THE POST (2017), the Press, and The Other Movie with Press-Freedom Issues

I'll start with, as we used to say, "Where I'm coming from."

• On at least two and possibly up to four or more occasions I've sworn "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States," which for me starts with defense of the Bill of Rights. The people administering the oath weren't very serious about it, but I take my word seriously. 
• I'm a life-member of the ACLU and have depending upon the First Amendment to undergird (my) academic freedom. 
• Some of my best friends and students have been journalists and/or teachers of journalism, and I worked with reporters off and on between my first semester in high school and my retirement. 

So:
I haven't yet seen THE POST (nor seen it advertised as playing in my area), but I have seen The Other Movie with Press-Freedom Issues that's out there now: ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, on the kidnapping of John Paul Getty's grandson.

THE POST (2017) is something of a prequel to ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976) and another celebration of the importance of journalism media for popular government ("of/by/and for the people") that was President Lincoln's ideal. ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD gives us glimpses of popular media in another sense, most strikingly as paparazzi, in their purest form in 1970s Italy.
And I — the guy in that opening 'graph — caught myself at points in ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD hoping that someone in those neat Italian sports cars, or a heavier vehicle, would run over a paparazzo or two.
I supported the ACLU when they defended the speech-rights of George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party to speak, and the rights of other neo-Nazis to parade through Skokie, Illinois — not far from where I grew up — in full regalia. And I declined to precipitate a riot when other neo-Nazis paraded in downtown Chicago near a very large, largely Jewish, teen dance at which I briefly spoke. For a Jew who's studied the Hitlerian Holocaust, these were much tougher calls than respecting the rights of paparazzi not to be run over.

But there's something about paparazzi and more important media in their "nightcrawler" mode when they are in the figurative and literal faces of people in pain. There's something about that kind of pornography of suffering that, clearly, really pisses me off.

Obviously, there are audiences for wall-to-wall disaster coverage and asking some Mr. Macduff what it felt like to learn his entire extended family had been massacred, and other wallowing in the pain of others that would get an upload thrown off a respectable S&M website for violating community standards of decency. Still: not every audience desire should be fulfilled, not even if there's enough money in that variety of prostitution to save one's media outlet as a viable business. 
So let us defend freedom of the press — but ask, quietly, for some internal pressures in the media from members of the media to keep themselves defensible.

Free Speech on Campus: ¡Interruption, Yes! ¡Disruption, No!

Writing for the Associated Press, on 11 May 2017, Collin Binkley noted that "First Amendment Backers See Free Speech Fading At Colleges" and looked in some depth at student attitudes.

         In campus clashes from California to Vermont, many defenders of the First Amendment say they see signs that free speech, once a bedrock value in academia, is losing ground as a priority at U.S. colleges.           As protests have derailed speeches by controversial figures, including an event with Ann Coulter last month at the University of California, Berkeley, some fear students have come to see the right to free expression less as an enshrined measure of protection for all voices and more as a political weapon used against them by provocateurs.

         What I can bring to this discussion is the experience of a law-abiding and moderate graduate student activist in "the long 1960s" followed by service as a faculty member in the 1970's onward, specifically service on the Miami University Student Affairs Council as we recommended to The President and Trustees of the Miami University — the University as "a body corporate and politic" in Ohio — rules regarding free speech and disruption.

         Student Affairs Council (SAC) did not deal directly with student attitudes, and if someone had brought up attitudes I might've quoted, "Laws are the great schoolmaster of the commonwealth" — from Francis Bacon or someone like that — and noted that in this instance SAC was supposed to recommend rules governing, first, on-campus behavior and second, behavior by people on campus: students, faculty, staff, and/or visitors.

         Miami University is a public institution and respect for First Amendment free-speech rights were — in theory — part of relevant Ohio law and implicit in our mandate for rules, so we tried to respect the free speech of teachers, speakers, protesters, and what some of us (well, I, anyway) somewhat flippantly thought of as "civilians." And we came up with a fairly simple rule asking that SAC work on the principle of a right to interrupt but prohibition of disruption.

         Teachers were not paid enough and were on campus enough that they shouldn't have to take much shit from their students and none from visitors to their classrooms. But we weren't back in the days of young Hitlerites intimidating professors, and the practical issue was with big-name guest speakers. And big-name guest speakers, especially when well compensated, were professionals, and professional speakers should be competent to deal with hecklers. Indeed, it's part of the gig, and for a long time part of the entertainment value of public speeches, at least of the political variety. And a quick debate could be more educational than the one-way communication of a speech.

         So, no, a guest speaker could not call in the cops to haul out someone who interrupted. And we wrote the rule generally enough that neither could anyone else, even if this meant — and I raised such examples explicitly — that a traditional Christian wedding ceremony in the campus chapel could be interrupted by a radical feminist objecting to "obey" in a woman's vows, and an Orthodox or Conservative service in the campus chapel the afternoon of Yom Kippur could be interrupted by gay students objecting to reading the prohibition of male homosexuality in the Book of Leviticus.

