I had already resigned myself to reading plenty of achingly stupid shit about the Giffords shooting, but it’s going to be hard to top this from Jack Shafer:
Any call to cool “inflammatory” speech is a call to police all speech, and I can’t think of anybody in government, politics, business, or the press that I would trust with that power. As Jonathan Rauch wrote brilliantly in Harper’s in 1995, “The vocabulary of hate is potentially as rich as your dictionary, and all you do by banning language used by cretins is to let them decide what the rest of us may say.” Rauch added, “Trap the racists and anti-Semites, and you lay a trap for me too. Hunt for them with eradication in your mind, and you have brought dissent itself within your sights.”Our spirited political discourse, complete with name-calling, vilification—and, yes, violent imagery—is a good thing. Better that angry people unload their fury in public than let it fester and turn septic in private. The wicked direction the American debate often takes is not a sign of danger but of freedom. And I’ll punch out the lights of anybody who tries to take it away from me.
On Wednesday, Nihad Awad, executive director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, released a statement on “Draw Muhammad Day” that begins, “I will be the first to defend anyone’s right to express their opinion, no matter how offensive it may be to me. Our nation has prospered because Americans value and respect diversity. But freedom of expression does not create an obligation to offend or to show disrespect to the religious beliefs or revered figures of others.”
Note the subtle shift: you’re free to be offensive if you want, grumble mutter blargh, but you’re not obligated to be that way, pointed stare, hint hint. Well, no shit. No one is saying they are obligated to offend other people’s religious beliefs or revered figures. They choose to do so, which is part of the whole freedom of expression thing. What was the problem again?
Ah, that’s right. You’re free to be outspoken on issues that I’m not personally invested in. Well, as Noam Chomsky so memorably put it long ago, Stalin and Hitler were in favor of free speech for ideas they liked. The whole reason for constitutionally protected speech is that almost everyone is tempted to want to carve out an exception when it comes to their sensitivities, and since everyone is grievously offended by something different, it wouldn’t be long before there was nothing safe to publicly talk about, except maybe the weather. No, wait, that might lead to volatile disagreements over climate change. Better scratch that too.
You can do it your own way
If it’s done just how I say— Metallica
But no one is really saying it should be illegal to insult Muhammed, Jesus or Bacchus, they’re just trying their hardest to pressure people into choosing not to do so. I’ve been both bemused and amused at reading so many of the typical liberal responses to Draw Muhammed Day, some of which make me think that they’d secretly be glad to see a fatwa declared against Reason magazine. It’s nothing new; these are the exact same whining complaints about civility and mean ol’ jerks directed at the “New Atheists” (and the only thing new about them is the willingness to not be cowed by public disapproval of atheists who have the gall to not act ashamed of themselves). I particularly appreciate the patronizing efforts of so many liberals to appoint themselves enlightened spokespeople for all the moderate, tolerant Muslims of the world and inform the Prophet-sketchers that they are needlessly infuriating more than a billion people (whereas I suspect a great number of them are just like the tepid believers of any religion: too indifferent and concerned with worldly pursuits to really care one way or the other).
Speaking of obligations, you would think it would be so basic as to need no explication, but people who do not belong to your particular clubhouse are not obligated to demur and show respect to the things you stand for, either. If this isn’t obvious to you, then you’re probably not all that tolerant and moderate to begin with. See, as a somewhat reasonable person whose first instinct is to assume that other people are also somewhat reasonable, and not impulsive savages who are prone to violent outbursts at the slightest provocation, I want to assume that these moderate Muslims we speak of are capable of looking dispassionately at the situation and seeing that drawing stick figures en masse is an appropriately light-hearted, mocking response to fanatics physically attacking people, issuing death threats, and burning down houses, aimed at showing solidarity and a refusal to be intimidated, and ultimately incapable of affecting their faith in the slightest way unless they choose to let it. I emphasize “response” because this is not a case of someone deciding to gratuitously pick some group at random and do something deliberately offensive for the simple fun of being a dick. Contrary to what Mom always told you as she forcibly separated you from the sibling you were fighting with, sometimes it does matter who started it.
Going along to get along is a perfectly fine thing to do in many situations. Of course, in others, it’s more important to speak the truth regardless of the consequences and stand for principles no matter how it inconveniences people, and as Isaiah Berlin taught us, sometimes virtues can end up in conflict with each other. The gulf between them wouldn’t seem so vast, though, if people could keep one other thing in mind: being offended really isn’t such a horrible thing. Honestly. Take a deep breath, relax your death grip on your narcissistic self-importance, and remember that if your beliefs and sensitivities have any depth to them at all, they’re not going to be seriously threatened by someone making rude and/or ignorant remarks about them. Sometimes, in fact, offense can be a good way to be jolted into introspection that you might not have been inclined to pursue otherwise. I read writers every day that I don’t necessarily agree with because I still recognize that they’re capable of provoking me into thought that I wouldn’t find in an echo chamber.
