Before the release of the motion picture bearing his name, the character “Borat”, portrayed by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, was most famous for a sequence on Cohen’s TV series, "Da Ali G Show", where, at an amateur night in a Country and Western bar, he performs a song where he advocates "Throw[ing] the Jew Down the Well’’ to an appreciative audience of rednecks.
In an interview in “Rolling Stone”, Cohen, a Sabbath-observing Jew, admitted that the audience may not have been anti-Semitic, but merely humored the character to be polite. He nonetheless pointed out that such polite indifference and conformity to anti-Semitism led to the Holocaust.
Certainly, some “victims” of Cohen’s agent-provacatuer version of “Candid Camera”, like the genteel hostess at a dinner party Borat attends during the course of his filmed journey across America, really are just being polite, going along to get along, often while suffering enormous embarrassment.
However, I think he may be letting the bar patrons off a bit too easily. Anyone who’s seen “The Blues Brothers” knows that audiences at C&W bars are not known for polite gentility; performers often have to be protected with chicken-wire. But Borat’s audience is having a rousing good time, loudly singing along and clapping with gusto; by contrast, in the film, Borat’s singing at a rodeo is greeted with loud disdain. Maybe, they just liked the Jew song better. Or, maybe they realized it was really a goof.
Of course, not every use of offensive language is an expression of bigotry, and may, like Mr. Cohen’s, actually have the opposite intent. The words of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor may also be said to fall into this category. However, there are those, like the Anti-Defamation League, who’ve objected to Mr. Cohen’s use of satire because less discerning individuals may miss the point. Instead, they advocate what I call “the idiot’s veto”.
And sometimes, one need not be an idiot to have trouble discerning such points. Mr. Cohen is a brilliant performer; others are not so blessed. Former Seinfeld regular Michael Richards, recently under fire for his use of racial pejoratives in an LA nightclub, may be wondering if he is really living in the age of Borat; he may also wonder why he should be paying penance if Lenny Bruce has already died for his sins. Given Mr. Richards’ prior collaboration in an infamous Andy Kaufman meltdown on national television, his intent in this incident is open to speculation, but I’m not sure it matters. Let me use an anecdote to illustrate.
I once had the misfortune to have as a supervisor an extremely unpleasant woman prone to massive verbal faux pas. When someone inevitably took offense she would proclaim “I was only joking!” One day after offering my umpteenth apology to the offended on behalf of our employer, I offered her my best advice on how to convey to people that one is only joking: “be funny”. An affable comedian may be able to coast on goodwill, but an offensive one better deliver the goods or people will start to take umbrage, a problem afflicting even a brilliant performer like the late Mr. Kaufman. At my workplace, the supervisor in question had been hired not for her skills verbal, but rather her skills oral. That excuse is probably not available to Mr. Richards; perhaps he should have tried picking up a guitar; perhaps the club should have installed chicken-wire.
Of course, it should be pointed out that Mr. Cohen and Mr. Pryor had the advantage of being members of the ethnic groups towards which their offensive language was directed. Mr. Richards was not black, and even his purported Jewishness turned out to be a “George Allen in reverse”. A member of the tribe can always more safely go further than an outsider. Rock Hackshaw can (and did) call his piece on the recent police shooting of a young black man in Queens on the night before his wedding “Taking the 51st Shot”, but Larry Littlefield could not publish an essay called “What I Would Do About Bachelor Parties”.
Continuing with the topic of polite indifference to bigotry, this week Andrew Sullivan reprinted a post he’d found on the blog of one Hugh Hewitt. I have no idea who Hugh Hewitt is, but from the vibes I’ve gotten, I’ve concluded he may not be my cup of tea. Apparently, Hewitt found something nice to say about Chuck Schumer, outraging at least one member of what appears to have been a conservative audience, who responded thusly:
“Schumer is a Radical Communist Jew – he is clearly in that part of the Jewish religion that supports Socialism and Communism. They claim to be secularist so they can attack all the other religions and hide their true affiliations. New York is full of these children of Communist immigrants of the early 20th century. FDR used them in very responsible positions during his Presidency to enact his Socialist programs and to get the approval of the Supreme Court, which he packed with Socialist thinkers. At that time Communism was on our side in the war. There are thousands just like Schumer but he is by far the most dangerous–George Soros is a close second. Look for the Radical Communist Jews in the MSM, Hollywood, the ACLU, and in the Judiciary as Judges and Lawyers"
This item was also carried by one of my favorite local bloggers, Michael Bouldin, on our local left activist blog, Daily Gotham, which I must admit, despite my frequent differences with many of the commentators, has been a pretty good place to pick up some interesting news and some provocative thoughts. Those who follow my writing know the pieces which appear here (including this one, which is pretty much the equivalent of a “clip show”) are often filled with material cut and pasted from thoughts I’ve posted in discussions here and elsewhere; lately Daily Gotham has been the starting place for more than its share. This essay is just one more example of this phenomena.
