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.

Agreeing with Alito, and so on

I hate it when I agree with conservatives: in this instance Justice Alito dissenting in Snyder v. Phelps. The nature of the Supreme Court is that it can't say "we're sorry," for example, for a succession of blatantly pro-business and pro-reactionary decisions over the past year or two. Some observers have seen, in the Court's recent decisions, a reaction to justified criticism that the court had moved too far to the right. Now, they are inhaling helium, apparently.

OK, we get it, you're sorry, and you don't have a case involving corporate campaign finance or the Second Amendment that would let you overturn the previous decisions and stay on topic.
But Alito is right: the speech of the Westboro scum isn't free speech or protected speech. It is "fighting words" under the laws of many states, Massachusetts among them. That is, it's a verbal provocation so strong that when someone swings on the provoker, the provoker and not the provokee is liable to be charged with assault.

I can testify that Westboro deals in fighting words, and screams, and flying spittle, because I have been close enough to them to experience all of that. I had to leave the final Beacon Hill gay rights demonstration in 2004 because of it. Because I had crossed the line into blind, red rage, which really is nearly blind and very red. Had I had to listen to it for one additional minute I would have done my damnedest to kill the nearest one to me. I wish this was an exaggeration.

This group has stated that they are emboldened by the decision. I don't think it will be long before the Court gets the chance to regret this overreaction, because it will not be long before the fighting words have their intended result. If so, may it be in a "fighting words" state. The stock Westboro defence has been to threaten to sue any community if they are subjected to violence in it. But if they are found culpable of uttering fighting words, they may be the ones out of luck. I'm taking bets.

Have you seen the details of the hilarious Texas immigration bill? Hypocrisy is the common currency of reactionaries everywhere, but it seems like the pee--er, tea-- party is out to monopolise the commodity. Texas state Rep. Aaron Pena, a Republican, said of the bill's gaping exception, ignoring those who hire unauthorized immigrants for the purpose of obtaining labor or other work performed exclusively or primarily at a single-family residence, ''With things as they are today, [Republican state Rep. Debbie Riddle's] bill will see a large segment of the Texas population in prison."

And the problem with that would be?

More shooting...of the foot

One trouble with the American left is its penchant for enabling the cowardice, excuses and ignorance of ranters, usually (not always) of right-wing persuasion, We are in the midst of a fit of hand-wringing over Sarah Palin's testy comment that American media had committed a "blood libel" by linking her violent rhetoric to the Gifford shooting. That includes me.

Come on now. Given this woman's lexical history, why on earth is anyone wondering whether she meant to use a reference to Jewish history, a reference that is a tad obscure even if you are Jewish? Those who wonder are giving her a degree of credibility she couldn't muster herself. She's doing what Limbaugh did in 1995; what every loudmouth before and since has done. It's called whining. Every bully who ever lived has whined just like this when they've been caught out. Let her whine. Take the lesson of his horrid act and learn from it, and let the bullies zig and zag and try to avoid their part of the responsibility.

There is a lesson and it is not entirely Palin. This is apparent from the inability of many on the left to figure out the lesson in any but partisan terms. The lesson is that when people who ought to know better start using vituperation as the core of their daily discourse, people who don't know better are listening. The vituperation goes in one ear as daily rants, and it comes out the other as fact. It does not matter if it is Sarah Palin or anyone else. What matters is that for every listener who knows that hyperbole is a literary effect, there are ten who do not. At least one of those ten is going to be nursing a psychotic rage that the hyperbole will direct. If they hear enough of the vitriol, they will act on it. They don't need a gun, just a truck loaded with fuel oil and fertiliser.

That's why it is unwise to wring one's hands and blather about Palin's free speech rights. We've had that discussion:

“The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing panic.... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenk v. United States, 1919).

We come daily closer to the threshold Holmes had in mind, and it's time the whining about it stopped. The last time we permitted vituperation to get this far out of hand, it ended in a was that cost 600,000 lives. In proportion to population, such a war today would cost 30 million lives and leave the entire country in ruins. So stop it.