Don't do it!!!
It's been a tough week for libs: first Bill Maher followed by the angst over this.
If we're for Freedom of Speech, then we're for it, whether or not we are offended by such speech. I enjoyed the spectacle on Bill's show last Friday night, as he was trying to justify his actions 50 different ways. I found particularly rich the scolding he received from Ice Cube, who made millions with lyrics that included "eff the Police."
I was in college when Blazing Saddles hit the theatres. Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor wrote a script for a movie that could not be produced today. I would have loved to been a fly on the wall in their production meetings.
There is a limit. There is free speech, but there is a most delicate line is that between 'speech' and obscenity, between speech which expresses political sentiment and speech which incites criminal activity, or speech which is, in and of itself, criminal (Like shouting "Fire!" or "He has a gun!" in a crowded venue to panic the crowd, when, in fact, there is neither a fire nor a man with a gun).
The former is Constitutionally protected, the latter, a crime.
What purpose does it serve to depict a man dead 2000 years in a 400 year old play as a modern politician?
Is this art? Political speech? Or intended to spark that fuse in some latent twisted violent psyche seeking inspiration?
Others, too, have freedom.
No one said they couldn't perform their play. They just said they weren't paying for it.
Unlike those who were run out of a wad of speechyfying over Islam because they they held some other views which were considered to be abhorrent. Even though the guy who they supposedly like was a pal of the Muslims, they were there to protest the Muslims, too. But the one group who was protesting Muslims didn't want the other group there protesting them too. Yet that decision is lauded by folks who claim to uphold the Constitution and freedom of speech. Freedom of Assembly is part of that same Amendment.
Unlike those calling for silence, I recognize that speaking your mind sometimes comes at a cost. There are times and places when and where identical words, spoken in the same manner, either by different people or by the same person under different circumstances, will provoke a reaction anywhere from a standing ovation to a lynch mob.
The corporate representatives of Delta Airlines, of Bank of America have the right to speak for their company, too. Unlike those who embrace policies and behaviours we find generally abhorrent or in (st least) bad taste, whom we would boycott over bathroom access, 'two mommy' ads, or even a spokesperson attacking a spokesperson for a fundamental right (Sweathog v Selleck, before K-Mart died), when corporations agree in general that the line has been crossed between 'art' and incitement, they can vote with their corporate sponsorship or lack of it as well, just as we vote with our patronage of their business.
I'm not advocating hypocrisy here, rather consistency.
They can speak their minds, but they might have to buy their own soapbox.
One last rhetorical question (for now):
How would Liberals respond to Othello with an actor who strongly resembled Barrack Obama?
I know what you are saying about Blazing Saddles. I showed it to a bunch of twenty-somethings close to twenty years ago, and they never laughed. They were (for want of a better term)
mortified. Try to make that movie today, and someone would lose their phony baloney jobs.
Play Ice Cube in 1960, and most people wouldn't listen a second time. Play it on the air, and be shut down. A few years later in Newark or Atlanta or even Washington DC, and you'd be rounded up with H. Rap Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokley Carmichael, and the lot for inciting a riot.
It isn't just who or what, but when and where that keeps a message under the penumbra of Constitutional protection. They're protected, but that doesn't mean there will not be a price to pay for what they say.