However much I like Bouldin, his piece was the cheapest of shots (in fairness, he can say the same about some of my work), posted basically to imply that it is emblematic of conservative thought. I would say that its presence on the blog is no more indicative of the conservative mindset about Jews than the presence of similar bilge on Jonathan Tasini’s blog (something I learned about from Bouldin) was indicative of the left wing mindset. During the recent campaign season, much was made, by those with an interest in making it, about anti-Semitic remarks on the blogs of Move On, Tasini and Ned Lamont. Frankly, I think all this stuff proves is that some schmucks supported Tasini and/or Lamont; to put things in perspective, some schmucks also supported Hillary and Lieberman.
Hewitt and the others were probably guilty of no more than lax monitoring (Hewitt did pull the post after it was linked by Sullivan and others). In many ways, having a policy of zapping every repugnant post is the easiest and most effective way of dealing with such garbage, but then you are actually obligated to read everything posted (yuck).
Some monitors, like Ben Smith of Daily Politics, carry the zapping even further. Ben does not like talk about the sex lives of others, possibly because he’s jealous. Just recently he zapped much speculation about Alan Hevesi’s love life until the NY Post ran a story, forcing him to do his own item. Even then he selectively deleted posts that went into areas he deemed sensitive, although his choices might not necessarily have stood up to acute analysis. Eventually the deluge overwhelmed him and he gave up, allowing me to expound in graphic terms about the whole sordid incident.
And, of course, most blogs delete posts which reveal the names of anonymous contributors.
As to not deleting posts containing offensive language, I am willing to accept a civil libertarian defense that the respective monitors don't believe in censorship. While the First Amendment applies only to governments, and not to blog monitors, who have their own First Amendment right to print only what they see fit; those who practice free speech for themselves would seem to have an obligation to tolerate it from others. The group censorship practiced on Kos certainly has its own ugly side, creating the equivalent of a “heckler’s veto”, a term not unknown in First Amendment law.
Blogs have benefited from a light touch at the monitoring monitor. Oldtime Brooklyn Blog pioneer Maurice Gumbs, who had graduated to the web from printing his own “newspaper”, had never allowed for comment on his website, and, when he joined Room 8, was initially quite shocked by what passed for “blog etiquette” and polite conversation in cyberspace. I explained it to him thusly:
“I understand how you must feel coming into this strange new world you helped to pioneer, but have never been a part of. The big difference is like that between the black and white church. Your blog is ‘white’; ours is ‘black’. Why? We both afford a pulpit to preachers, but our church incorporates the ‘call and respose’”. Soon Maurice got into the game with gusto, although he never quite abandoned his old world values, even though he was now preaching in what Boy George might have called "The Church of the Poisoned Mind" .
In general, I prefer sins of commission to those of omission. Earlier this year when a Danish Newspaper printed a group of cartoons, some of which were seemingly bigoted against Muslims, and others of which merely offended with their sacrilege, there were worldwide outbreaks of violence, including the burning of embassies. I didn’t much like the cartoons, which weren't very funny, insightful, or tasteful, and they certainly wouldn’t have seen the light of day on my editorial page (I've been offended by the equivalent stuff about Jews); but, once they became news, they were worthy of being reprinted on the news pages. However, in a stunning epidemic of cowardice, almost no news outlet reprinted them. How could we understand what all the fuss was about if we couldn’t see the items in question? It was like a real life version of "Waiting for Godot".
The cartoons were dubious speech, but printing them would have been journalism as it should be practiced. The cartoons were hardly of the level of hatred of Der Sturmer (or of the stuff many Arab papers print about Jews on a daily basis), but even if they were, I would have advocated printing them. One has to see this stuff to truly understand its nature. To see a Streicher cartoon is to understand what Nazism is all about. The diluted version or a description just won't do.
In the 30's Adolph Hitler successfully sued a courageous young American liberal named Alan Cranston (yes, the same guy) for copyright infringement, for having the guts to put out an unexpurgated version of "Mein Kampf" in America, because Cranston believed that people should understand the true nature of Nazism.
