Freedom of Expression for Me But Not for Thee, One More Time

A friend posted this tweet by Billie Jean King this morning:

I suppose that King meant "public condemnation" to imply "public condemnation by the President," but even if so, she's wrong.  And since she left out the specific case, I'll begin with the more general statement she actually made, since many people would agree with it.

Freedom of expression does not mean that a person may not have to face public condemnation.  If you express unpopular views, or just views detested by a large number of people (who may not be the majority), you can expect to be condemned publicly.  Liberals and progressives are just fine with this principle for views they detest -- Republicans, Bible thumpers, white racists, Donald Trump.  In many cases they demand not just condemnation but the suppression of such views by the State.  It's only when opinions they agree with encounter pushback that they become more purist, though they are ready to demand the suppression of the views of their critics, as King did.

The First Amendment, and the general principle of freedom of expression, assume that there will be public debate, without making any assumptions about the quality of that debate.  (And a good thing, too, since the level of public debate is generally not high.)  What is important is that someone should be able to express a highly unpopular opinion without being silenced -- by the State or any other force.  Someone who wishes to express a highly unpopular opinion had better expect to encounter hostile responses; one very annoying tendency visible among liberals is that, for example, they should not be made to "feel like an outcast" (via) for taking an unpopular stand.  This would be bad even if they didn't feel that no such consideration need be extended to those whose opinions they hate.

It's to their credit that the athletes themselves, as far as I've seen, don't seem to be demanding that they not be criticized.  Perhaps because most of them are black and are therefore closer to political struggles of the recent past, they knew from the outset that standing up against the majority would make them lightning rods for hostility. 

Now I'll address what I take to be King's more specific reference to President Trump's attacks on the athletes who protest against American white supremacy, while generally supporting American military aggression.  It's true, as the friend who posted the tweet on Facebook argued, that the words of a President carry more weight in the public sphere than those of most citizens, though not (as she also argued) that they take "the form of law."  Admittedly, partisan fans of a president will want to see them that way.  But my friend, like so many Democratic loyalists, wasn't nearly as concerned about (for example) President Obama's prejudicial remarks about Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, let alone Obama's general war on whistleblowers.  Privately, she probably would have agreed with them even if they had the imprimatur of a president she admired, but like most Democrats she ignored them or minimized their impact on the well-being of people who'd been accused of crimes.  Nor, if I recall correctly, did she object to Obama's public criticism of Fox News, though right-wing partisans reacted to it in much the same panicky way that Democrats are now reacting to Trump.

Though I agree that a President's public statements will carry a lot of weight, it struck me funny to see my friend making the claims she did just as the owners of the NFL, and the NFL commissioner, struck back at Trump's demand that protesting athletes be fired.  Former NFL coach Rex Ryan, who'd campaigned for Trump, announced that he was "[bleep] off."  (Presumably bleeped by ESPN, where he appeared, rather than by Democracy Now!, who quoted him.)  Pushing back against the Leader of the Free World is harder than pushing back against a single football player, but it can be done, and it's being done.  (I'm with "former NFL player Donté Stallworth," who also appeared on DN! this morning, and warned against letting Trump hijack the protests into a controversy over himself, though that already seems to be happening.)

P.S. When I pointed out some of this, my friend replied that I should "tell it to the Joint Chiefs of Staff" in connection with Trump's announcement via Twitter last summer that transgender troops would no longer be allowed to serve in the military in any capacity.  This was a notably ill-chosen rebuttal, because, first, Trump sent that tweet as a declaration of policy, which was not the case with his denunciation of the NFL protestors; and second, because the Joint Chiefs did not accept the tweet as having the "form of law."  They announced that until a policy had been worked out formally, they were going to ignore Trump's announcement and transgender troops would continue to serve.  Until Trump signed a memo implementing the ban, it wasn't law.  The tweet itself did nothing.  This case also supports my general distaste for the hopelessly inadequate way liberals have been responding to Trump's provocations.

The Autumn of My Discontent

The image above comes from a famous, not to say notorious, company that sells an odd variety of products and sponsors sweepstakes with large prizes.  I'm sure you can guess who I'm talking about.  My impression is that their target market is mostly older people, often religiously devout and jingoistic.  So I was baffled by this offering: an American flag doormat.  "Show Your Patriotism All Year Round!" was the tagline.  By making / letting people wipe their feet on Old Glory?  I wonder how this one is selling ...

I apologize for my inactivity; I just haven't felt like writing lately.  The closest I can come to a reason for that is we're in election season.  I have seen less than usual Democratic fussing over the upcoming election, and I wonder why.  Could it be that even Obamabots can't work up much enthusiasm for the Democrats, partly because numerous Democratic candidates are evidently distancing themselves from their President?  Elizabeth Warren actually accused Obama of protecting Wall Street, and that's a remarkable move within the party at a time like this.

I've had some nasty exchanges in comments on various Democratic pages, only a few of them with people I actually know, but that's normal.  I'm past being surprised when party people, as Nietzsche said, necessarily become liars.  A writer I'm Facebook-friends with complained that she'd been dunned with e-mails from Democrats begging for campaign donations; I realized that I haven't been getting them this time around.  So I'm not sure what's up.  I'm not happy with the prospect of the Republicans taking the Senate, but then I'm not happy with the prospect of the Democrats keeping the Senate either.