         Interrupted, not disrupted.

         A "group heckle" is not heckling but disrupting, and failing to sit down and shut up after objecting to wifely obedience or prohibitions of homosexual behavior is also disrupting. And disruption was and usually should be illegal.

         We retained the old formulation that the teachers or the sponsors of events should retain their cool and warn people when interrupting was moving into disruption. But if the interruption became disruption, or disruption was the point all along, then we recommended authorizing calling in the cops and the armed power of the State.

         And this was in Ohio, down the road a piece (252 miles) from Kent State University and not long after the 4 May 1970 shootings at KSU. And if anyone had ever asked me — and they didn't — I could tell anti-War stories of Michigan and Balbo in Chicago in the summer of 1968, and the University of Illinois campus and how the two times I was most seriously threatened with serious injury it was by police with clubs.

         (Of course, a big part of the reason I was only seriously threatened twice in my life is because of the strong State with a lot of cops [a "Leviathan"], but that's another essay.)

         So we knew that every law and rule is, ultimately, backed up by force — including our rules on the size of pet fish in dorms — and some of us knew very well that even legal force can get nasty.

         Protesters had the right to interrupt; speakers and their audiences had the right to speak and hear … after a bit.

         I'm sure by now the Miami U Office of Legal Counsel has grown to significant size and rules are written by small teams of lawyers — especially sensitive rules such as those regarding guest speakers. But I like the rule we wrote and recommend our principle: Interruption, sure, especially of over-paid, over-pampered political trolls; disruption, hell no.

         Student attitudes can be worked on later, starting with teaching the simple fact that when speech is restricted, minorities with unpopular views are the first groups to get shut up — and Leftist, radical, unorthodox views are usually unpopular. Then "da older guys," and gals, can tell the young hotheads about the word "provocateur" and the tactic by Establishments through history of provocation to get reaction — and the use of reaction to get activists in jails or hospitals or morgues and the Establishment more firmly in power.

The "No-Visible-Scars" Approach: Disciplining/Harming Kids and Others (29 June 2013)

Most of us learned as kids, "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me," which we modify as adults to add, "Words just leave those invisible wounds that fester for years and years, poisoning relationships and our lives …."

I was going to write on this topic again anyway — indeed, I'd already written that opening paragraph — when I listened to David Sedaris's Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (2013), which includes a story in which a young Sedaris gets paddled by his father. In earlier books, Sedaris had talked about his father's dinner-table custom of hitting his wise-ass kids on the heads with a heavy spoon, and I thought that a bad thing for the father to do: scalp wounds can bleed a lot, nerves in the scalp damage easily and take a long time to heal, frequent head trauma of even a minor sort can harm the brain, and I agreed with the instructor of the one psych course I took that it's unethical for big people to beat up on little people.

Still, the instructor noted that kids are pretty resilient and that the research as of that date (mid-1960s) indicated that all sorts of systems of discipline could work with children so long as the general environment was loving and the system applied fairly and consistently. As the instructor threw in, "It won't warp their little psyches if you hit 'em now and then; and there's your psyche to consider" — and then repeated the ethical point that adults shouldn't beat up on kids, ever.

In the story with the paddle, however, the young — but not all that young — David Sedaris wasn't beaten up by his father and had behaved really, really like a brat. What bothered me in the Let's Explore Diabetes stories about the elder Sedaris (and remember that these are stories, and we haven't heard Dad's side) — what bothered me with this to-some-degree-fictionalized Dad wasn't that he'd once paddled his son but that he consistently undercut him verbally.

There may be something in my personal background working here. I can recall only one occasion when my father hit me — on the arm, with an arrow I had loosed in the apartment — but our parents didn't work very hard to disguise that (CLICHÉ ALERT!) I was our mother's favorite and my sister my father's favorite. Also, I was "the good one," the occasional arrow-equivalent notwithstanding, and my sister "the smart one": all the way through to at least my PhD and getting tenure at a respectable university.

Quick story. My sister called me one time laughing and saying that she'd called our father to tell her that her son had made Phi Beta Kappa. My father sent on his congratulations, paused, and said, "Well, that can't be such a big thing; Rich made Phi Beta Kappa."

Anyway, and for sure, I was kind of sensitive to — let's call it "verbal negativity" and leave "abuse" for more serious issues — to verbal negativity by the time I was a junior or senior in college.

