Truth be told (and who better to truth-tell than a spin-free polemicist?) few people really care for the loud, variegated din that is free speech. That would be like championing brussel sprouts. Of course they'll cheer for their own team. That's like championing ice cream. Free speech —the kind in need of protecting anyway— is not the ugly stepmother's sycophantic mirror parroting narcissistic bromides. We've already had the Stepford Wives remake and frankly it sucked. No, in its fullest permutation (and how else to broach constitutionality but in its totality, warts and all?) free speech is an ugly spectacle. If you're liking everything you hear, then it probably ain't free speech anymore. It's Disneyland, or Ambien country. Controversiality is the dialectic that sparks robust debate. A society that worships calm courts the worst form of inarticulateness. I suspect we're out of practice talking to one another. That's one reason America's national debates always end up careening down false trails. Our native ability to render uncoaxed, free speech has atrophied from an over-proliferation of transmit-only commercial venues. There we are, mute and ears cocked, to the nearest 'telling device'. Has the couch finally rocked our potato-heads to sleep?
With so much money in the temple one can be forgiven, I suppose, for mistaking the pigs for the men. However after this essay, I won't forgive you for letting it happen again. Imus' 'speech' was not free speech at all, but commercial speech, bought and paid for by a series of sponsors who derived economic advantage from his ability to draw an audience. In this context, the mechanics of commercial speech worked just as Adam Smith's invisible-hand-in-fast-retreat should. Pressured by their customer base these sponsors made a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation and decided that the cost-benefit had tipped against this particular promotional tool and that it was time to plow more cash into billboards and scantily-clad dancing girls (or at least let's hope). At the end of the day and despite what he may have thought of himself, Imus was a tool to sell soap. Draping the discussion in constitutional language is more than a bit high-falutin.
There's nothing to prevent Imus from spouting his views on the street corner, though I would urge him to avoid Harlem's 125th Street for all the obvious reasons.
There's no tinnier sound than when a grown corporation cries. CBS chairman Les Moonves' press release announcing Imus' firing was a doozie (a scolding that took a full eight days to congeal into a 'statement'.) Had he been an indefatigable commercial speech spokesman (and why apologize for capitalism?) Moonves should have said —"We are a bloodless, asocial entity known as a corporation. The profit motive has evaporated beneath our feet. Imus is gone." Hey man, I sell soap and this gig ain't workin' for us anymore! See ya! This debate doesn't warrant Jeffersonian pretensions. Though people do love reaching for the powdered wigs.
One of the great advantages of commercial speech (among a myriad of disadvantages) is that in most instances it can be turned off by the offended party like a spigot —with the spin of a radio dial or the click of a TV remote control. Perhaps it's the growth of secondary media outlets like Youtube that compels folks —who normally would not be listening to Imus anyway— to 'tune in for a sampling of the offense'. Thus the sense of outrage cascades well beyond Imus' naturally inclined audience. One gets the feeling the various resentment classes —certainly their shepherds— stand ready to mobilize their flocks at the first sign of crude remarks. For example, rather than compound the hurt by propagating the comments out to folks who wouldn't encounter them under normal circumstances, why not shield the unoffended? Why lead them to the very diatribe where their feelings are sure to be hurt and their self-esteem injured? This is not the next door neighbor standing at the fence-line spewing obscenities about your wife. Depending on what you think of your wife, that could be a real problem. No, there is a rehearsed nature to the press-conferenced outrage that belies the very notion of rage.
Are people seeking offense for self-validation? I heard someone complain recently about the saturation coverage surrounding Anna Nicole Smith's death. Every station seemed to be regurgitating the same footage, he said.
My suggestion, sacrilegious to be sure, was to turn the TV off. Read a book. I have little time for the 'help me before I watch TV again' crowd, those bored legions intent on indulging their own exasperation. If you want to get all societal about it, the first-order problem is not what Imus and his type say anyway. The problem is that a substantial segment of society enjoys his coarse invective. Or maybe they're just too lazy to turn the channel. I wish someone would get behind inertia as a driving force. How do you refine a coarse society? Now that's a worthy debate! I for one am not sure, though I suspect a coarsened democracy is preferable to a coarsened police state. We inhabit a democracy that tends to stalk equality with a steam-roller's abandon while excellence and merit never speak up for fear of offending someone. Plato, old dead proto-European, suggested that democracy inevitably yields to mediocrity, a fancy way of saying we get exactly what we deserve.
The larger problem is that all major soapboxes in America are controlled by corporations. This is a dismally repetitive dynamic: as corporations sell more soap, they expand into more soapboxes for the express purpose of selling more soap. Solitary voices in the wilderness —the quintessential human voice of poetry for instance— get buried beneath a wall of commercial sound; advertising jingles and their enabling pitchmen —Imus and others— are paid to keep our eyes and ears riveted between commercials. If they ever train soap to tell jokes, that's exactly what we'll get, and judging by this year's Super Bowl ads, the bathwater's making a damn good run at the baby. Rest assured the people tuning into Imus —offended and un-offended alike— were not simultaneously perusing Robert Frost. Woops, there went an elitist gaffe. But without Oprah's imprimatur, literature just can't peddle soap.
The fact is, the bulk of public speech today, certainly political speech, is underwritten by commercial interests. This is the best argument yet for spending more time listening to your children. Given the alacrity of Imus' demise, the corpocracy's commitment to free speech —despite frequent assertions to the contrary— is almost comically facile even by the lax standards of superficiality. But this is tossing apples in with oranges again. Why should we expect a corporation to revere free speech? Shame on us for thinking that it might. Ostensibly, the public owns the airwaves and licenses those airwaves through the FCC, the People's regulatory designee. Yeah right. If you want to access your fellow citizens on a significant scale, your free speech must bend (stoop?) to the demands of commercial speech. Media corporations take full advantage of the public airwaves by acquiring cost-prohibitive infrastructure, something the average guy's budget precludes. Hey, speech ain't really free. You wanna talk? Tow the party line. Thus funny things happen on the way to the microphone. Serious commentators sprout red noses and big floppy shoes.
The only fail-safe venue for free speech in America today is the one where you can be sure nobody's listening. Think Winston Smith's interior monologue outside the prying apparatus of Big Brother's ubiquitous listening devices. So keep it between yourself and your showerhead Bub —just check the towel rack for wires first.
Alas free speech has no sponsors. Whereas some faction or other will always rise to defend the offended-du-jour, in this instance the Rutgers girls' basketball team. Yes that's right. The offended class is a revolving designation. In Warholian fashion, we will all writhe through our own fifteen minutes of offense. In a properly functioning free society, everyone gets his time on the blocks —call it equality of outrage— though sadly some are the butt of insult more than others. For those sufferers of perennial offense (and let me say for the record I sincerely believe some groups are preyed upon more than others) that is a cultural dysfunction to be addressed through social policy measures, not constitutional disfigurement. In the meantime, the alarming truncation of free speech has the feel of Martin Buber's thorny construct —the problem beneath the problem. Unplugging microphones merely disguises the symptoms of an underlying pathology —racism, xenophobia, religiosity, exceptionalism. It's Freudian repression practiced at a societal level.
The more microphones we have, the uglier we will sound. But if that's who we are, then so be it. The truth might hurt. But self-loathing can be a wonderful motivator. How else can we hope to clean ourselves up?
Norman Ball is a Virginia-based writer, musician and poet. Some of his recent on-line efforts can be seen at Bright Lights Film Journal, Identity Theory, Potomac, Big Ugly Review and Folly.