I've been preparing for a one-month trip overseas -- leaving tomorrow, in fact -- and I realized that I wouldn't be in the US on Election Day, for the first time in my life.  Because of the novelty of the situation it took me a while to decide what to do.  Luckily, there was early voting in my city, so I was able to vote yesterday.  I'll be giving a hard time to any Democrat who accuses me of not voting, not wanting to vote, or of trying to discourage other people from voting; I'm just out of patience with that kind of crap.  I'll have internet access while I'm abroad, and who knows?  Maybe a change of scene will get me writing more again.

We Were Only Trying to Help!

In a follow-up to its story on the killing of two American officers in the Afghan interior ministry building this weekend, the BBC reports that "At least 30 people have been killed in violence over the last five days." By "violence" it clearly means "violence by Afghan rioters," not "violence by NATO troops against Afghan civilians around the rest of the country in the course of their normal duties," which right-thinking journalists and news consumers know isn't really violence at all.

Glenn Greenwald has a good related post at Salon this morning, pointing out that the protests in Afghanistan aren't simply about the burning of Korans. He quotes this New York Times story:

Protesters in Kabul interviewed on the road and in front of Parliament said that this was not the first time that Americans had violated Afghan cultural and religious traditions and that an apology was not enough.
“This is not just about dishonoring the Koran, it is about disrespecting our dead and killing our children,” said Maruf Hotak, 60, a man who joined the crowd on the outskirts of Kabul, referring to an episode in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent erroneous airstrike on civilians in Kapisa Province that killed eight young Afghans.
“They always admit their mistakes,” he said. “They burn our Koran and then they apologize. You can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology.”

I've noticed that Americans have trouble remembering what the US is doing over there. It's reminiscent of the US invasion of Vietnam in this respect: One one hand, we're only over there to help the "Afghanis," because if we leave the Taliban will oppress their women (never mind that the Northern Alliance, our allies in the overthrow of the Taliban, also are patriarchal Islamic fundamentalists who oppress women), we're only trying to help them, okay, and they should at least appreciate that, instead of rioting over trifles. On the other hand, the "Afghanis" are a threat to American security and we can't leave until we've made sure that they'll never attack us again, we are over there primarily to protect and defend ourselves, and the sooner they put down their arms and stop fighting us, the sooner we can leave that godforsaken wasteland (except for the bases and troops and mercenaries we'll certainly want to retain, for our own security, and they wouldn't begrudge us such trifles, would they?).

I think this might be the place to use, finally, this quotation from an educated liberal commenter on a lesbian-feminist blog a couple of years ago, as one example of "folks who are angry and upset with their own lives, and who, for some reason, attribute all that is wrong in their lives to the actions and influences of others":

Ask an Afghani Taliban peasant why his family is impoverished, and he’s likely to blame Israel, the US, or the West. Ask him to show you those places on a map and chances are he can’t do it. Gee, ya think his support of a system of corrupt tribal warlords, a corrupt weak government, and the lack of decent free education might have something to do with his poverty?

(Other examples proffered by this commenter included black -- "urban" was the commenter's adjective, which as you'll see was dogwhistle code -- men who sit around drinking Colt .45s and blaming "The Man" for their inability to get a job, and angry white male Limbaugh fans who blame all their "economic and personal woes" on gays, feminists, and people of color. Quite even-handed, you see.) The complacent ignorance displayed about the situation in Afghanistan that led to the US presence there still amazes me; certainly the commenter is in no position to cast the first stone. And how many Americans can find any country on a map?  (That Afghan peasant doesn't need to find America on a map, by the way: the American invaders are right there in his country, killing people.)

Greenwald also points out that Americans have our own little totem that you had better not mess with: the Flag.

Beyond all these points, it’s perversely fascinating to watch all of this condescension — it’s just a book: who cares if it’s burned? – pouring forth from a country whose political leaders were eager to enact a federal law or even a Constitutional amendment to make it a criminal offense to burn the American flag (which, using this parlance, is “just a piece of cloth”). In fact, before the Supreme Court struck down such statutes as unconstitutional in 1989 by a 5-4 vote, it was a crime in 48 states in the nation to burn the flag. ...

Along those lines, just imagine what would happen if a Muslim army invaded the U.S., violently occupied the country for more than a decade, in the process continuously killing American children and innocent adults, and then, outside of a prison camp it maintained where thousands of Americans were detained for years without charges and tortured, that Muslim army burned American flags — or a stack of bibles — in a garbage dump. Might we see some extremely angry protests breaking out from Americans against them? Would American pundits be denouncing those protesters as blinkered, primitive fanatics?

Probably not, but I'm sure that pundits for the country that invaded us would do so.

His High Mightiness, the President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties

It's July 4th, and patriotism is on the menu. Various of my Teabag-symp Facebook friends have been posting the predictable viral status messages that 99 percent won't have the guts to repost!