I recall helping to run my fraternity chapter's Hell Week then and having some inspectors from the Interfraternity Council show up for yet another surprise inspection and getting into a moderately friendly discussion with one on pledge training. He politely declined my invitation to camp out in our foyer (or some similar snarky remark) and noted that he and his colleagues had returned because there were rumors that my fraternity chapter included sweat sessions of the boot-camp persuasion in our pledge training. Neither confirming nor denying the rumors, I noted that IFC held us responsible for the behavior and, as we said back then, discipline of our pledges and wondered aloud what sanctions for pledge-ly mischief he would recommend.

He told me that his house used line-ups where a pledge would be verbally dressed down (and verbally torn down) in front of his pledge brothers.

"The 'No-Visible-Scars' approach …?" I said, innocently, and thought "Now that is barbaric" and said that we didn't do that, and wouldn't. We'd line pledges up and yell at them as a group, but if we were going to say hard things about a pledge we said them to the pledge in private; and however much we were willing to use Parris-Island techniques for motivational aerobic exercise, we avoided the Marine tradition of tearing a guy down (destroying a boy to build a man, breaking the man to build the Marine [see Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket or just about any Marine movie prior to the 1990s).

            I am a life member of the American Civil Liberties Union and close to an absolutist on free speech; and contrary to some of my allies in feminism and on the Left, I strongly differentiate between speech and actions and limit a phrase like "speech acts" to something like, "I now pronounce you husband and wife" (or whatever), or "You're fired!" And I note again that David Sedaris tells stories, and even if they are 100% true to his perceptions and memories, we don't hear from his parents and siblings. Still, to my ears, the elder Sedaris comes through as something of a villain.


            I can forgive him his heavy spoon and (far more easily), his occasionally swatting a bratty son. Cutting the kid down, though, figuratively, hitting him with "verbal negativity" at just about every exchange — now that is kind of barbaric and cruel.

Food Porn (30 Sept. 2013)

            As often noted, it says something significant and disturbing that commercials on CNN and the other cable-news channels trend toward advertising catheters, large cars, Cialis and other drugs for old people: the audience analysis for the news channels is, apparently, the same that has newspapers' placing their editorials right after the obituaries. What I've been noticing lately, though, is the commercials on the day-time re-runs of the fake news shows: the restaurant, cooking-school, fast food, booze, soft-drinks, and candy commercials with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

            I'm on the treadmill or elliptical trainer, switching from MSNBC to Comedy Central to my iPod, with the TV on mute and trying really hard to deny my ears and eyeballs to the hucksters during the interminable commercial breaks. But up there before those eyeballs are incredible images, impossibly perfect images, of impossibly perfect food.

            I'm trying to diet and get exercise, and I've just heard a very clever Colbert riff on Michelle Obama's plugging for Americans' drinking water (as an alternative to sugary drinks), and then I find myself staring at a double cheeseburger with bacon, slowly dripping what looks like extra-rich bourbon barbecue sauce. If I ate that thing I'd have to spend another hour on the treadmill and have a salad and fiber bar for dinner, and I'd still be over my "Lose It!" calorie allowance — no shit; there's an exclamation mark in the name — I'd still be over my calorie allowance for the day.

            CNN and MSNBC are catering to old farts, and Fox-News is trawling for old farts with anger issues. Comedy Central et al. are going for younger demographics, who are apparently strongly into highly fattening food, or, perhaps, can be tempted to buy highly fattening food.

            This is not good.

            In terms of minute-by-minute content, the youngsters are getting better news than their elders, but they're also getting the message that it's not only normal behavior but downright cool to eat a 1300-calorie superburger, washed down with beer or sugar-cola and followed with a casual chaser of M&Ms and Cheetos.

            In throwing Eve and Adam out of the Garden, God pronounces a severe sentence on them, but He has his harshest words for the serpent that tempted them. Arguing "On Liberty" in 1859 — he's in favor of it — John Stuart Mill allows that society probably has to tolerate a lot of, as I'll put it, whoring and «john-ing», but we are freer, if we choose, to regulate pimps or at least bring down upon them social disapproval. It's one thing to get your rocks off illicitly; it's another to tempt people into such behavior and make your living at it.

            In terms of US public health, pimps who provide STD testing and condoms are less of an threat than the hucksters pushing to young viewers a Tuesday-night special of a bottomless pasta bowl, all-you-can-eat breadsticks, and a turtle cheesecake dessert. For that matter, small-time drug deals are probably less of a threat to public health than the hucksters pushing to young viewers deliciously seductive food porn.

            SUGGESTION TO FTC, FCC, AND OTHER REGULATORY AGENCIES ALPHABETICAL: Do require calorie disclosure on menus and flashed across the screen in all those ads.


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ADDENDUM: As often, the satirists were on to a trend way before more earnest folk such as I. See Trey Parker and Matt Stone's South Park espisode 14.14, 17 November 2010, "Creme Fraiche" — not commercials but full-frontal Food Network!