is like trying to write an Escher painting. In case any of you are keeping score at home, the slogan “The Truth Hurts Like a Motherfucker” is our site’s de facto motto, and it was coined by Grace himself. Anybody traversing the wild and woolly frontier of the Internet who stumbles upon this site will be confronted with that phrase before anything else. So let’s assume that Grace gets what he wants, that organizations like NAMBLA prove such a threat to public safety that the United States government places provisos and qualifications on our right to say and write what we want in the public dominion. What, then, would stop some religious wingnut who sees the phrase on our site’s main page and has a panic attack from crying to the Department of Homeland Security about a horrible website that features a Swedish immigrant exhorting readers to have sexual congress with their mothers? And further, what would stop the government from telling him to take it down or risk losing his site and being prosecuted for saying such a thing? Nothing, if we had no first amendment.
The support of such a radical undertaking as doing away with or modifying our First Amendment would also place the control of defining a subjective hypothesis – “what constitutes words that amount to a threat to the public safety?” – in the hands of Congress and the Senate, two bodies of politicians so compromised by big-money lobbying groups and obligations to big-time campaign contributors that their own words are beyond meaningless. You would effectively be handing control of what could and couldn’t be said in the public arena over to big business – who hold enough sway over our lives already, by way of the jobs they provide, the suppliers with whom they choose to do business, and by who will and won’t get their precious advertising dollars. But this would put them in the realm of making their interests into law. Big Tobacco, for instance, could very conceivably pay to make it a Federal offense for doctors to tell their patients that smoking will kill them.
This brings us to the simple fact that censorship already does exist – big time – in the US, thanks to the backbone of our economic infrastructure, aka the free market. A perfect Darwinian model in action, the free market goes a long way towards allowing de facto censorship, even allowing the government such a power to some extent. For example, let’s look at the city of San Francisco, California, the home and headquarters of NAMBLA. They have the option to lease advertising space at city bus stops and on the sides of city buses, just like any other city in the country, to whoever wants to pay the highest amount for such space. The First Amendment does not obligate them to sell this space to anyone who bids highest, however. It’s a judgment call for city officials to make, and so far no city official there has seen fit to sell advertising space to NAMBLA. I can’t think of too many private enterprises who would go for it either. Even on the relatively unregulated digital Old West of the Internet, groups like NAMBLA don’t get too far. Look at Youtube, the current darling of the Web. Anyone who wants to can utilize this free service to post their own videos – SO LONG AS THEY OBSERVE THE TERMS OF USAGE. If a video is uploaded to Youtube that violates the usage terms – which are posted multiple times on the site for those interested in viewing or uploading material – the site owner can and does utilize the right to remove the video and ban the poster from the site. Is it legal prosecution? No, but it means that whatever message the offending user was trying to get across will not be gotten across on Youtube.
Independence and self-regulation are wholly American traits. It can be argued – and rightly so – that Americans are getting smugger and stupider as time goes on, and that we are cavalier about our rights, responsibilities, and privileges. But one thing we’ve always been good at, and indeed are better at than ever – is righteous indignation and a desire to squelch aberrant ideas and behavior. The whole issue of NAMBLA is one that actually allows our collective Puritanical paranoia to work in our favor. As long as most Americans are scared shitless of sex as our forefathers bred us to be, NAMBLA will never get a toehold in the American psyche. Regardless of what these guys say, and are allowed by the government to say, they will NEVER attain mainstream or even non-mainstream acceptance.
Some ideals are simply too precious to let go of, no matter what the perceived collateral damage. The First Amendment is an ideal that America can’t afford to lose, especially as the tide of government-sanctioned fascism rises around us. We cannot lose sight of the fact that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights aren’t about what we, as private citizens, can or cannot do – we have plenty of laws, millions and millions of pages of them at every local, state and Federal turn, to do that. These precious documents and their holy words were made, first and foremost, to tell the government what they are NOT allowed to do to, or take away from US.
