Salon News | With conservatives like these, who needs liberals?


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By Jeff Stein [08/28/99] Feature Texas judge rules against Bush A motion to force Eliza May to give a deposition in the Texas "Formaldegate" matter was rejected. By Robert Bryce [08/27/99] Feature Espionage without evidence Is it racism, or realism, to look at Chinese-Americans when trying to figure out who's spying for China? By Jeff Stein [08/26/99] Feature The little old hell-raiser from Pasadena Granny D, 89, is walking across the U.S. to push for campaign finance reform. By Suzi Parker [08/26/99] Feature Camille Paglia defends David Horowitz The Salon columnist slams the editors behind Time's attack on Horowitz for their "late summer slip-up." By Camille Paglia [08/26/99] Complete archives for News - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		With conservatives like these, who needs liberals? \| page 1, 2, 3 Lowenthal's manifesto turns out to be a screed on behalf of full-blown moral dictatorship by government guardians of what the public should see and hear, and what it should not. According to Lowenthal, Hollywood is so "enamored of its profits" no appeals to its conscience will work. On the other hand, without drastic measures to stop the current flow of cultural filth, the prospects for the nation are dire indeed. "The mass media," Lowenthal writes, have become "the prime educational force in the country," and their "pernicious" influence already overwhelms that of "schools, synagogues and churches." They have "immersed us" in violence as well as sexual depravity, "habituated us to the most extreme brutality" and "surrounded us by images of hateful human types so memorable as to cause a psychological insecurity that is dangerous." Nothing less than the future of civilization is at stake and no power short of the state is sufficient to save us: "Government, and government alone, has a chance of blocking this descent into decadence ... The choice is clear: either a rigorous censorship of the mass media ... or an accelerating descent into barbarism and the destruction, sooner or later of free society itself." Even more distressing than this horrifying jeremiad is the failure of any of the conservative commentators assembled by the Standard to find it just that -- horrifying. "I agree with much in professor Lowenthal's article," writes Bill Bennett, while defining himself as a "First Amendment absolutist." But how absolute is Bennett's commitment to the First Amendment when he does not reject Lowenthal's proposal on absolute grounds? Instead of condemning it as the reflection of an anti-democratic mentality, he argues for its rejection on the grounds of its political imprudence. The "main problem for Lowenthal's argument," writes Bennett, "is democracy itself, specifically the current state of thinking among the American people: They do not want, to use Lowenthal's words, 'rigorous censorship.'" And if they did, that would be all right? What Bennett proposes is an effort, using the authority of government, to bring the industry to heel by a combination of public humiliation and government threat: "Among other things, Congress ought to begin treating the entertainment industry the same way it treats the gun and tobacco industries: Invite the executives to testify in public, let them defend [themselves] ... Is there anything you won't sell? Why was this ugly, stupid, horrible scene put in this movie?" So now congressman are going to be entertainment critics. I wonder if Bennett has tried to imagine the scene if Parliament had hauled Shakespeare before it in the time of Elizabeth to explain why both eyes of the 80-year-old Duke of Gloucester are plucked out on stage in King Lear, or a virginal Ophelia has such obscene fantasies in Hamlet or why eight people are killed in the last scene of the same play. "Mr. Shakespeare! Is this really necessary? Don't you find eight corpses a little excessive? Have you no shame, sir?" American Spectator publisher Terry Eastland, who is a lawyer as well, is even less restrained than Bennett. "Censor the mass media? In theory, I agree." But he, too, concedes there are practical objections. There is the tricky matter, for example, of American law which "stands in the way" of the kind of censorship Lowenthal is proposing, particularly as it has been interpreted for the past 50 years. Behind current interpretations of the law, moreover, there is still that unruly beast, the American people. "Persuading the public" to abandon its prejudice against censorship would be impractical as a result of the moral decline of the culture in recent decades. In providing a Bill of Rights that included the First Amendment, Eastland reminds us, the founders counted on "a certain degree of virtue in the people," a condition that in his view it can no longer meet. He refers to this state of affairs as "the disabling of America." Next page \| The men who would be censors


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