Warhol was wrong

Ted Nugent, to be honest, has never been on my radar screen. Never, as in hits released 35 years ago didn't do much for me at the time. By Warholian standards, his 15 minutes of fame peaked about 1977.

But this is now, and if one has once achieved celebrity, then one can get headlines by, say, farting in public. That's about all Nugent has achieved in the last few weeks, and it's enough. Obviously it works well if the fingers have gone and the voice is gone. Generations of opera singers would have loved to have today's celebrity culture to extend their careers.

Nugent does prove the point that celebrities, however meagre or vast their skills, rarely have anything to say on politics that is worth saying. Part of his oral diarrhea asserted that only under Obama would he have been investigated by the CIA for veiled threats against a sitting president. Well, I beg to differ, mooooron.

Soon after John F. Kennedy was elected, a good many people up my way were severely agitated by having a Popish Democrat as President. One, in the next town over, was very loud in his dissatisfaction. He had never been in a band. He was not a celebrity. He got a visit from the Secret Service: according to local news, it was not at all a benign visit. Our local loudmouth very narrowly missed a term in Leavenworth, and looked especially bad after Kennedy's actual assassination.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the fundamental expression of free speech when he said, In Schenck v. United States, "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre...." Assuming Nugent or any Teabagger has even heard of Justice Holmes, his principle is probably the first bit of judicial activism they want thrown over the side.