Letters to the Editor
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"Free" doesn't mean "without consequences"
How free is free speech if you risk getting fired and ostracized for exercising your right to it?
It's as free as the consequences you are willing to accept for your actions. The "free speech" banner is too frequently held up by people who fail to understand the difference between government-directed sanctions, and sanctions imposed by a private entity. One is forbidden by law, the other isn't.
Tell me, what exactly do you think might happen to you if you typed up a racist screed on your company's letterhead and sent it to the local newspaper?
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Oh merciful god, end the writer's strike now!
Christ on a bike, that sketch was AWFUL. Never have I seen it so clearly demonstrated how necessary writers are to actors & directors: without a good script, the latter are just a bunch of bored, attention-starved dumbasses messing around with a camcorder in the backyard.
Look, there are funny rape jokes. I like the ones that come from a place of black humor and mordant commentary on the world we live in. I enjoy these as much as anyone, perhaps in some ways more so after recovering from a date rape. (The one that ends with the rapist telling his doomed victim, "What about me, I have to walk home through the woods in the dark alone!" always makes my mouth twitch involuntarily, maybe because it plays off rapists' capacity for self-righteousness and sociopathic narcissism so aptly.)
But there are also offensive, hateful rape jokes-- not funny because they're stupid and come from an ignorant-to-outright-spiteful place, where the punchline is only about laughing at someone else's pain or degradation. The punchline here is the image of the woman running out screaming "Raaape!" Which might be funny, if a woman getting raped was more like Moe taking a pie to the face.
The joke sucked because the entire skit was lame, sure. But that little "rape" aside added a bunch of gratuitous suckiness-- it was an awkward, dischordant moment, and it came off like the needlessly mean-spirited, offensive kind of rape joke.
I want to give these guys the benefit of the doubt, so maybe they were going for something much less... uh, retarded, and didn't quite manage to pull it off. Just sit tight and wait for the writers to come back, okay guys? Please?
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Of course not
Tonight I heard a joke about a pedophile committing incest. I won't repeat it here - can't adequately recreate the context or the tone of the comedian's riffing. But it was quite funny. It wasn't making fun of the victims of these crimes, but rather the perpetrators.
The video TCF is asking about is not funny. Which reminds me, bad humor should be off limits period - regardless of topic. As for rape and incest and racism and the burning death of kittens - if you can find a way to make me laugh, well, you're welcome to it. I think I'm in the majority when I say I don't find these topics inherently funny - but isn't that the best set up for the most effective humor? To take something that is not inherently funny and present it in a way that makes people laugh?
Of course, laughing is absolutely NOT the same thing as finding the topic matter of the joke funny.
In the video, these guys weren't sending up rape for laughs. They were making fun of self-righteous green fascists so blinded by their zeal to promote their cause they are excusing abominations far more heinous than a big carbon footprint. They were making fun of the type of person they were pretending to be - not making fun of the pretend rape victim. The suggestion of rape was used to highlight what total losers these guys were.
TCF cited some blog that called this video misogynistic. Huh? There was nothing of the sort in the video! How obtuse, to find a humorous video referencing the subject of rape automatically indicative of hatred towards women. Talk about a lack of perspective.
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transgression
Without transgression, we have only the conventional. Change and growth happen only when we press our limits, not when we celebrate and rigidly enforce them. Art without transgression is mere craft, fine if you want something that will match the color scheme of your living room, but insufficient if you want something which will make you think about the human condition.
The Green Team does make us think about the human condition, because of the contrast between their moral stance of environmentalism and their obvious immorality in enforcing it. Have we seen just that sort of contrast in other places?
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As long as you don't talk about black people you get to keep your job
You can be as offensive as you like as long as your don't disparage black people. So if you want to end rape jokes make them all black rape jokes. They'll be gone faster than you can ejaculate in a dead hookers mouth.
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censorship
Why is the forum for the RU-486 topic closed?
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state vs. private
Apologies for this long comment, but it grew beyond my control. KitchenGirl: I understand the difference between state-imposed sanctions on speech and those imposed by a private entity. I understand that the first amendment protects us only from the former. But am I wrong in saying that when we talk about free speech, we're talking about more than the letter of the Constitutional law? Free speech is a personal value--we (most of us, I assume) respect one another's right to speak our minds without being shouted down or bullied. In other words, it's a moral issue.
You may argue that in the example in question, Imus bullied those Rutgers women. I would say he mocked them, and lightly, passingly at that, and the punishment was nowhere near equal to the "crime." This wasn't hate speech--it was a bad joke from an unhip old man. (For the record, I always found this guy boring.) The fact is, Imus made a lame attempt at coopting some hip-hop speak. A big thing was made of it, and the insulted parties were free to fire back at him through the media. They did have the country's ear for a good few weeks.
But all this is to my mind beside the point. CBS has the right to fire whomever they want. What really bothers me is that otherwise intelligent, left-leaning people agitated to get this man fired for an off-color joke (which, by the way, is what CBS hired him to do, and what his listeners want from him). Sure, they had the right to do it. Everyone had the right to do everything that was done. But when we as private citizens hold the personal value of free speech in such contempt, it does whittle away at our individual rights as surely as any federal law. And living as we do in a democracy, public sentiment has a tendency to worm its way into written law.
KitchenGirl, in response to my question, you said that free speech is "as free as the consequences you are willing to accept for your actions." That strikes me as a rather thuggish interpretation of things, and a dangerous one. What if public sentiment were as hostile to, say, feminist speech as it is now to racist speech? What if TCF were fired by Salon for writing one such offensive article too many? Would you shrug and say that TCF has to accept the consequences of her actions? An unlikely scenario, I grant you, but the analogy serves to show how minority rights can be legally trampled. Surely you didn't applaud Bill Maher's firing, did you? How about the government's withdrawal of funding from the NEA when it didn't like the art? (An example of government censorship, sure, but those funds are a privilege, not a right.)
The same goes for you, fetboy: yes, I understand the difference between a whistleblower and a joke teller. But your characterization of this particular joke teller as "distasteful," "a nuisance" and spreading "hate and discontent" is all your personal opinion. Common decency may lead you to that opinion, but it should also lead you to the conclusion that you shouldn't impose your values on him. We agree that whistleblowers' speech should be protected by law because we value what they have to say. You may not value what Imus has to say--I sure don't--but at least value the idea that he should be able to say it. To argue that you'd die to protect his right to say it while agitating to get him fired strikes me as a hypocritical position. Of course losing your job is not the same as losing your freedom. But public opinion can silence unpopular speech with the threat of the former almost as effectively as the state can with the threat of the latter.
Now, I suspect you and KitchenGirl might respond that the Green Team and Imus are questions of community standards; that we in 21st century America will not tolerate "hateful" speech, and will agitate against it; that the I-man crossed the line, and he got what was coming to him. To some extent, I agree--we are a more open nation than we used to be, we tolerate racism and sexism far less than we used to, and those are good things. But those are personal, moral values (at least as far as speech goes), and the potential damage done to women and African-Americans by these jokes needs to be weighed against the damage done to this value of free expression. Imus is back on the air today with another company, sure, but I think the damage to our sense of free expression was already done by his very public firing. You may have come away from that whole episode thinking, "Great, a message was sent: racist, sexist slurs will not be tolerated by a decent society." I got a different message--that a loud enough mob can get someone canned for having an unpopular opinion.