Everybody, let's do this (and NBC - this one's for you!) ....We should flood Facebook with this...."I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands: one nation under G O D, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all". RE-POST IF YOU THINK GOD, OUR COUNTRY, OUR FLAG, AND OUR MILITARY DESERVE RESPECT!!!! Let's just see how many AMERICANS will re-post

And:

The American flag does not fly because the wind moves past it. The American flag flies from the last breath of each military member who has died protecting it. American soldiers don't fight because they hate what's in front of them...they fight because they love what's behind them. Re-Post this if you support our troops!

So that's what Our Troops are up to, protecting the flag? I thought they were supposed to be protecting our country and defending our freedom -- the freedom to shut up and do what we're told.

This morning a DJ on our community radio station played Randy Newman's "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country," describing it as being critical (but not too critical) of America, which I guess is true, but ... I dunno. At his best, Newman's beyond praise; but he's rarely been at his best in the past thirty years. I'd heard "A Few Words" several times, mostly in video clips of him playing it alone, just his voice and piano, and I think it bothered me because most of his best songs involve an unreliable narrator: someone who, as Newman puts it, knows less about himself than we know about him. I took for granted that in this song, Newman was mainly speaking in his own voice, but when the DJ played the studio version from Harps and Angels, I wondered. The music gave the context, a country ballad with strings, pedal steel, and Floyd-Cramerish piano, and I tried to hear the narrator as one of one of Newman's Southerners -- even one from Good Old Boys, forty years older and somewhat mellowed out. The song worked a bit better that way, but not much. I think Newman is speaking (or singing) in his own voice here, and the trouble is that a nice moderate, reasonable guy isn't as interesting as a bigot; but the point of his best satire is that his bigots, slavers, and other crazies see themselves as nice, moderate reasonable guys.

Still, for the Fourth of July I'd rather offer this Newman standard, which made his PBS audience gasp:



And in honor of the Founders, a couple of bits from Roger D. Hodge's The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism (HarperCollins, 2010):

It might seem odd that there is nothing in the Constitution about banks, since banks were a common subject of political controversy, as was the question of money. As it happens, banks were popular inside the convention but extremely unpopular outside it; leaving banks out of the document can be seen as a tactical maneuver, to eliminate a potential obstacle to ratification. …

Once the new government was formed – after squabbling over whether President Washington should be addressed as “Your Highness,” “Your Excellency,” or “His High Mightiness, the President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties,” a dispute that consumed John Adams and appalled Madison – the debate over the chartering of the United States Bank divided Congress into bitter camps [106].

and

The Whigs were no less corrupt than the Jacksonians, as Daniel Webster’s famous note to Nicholas Biddle, the president of the U.S. Bank, makes clear. Webster’s candor was magnificent: “I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual,” he wrote to Biddle. “If it be wished that my relation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainers” [164].

Standup Comedy

Some things never change, do they? Another right-wing acquaintance of mine passed along this cartoon on Facebook. He commented, "Because freedom isn't free."

What, I wonder, is the point? It seems to be that because our freedom to dissent was bought by the blood of patriots, we should never actually use it. I've heard that one since the Vietnam era, and I'm sure it was old then. It's especially humorous coming from a right-winger, since they feel quite free to dissent (against Democratic Presidents, anyway) whether they've shed blood for America or not, and usually they haven't. Our wars aren't sacrosanct either, as long as they are the work of Democratic politicians -- Republicans objected vociferously to Bill Clinton's war in the Balkans, for example -- but no one had better object to Republican wars.

I've written before -- here, for example -- about the inconvenient reality that the US has not fought a defensive war in my lifetime; certainly the Iraq War, probably the one in which the class's visiting Marine lost the ability to stand, had nothing to do with defending Americans' rights not to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance (an act of idolatry which this country managed to survive without for its first century and more). And it's often been noticed that wars tend to be associated with the suppression of freedom at home.

The deepest irony about this cartoon, though, is that the biggest threat to freedom in the US comes not from outside our borders, but from inside them: from people who try to impose conformity either gently, as in this cartoon, or violently, as seen in many assaults on protesters and dissenters. (I've been looking online for a copy of the photograph of an American veteran, Howard Gottesman, being hit by eggs thrown by pro-war goons during a protest against the Vietnam War in 1966. No luck; it can be seen on the first page of the photo section of Jerry Lembcke's The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam [NYU Press, 1998]. As Lembcke writes, it was opponents of the war who were spat on, not returning veterans, and they were spat on by those who supported the war.)

Notice, too, that there is no context in the cartoon for Kevin's refusal to stand. I think his posture is meant to indicate insolence and even laziness, as though he's refusing to join in the Pledge simply to be different, or cool. But compare a real American kid who refused on principle to recite the Pledge of Allegiance: Will Phillips. His teacher was angry and some of his all-American classmates called him a gaywad, but he stuck by his decision. Here's a nice piece from an Arkansas newspaper in Phillips's support; the writer even questions the validity of the Pledge, though finally he says it's "harmless" while supporting the boy's refusal to go along with the practice. Much better, and more thoughtful, than the cartoon above.