Gross indecency
Smut-peddler Larry Flynt, and the movie that glorifies him, are further signs of the degradation of American culture, says the author of "The Repeal of Reticence."
Larry Flynt isn't a smut peddler of the lowest order. He's a hero. That Hustler "parody" involving Jerry Falwell having sex with his mother in an outhouse wasn't a sickening, contemptible — not to mention defaming — attack on an individual with whom Mr. Flynt disagreed. It was a triumphant blow for the First Amendment.
Thus goes the consensual wisdom of critics and commentators who have annointed Milos Forman's "The People vs. Larry Flynt" as a political statement on a par with the Bill of Rights. Drowned out by the cacophony of huzzahs are those who don't think Flynt was a hero, don't believe the Supreme Court decision in his favor advanced the cause of freedom, and fear that public life is becoming increasingly vulgar and coarse.
One such critic is Rochelle Gurstein, author of "The Repeal of Reticence: A History of America's Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art" (Hill & Wang). In the book, she notes that from the late 19th century to the 1960s, many warned that totally unrestrained "free speech" would dangerously cheapen public life. Cultural and legal developments since the 1960s, she says, appear to bear out those warnings.
We spoke to Gurstein by phone from New York, where she teaches at the Bard Graduate Center.
The way "The People vs. Larry Flynt" is being pitched is that Flynt may not have been a pleasant person, but in the words of Newsweek's film critic, David Ansen, his stand represents "patriotism" at its finest.
It seems very bizarre that people should be celebrating Flynt's infantile, puerile, and insulting name-calling — which is what the Falwell parody was about — as a victory for free speech. That suggests to me that people have lost track of what free speech is supposed to protect.
What is it supposed to protect?
To my understanding, the First Amendment became an issue after World War I, when radicals were either deported, like Emma Goldman, or jailed for speaking out against the draft, like Eugene Debs. The ACLU was formed in the early 1920s primarily to protect real political speech. Since the 1950s that idea has deteriorated. It's now claimed that even though obscenity isn't protected, the definition of free speech has been so over-extended, that almost anything can be said or written. The Flynt case is an example: insults have turned into some kind of standard of the First Amendment.
A particularly lurid insult in this case.
It's always described in this very bland language. It's supposed to have something to do with with a sexual encounter Falwell describes having with his mother in an outhouse. But when you actually read it, it is so puerile, like a child saying nasty words to get a rise out of an adult. It's lurid and disgusting. And I don't think it's a victory for free speech. I think it is another sad instance of people being confused about what the nature of public discourse is. It's the same as arguing that there's nothing you can do about hate speech; that burning a cross on your lawn is a form of protected speech.
In the Flynt case, lower court juries found for Falwell on privacy grounds.
Yes. A jury awarded him $100,000 in damages. An appeals court upheld the award, then the Supreme Court overturned it. Falwell originally sued for invasion of privacy, defamation and "intentional infliction of emotional distress." The right to privacy emerged in the 1890s to protect private and public figures from invasive journalism. The legal cases were a mixed bag. Newspapers invoked the First Amendment claiming they should be able to print whatever they want. But the other side argued that there is a public dimension to the harm, that when you print things that are too private, too small, too fragile, it not only harms the victim of the story, but it also harms the tone of our public discourse, making it coarse and vulgar, polluting the public sphere.
Do you think Hustler's "parody" of Falwell should qualify?
When you actually read it, it is so low-down, I don't know how to describe it. It really is outrageous in its idiocy. It seems to me that using the law in all of these cases is really not a good answer. Early critics of the privacy laws said that the proper way to deal with such invasions was physical retaliation — a duel — because there is no way that the law can really redress this kind of harm. I think Falwell would have felt better had he been able to slug Flynt.
Except that he would probably have been arrested.
Still, the jury did find on his behalf, and I think that was probably the proper judgement.
If the law is unsuitable, what can be done to protect the tone of public discourse?
I don't know. It is pretty much a disaster when it is left to the so-called marketplace of ideas. People in the 19th century used to say that the more one was exposed to unseemly matters, the more one becomes used to it and fails to recognize it. That seems to have happened in our culture. It's hard to know what would shock someone anymore. The most shocking thing about the Falwell piece is that someone actually thought it was worth publishing.
How important was the Flynt decision to the overall "repeal of reticence"?
In my book, I stop in the early '70s because reticence had been completely repealed by then. In the mid-'60s, the Supreme Court held that "Fannie Hill" was a "classic" of pornography, and therefore was protected speech. I don't think the Flynt case is a milestone because the legal fight was pretty much over. What's interesting to me is that in the 1990s, suddenly Milos Forman and Oliver Stone decide to make a story out of it. So Hollywood now tells us what political freedom means.
Forman says in interviews that any censorship — even in the Flynt case — is one step away from totalitarianism and he knows because he lived under it.
This is really the worst kind of chest-beating and trivializing of the Holocaust and totalitarianism. His own family were victims of the Holocaust. That he can use this as a kind of rhetorical weapon is really despicable. Oliver Stone has made a career out of trying to be the bad boy of Hollywood, a kind of phony avant-garde. So it doesn't surprise me that the two of them see this as a kind of final stand for the First Amendment. Obviously their notion of the public sphere is a very diminished one.
Are there any signs of reticence making a comeback?