So Rush Limbaugh says he wants Obama to fail as president. The sky is also pretty blue today.
Yet due, I suppose, to many liberals’ rekindled love for the Oval Office and the dreamy hearthrob occupying it, this has struck a nerve among the netroots. Blog after blog over the last several days had comments from outraged little soldiers demanding that tired old tactic, the advertising boycott (because it obviously worked so well the last time they used it).
I’ve seen this come up several times now over the past few years, and really, the only example that could even be partially described as a success was the Imus brouhaha from a couple years ago. Partially, because it wasn’t the netroots alone who applied pressure, and most obviously because Imus just had to lay low for awhile before getting right back in the saddle again. But everyone’s drunk on hopenchange juice and their own self-righteousness, so here we go again.
I’ve asked people before how they feel comfortable with such tactics, and they usually give some lawyerly response about how it’s not really censorship as long as government troops aren’t kicking his door down, that no one’s saying he doesn’t have a right to his opinions, just that he doesn’t have a right to broadcast them to a national audience on the public airwaves, that they’re perfectly within their own rights to refuse to patronize businesses that provide the funding that put him on the air. All of which is true in a limited sense. Unfortunately, it’s also sophistry. It’s extremely disingenuous, relying on indirect loopholes to shut someone up. Hey, I didn’t put a pillow directly over Grandpa’s face and smother him, I just locked him in an airtight room!
Ask yourselves this: when the same logic was applied to the Dixie Chicks case in 2003, did you see that as fair play? After all, no one was trying to say they couldn’t express their opinions to anyone within earshot, they were just saying that they didn’t have a right to a musical career, and the consumers were perfectly within their rights to tell radio stations that they would no longer listen to them if they continued to play songs by the Three French Hens. Amazing how everyone saw this for the bad faith effort to silence unpopular voices that it was. Liberals Progressives still occasionally bring up how terrible it was that Phil Donohue’s show got canceled despite good ratings because no one wanted to be associated with a slightly liberal show when the whole country was going apeshit with jingoism. I don’t know why, because after all, it’s all about making the consumers happy, isn’t it? How about when Michelle Malkin led a crusade against Dunkin’ Donuts for Rachael Ray’s scarf, or just a few weeks ago, when the fetus-fetish crowd went after Krispy Kreme? Was that grassroots democracy in action, or just paranoid, thuggish intimidation? (All of which brings up another important point: the right wing is much, much better at this sort of army ant behavior, so perhaps you should think long and hard about legitimizing this sort of strategy for dealing with political opponents.)
And you know, if your typical liberal progressive had any brains at all, they’d put Limbaugh, Coulter, Palin and the Plumber in a Real World-style setting with cameras and mics on at all times. Wind ’em up and let ’em go. Ladies and gentlemen, your Republican party! But no, the impulse to act like a hypersensitive shrieking ninny is too powerful, I suppose. The end result is that it does nothing but reinforce that besieged bunker mentality, to allow Rush to tell his herd how once again, the forces of political correctness are trying to keep them from hearing the truth, letting them wallow in their persecution complex. Even if you could somehow get his radio show removed from the airwaves, he’d reach his minions through direct mail, webcasts or some other means. What the hell is the point? It’s still good advice for people not overflowing with their own moral rectitude and self-righteousness – if you don’t like it, don’t fucking listen to it.
One thing that’s always struck me since beginning to read the mainstream political blogs is how the issue of concentrated media ownership never comes up, when it was a constant feature of actual leftist commentary. Instead, here you have these morons unwittingly trying to make it so that only someone like Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch can express a pointed or controversial opinion without having to fear for their job. Really, guys? You want to ignore people’s increasing dependence on corporate sponsors to provide anything like a platform or a megaphone that can cut through the oceans of white noise and Twittering idiocy while doing everything you can to make those advertisers more skittish and unwilling to take a chance on anything that doesn’t suit their already vanilla, anodyne standards? Brilliant!, as the Barq’s root beer ads go. Let’s make it so that opinions have to run the gauntlet of mob rule and fickle public opinion to get a fair hearing! Why, I can’t possibly see how this could come back to bite you on your oblivious asses.