On the Danish front, more lunacy followed. The Iranian government responded to the cartoons by sponsoring a contest for the best work making light of the holocaust (did Mel Brooks enter?). Apparently, they'd taken Zionist Louis Brandeis' injunction that "the best cure for bad speech is more speech" to heart, although in their case the cure was apparently more bad speech. I wish the winners had been printed in the American press so everyone could have seen all the gems of comedy that the search for humor in the Islamic world really yielded; it might have given people a more realistic picture of the world, although if setting embassies on fire won't give you a realistic picture, I'm not sure seeing anti-Semitic cartoons would help (and yes, I know we have our religious fanatics too; It seems like only yesterday when the Catholics burned the Brooklyn Museum to the ground over the elephant dung controversy).
Still, despite my ringing endorsement of dealing with bigots not by censorship, but by exposure and confrontation (in print, not with flaming torches, unless absolutely necessary), I certainly understand the temptation of readers to ignore such comments rather than to criticize them. While the Schumer comment is certainly worthy of flaming, I think to imply it speaks for many readers of Hewitt’s blog may (or may not; I don't read it) be a bridge too far, and I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to accuse those who didn’t respond to it of endorsement or polite indifference.
On the other hand, silence sometimes gives just such an appearance. As an alternative, I suggest that, when one notices such remarks, a well placed slap, followed by a notation that the writer is an idiot, who is not worthy of further debate, should be a sufficient response. After that, the further lack of comments will look more like an endorsement of the quarantine. Then, one can let the idiot go on until he's blue in the face, unless he actually attracts some support. Real threats can be dealt with by proportionate response, others with a more dismissive one.
This is especially the case for that category of lunatics like former mayoral candidate Christopher X Brodeur (who was once arrested for aggravated harassment of Ben Smith) and Leila Khaled, a Jew-hating supporter of Hamas I tangled with several months ago. For such folks it may be best to make believe they’re not there and build a security fence around them, as one does a Kadima-like unilateral withdrawal.
Of course, my efforts to quarantine Leila attracted an angry response from several blogger-Likudniks (who may also have been policy-Likudniks). They didn’t buy my argument that answering lunatics dissipated our attention from answering anti-Israel comments from non-bigoted posters capable of making a coherent argument. The only response I supported for the likes of Leila was to answer their remarks by harking back again to “Waiting for Godot” and quoting the immortal words of Samuel Beckett, "who farted?"
Yes, the best cure for bad speech is usually more speech, but every once in a while you are given the gift of having the opposing position being articulated by someone whose manner of expression makes your points far better than you ever could. I only wish that all anti-Israel opinion was being articulated by folks like Leila. Sadly, some folks can make a better, more coherent, less inherently offensive articulation of their position. They do need to be answered. Others need to be left alone to whither and die. Perhaps the "Likudniks" don’t understand this because they don’t acknowledge that better, more coherent arguments really exist.
In the case of another anti-Semite, who perversely called himself “Lord Balfour”, I actually found it helpful to call out for help from those who were less supportive of Israel’s activities in Lebanon than I. I thought it was important, in that case, to show the distinction between a sincere position based on what I consider a well intentioned, but wrongheaded, worldview, and one based upon hatred and prejudice. I thought this was necessary, given the alarming support Balfour had drawn, and I thought it was best done by someone who was not entirely supportive of the Israeli response. Among those I’d baited into generating such a response was Bouldin, who, as expected, came through with flying colors, putting the mamzer in his place and making clear that not even those who differ in some measure with Israeli policy bought his hateful view of the world.
Ironically, Baron Cohen may have it wrong concerning the impact of social mores. As noted elsewhere, I and other non-African-American writers have felt constrained in commenting about the recent death of the young groom-to-be from Police gunfire. Rather than social mores and the threat of peer disapproval facilitating the polite acceptance of bigotry, social mores and the threat of peer disapproval prevented the expression of any comments which might have had the possibility as being perceived as bigoted or otherwise unacceptable.
Social mores and peer disapproval are usually far more effective limits on speech than government regulation or heavy-handed monitoring could ever be. "Free" speech is a misnomer; it always has a cost; in a "free" society, that cost is determined by the marketplace rather than the government.
That some choose to sometimes hold their tongues is not always necessarily a bad thing, although it sometimes acts to silence voices and lines of inquiry which it might be beneficial to have heard.