I try not to be all gloom and doom. The ongoing debate about television ratings is some kind of sign that adults are concerned about what's appearing in public. I don't know. It's hard to come up with a sign that there's any renewed sense that certain things shouldn't exist. There is a lot of discussion about the demise of civility. Maybe that's a sign in itself of change.
The establishment press savaged the Mercury News for its "Dark Alliance" story. Now a left-wing media organization has fired back — all too predictably.
By Dan Kennedy
in one corner: the San Jose Mercury News, whose reporter Gary Webb, in a controversial three-part series last August, charged that CIA- backed Nicaraguan exiles in the 1980s raised money for the Contra rebels — and touched off the crack epidemic — by selling millions of dollars' worth of cocaine in South-Central Los Angeles.
In the other corner: three of the most respected newspapers in the country, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, which countered with major investigative pieces concluding that Webb got most of it wrong, and exaggerated what little he got right.
Now comes the left-liberal media-watch organization Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) with a new report asserting that despite occasional overstatement and hyperbole, the Mercury's series, "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion," was essentially accurate.
Unfortunately, though FAIR's Norman Solomon, the author of the report, offers a few sharp observations, the tone of his screed is so over-the-top that it comes across as being driven more by ideology than by a genuine desire to sort out the truth of this extraordinarily complex story. Indeed, by the time the reader has absorbed the title ("Snow Job: The Establishment's Papers Do Damage Control for the CIA") and the opening quote, from George Orwell's "1984" (about the telling of "deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them"), there's not much to do other than watch Solomon play out his too-predictable hand.
This is one journalism debate that everyone can follow: the Mercury, to its credit, has put together a Web site that includes Webb's original series, follow-ups, and the critical pieces by the Post, the NY Times, and the LA Times. (In fact, the Web site has been crucial to the story's getting out, as it has enabled black-oriented media across the country to pick up on it.) And FAIR, which will publish the report next month in its magazine, Extra!, is also making it available now on the Web.
Solomon derides the establishment papers, but he fails to refute the compelling evidence they have amassed — evidence that seriously undermines Webb's assertions. First, in terms of both timing and the quantity of cocaine that was sold, the papers showed it would have been virtually impossible for Webb's three amigos — Nicaraguan exiles Oscar Danilo Blandon and Norvin Meneses, and L.A. coke dealer "Freeway" Ricky Ross — to have singlehandedly launched the crack wars. Second, Webb's circumstantial evidence notwithstanding, there is at least substantial doubt as to whether the CIA or its agents ever had any contact with or knowledge of Blandon or Meneses.
In attempting to rehabilitate Webb, Solomon does offer some points that are right on target. For instance, he notes that the three papers relied far too much on CIA and other official sources — people that, as Solomon quotes the leftist journalist Marc Cooper as writing, should more properly be considered "suspects." Solomon also unearths a whopping inconsistency: the L.A. Times' Jesse Katz, who dismissed Ricky Ross as a minor player, had called Ross "a criminal mastermind" and "South- Central's first millionaire crack lord" in a major investigative profile just two years earlier.
Ultimately, though, Solomon is able to debunk the debunkers only at the margins. Partly this is a reflection of his methodology: rather than reinvestigate the entire story, an enterprise that would be far beyond the capacity of FAIR's minuscule budget, he relies exclusively on the published record. Partly the problem is Solomon's ideological orientation. For instance, his take on why the papers sought to discredit the Mercury — because the Post and the New York Times backed the Contras on their editorial pages, because those papers' ruling families have long supported the CIA, and because L.A. Times editor Shelby Coffey, according to a former staffer, is a toady for the "ruling elite" — is entirely unconvincing.
Still standing, though, is the central premise of Webb's reporting: that Contra rebels helped raise money for their CIA-backed war by selling cocaine in Los Angeles, and that U.S. authorities may have looked the other way.
Which is why this story isn't over yet. In fact, as Solomon points out, Washington Post ombudsman Geneva Overholser recently criticized her paper for showing "more passion for sniffing out the flaws in San Jose's answer than for sniffing out a better answer themselves." And she concluded: "A principal responsibility of the press is to protect the people from government excesses. The Post (among others) showed more energy for protecting the CIA from someone else's journalistic excesses. Not an invalid goal, but by far a lesser one. Perhaps there is better to come."
Solomon's piece isn't it. But it does serve the purpose of keeping this story alive. Now's the time for a news organization with more resources and less of an ideological axe to grind than FAIR to do what the establishment papers should have done in the first place: dig up the truth about the Contras, the CIA, and their involvement in the crack trade.
Dan Kennedy is the media reporter for the Boston Phoenix.
There is no other review quite as lively as the London Review of Books, a fortnightly publication that regularly offers up contrarian opinions on subjects both literary and political, elegantly written and aggressively argued. Now Verso is coming out with an anthology of some of the best writings from the LRB. Though missing what is perhaps the liveliest section of the review (the letters page), the collection is filled with provocative pairings of writer and subject: Christopher Hitchens on Bill Clinton's eagerness to please; Adam Phillips on Freud's uneasiness with the Occult; Terry Castle on Jane Austen's lesbian impulses; Jenny Diski on arranging one's death. And, as they say, much more.
Bookmark: http://www.salon1999.com/media/mediacircus.html