"but if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell you is brother you have to wait . . . " John Lennon
Dear HotWings,
I read an article on a website belonging to News 3 of Las Vegas. The story was about a teacher at a Las Vegas high school. While in the presence of her students she said the holocaust never happened. She also elaborated on why she has this belief. So, blah, blah, blah, a cry from the public has surfaced to have this teacher fired. I was happy to see a link at the conclusion of the article where I could post a comment. Participants were greeted with, “We welcome your participation in our community. Please keep your comments civil and to the point”. I was looking for your opinion. Do you believe I’ve followed the rules. The following is the comment I submitted:
“So unfortunate that people tend to forget about the Freedom of Speech. It's equally unfortunate when people act irresponsibily when exercising this Freedom. When a teacher can't speak responsibly, ignorance and stupidity are at work. This is truly a shame. But, the firing of this teacher shouldn't be mandated because someone is upset over this incident. The Freedom of Speech is a beautiful thing”.
I’m looking forward to your assessment.
- Let 'er Speak
Dear Let 'er,
The freedom of speech is not without sensible jurisdiction. Think "Fire" in a crowded theater, or the public disclosure of sensitive information on national security. Imagine an American President claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, knowing full well that he could not prove it; or worse, the claim was unlikely. Now imagine your own child failing an important exam as a consequence of wrong information he accurately recalled from the teacher's council. Now consider the possibility that his teacher used her position to undermine your child's chances on the exam for reasons that some might claim were protected by her freedom of speech. I could imagine a single opening at a prestigious university which the teacher held in preference for a competing student.
Now replace this motive with a political agenda, like saluting the flag while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Or perhaps learning about our young nation's obsession with its Manifest Destiny; the sanitizing of our treatment of the Native American in the process. How about the reluctant humility with which we recount our days of slave trading and the deafening silence on the subject of compensation to the families of these victims. I could go on. This essay will not simply discuss the legal parameters of Ms. Sublette‘s right to express her incendiary opinion of the Holocaust in the classroom of a public high school, but rather examine the situation to refine a common consensus on why decisions about the law might be upheld, independent of a balanced sense of moral, logical or civic accountability.
We have a responsibility to view these issues in the context of our imperfect contract as a community, if for no other reason than to validate the coordinates of the line we oblige our soldiers, law officers and politicians to hold. If we send our kids into action in Iraq, you'll want to know that we really needed the oil back home. We salute the flag as a five year old because our government needs to know that the principle of individual sacrifice for the Nation, trumping loyalty to family, is instilled before the child's mind can wrestle with its more unreasonable implications. In most discussions on group or congregational psychology this would be referred to as “indoctrination”. To salute the flag and recite the pledge is a display of patriotism and serves to reaffirm our place in a safe, functional community. Refusing to salute the flag and recite the pledge, although an individual's right or privilege exposes both an irony in the protection he enjoys, while coincidentally alienating him to suffer the derision of the remaining community. I want to focus on the consequences of populist influence when examining the opinion expressed, of a teacher's persecution by her community; the confrontation between laws and popular sentiment.
The laws exist to insure our society against the imperfections of its citizens, the premium being the restriction from absolute free will. In a republic, the laws are both established and periodically reviewed by a pyramidal consensus; that is to say that “We the Public” gather on Election Day to elect an elite handful of representatives who then decide which issues become the subjects of debate by a network of committees and councils whose influence and power is inversely proportionate to the size of its staff. The broader the influences of the decision, the fewer officials are tasked to consider it. It is the struggle for control of the law between the Federal and State/local governments that agitates the ambiguities in the pure logical framework over which the system is stretched.
I propose that it would be correct to describe myself as both an American and a New Yorker. It is my intention to emphasize to the reader that I recognize no redundancy in this. New York is a fine example of one region of American citizens whose majority opinion on many issues remains at odds with those of both our fellow states and the nation as a whole. Issues such as the death penalty, abortion, car insurance and gay rights serve to illustrate my point. As an American, I am a member of a society which sent soldiers into Iraq. From the first moment I recited the Pledge, I accepted my role in a contract with my neighbors which required my compensation of the afore-mentioned premium each day and on time: in this case I would support the American Servicemen and women involved with the campaign while using my modest influence, my First Amendment right to speak freely, to end the war through writings, conversations and the voting booth. I am not in a position at this time to offer the anti-war effort more. This then, places the consequences of a failure to rally enough of my fellow Americans to effectively oppose the war directly on my shoulders.
The image of America by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century became one of arrogance and clandestine tyranny throughout the world. To our allies we simply succumbed to a fevered paranoia through a sense of rage at the terrorist success on September 11th and our own impotent might. We stated our disregard for the Geneva Articles on a world stage, undermining the single most influential text on the subject which we, ironically, were instrumental in drafting. As a nation, we operated a campaign of aggression into a sovereign nation (granted, a nation ruled by a despotic lunatic and his creepy family) with an increasingly unilateral mission statement. Disagreement with this mission resulted more readily in alienation than dialogue; thus we expressed an unwillingness to cooperate with our allies to an unparalleled degree.
To our enemies, we simply reinforced a caricature of “the Great Satan”, by our interrogation techniques, our extraordinary renditions, our incident at Abu Ghraib, with world condemnation and weak domestic support, all which helped the recruitment of fresh, young jihadists immeasurably.
My continuing denial of "America's" justification for this aggression changes nothing with respect to the actions of my country and the disgust of the rest of the world. However, my "free speech rights" allowed me to help change the tide over the past eight years. By speaking out against our behavior in the Middle East, bonds among my New York neighbors were created and broken at a rate more favorable to those in my community opposed to the war. Hence the establishment of a growing "Blue" voice in a time of a "Red" administration. New York's voice against the war eventually out-paced the incumbent Red majority and joined with similar sentiments gathering force in other states to win the majority voice in the 2008 Presidential election. The face of America is slowly beginning to regain its former, multi-lateral sophistication and intelligence.
We are likewise a country of increasingly diverse racial and ethnic complexity where you will still find a majority of American communities utilizing a social structure founded over a few centuries and many generations ago by powerful western European traditionalists. Our laws, our economic structure, public school system and in some cases the faith in Jesus Christ, are all staunch examples of specific, essential tools variously adopted and employed by a broad spectrum of the nation's ethnically diverse communities, while maintaining a fixed philosophical core. We live our life in a community as unique from our distinct individuality as the neighboring town’s collective identity is from our own. Multiply the degree to which this phenomenon might divide two small fractions of a society, in a nation as enormous as our own and the question which began this dialogue becomes less about a common sense of moral or legal purpose, overshadowed instead by the miracle of any remaining consensus of purpose at all.
The issue of United States compensation for the Native Americans for example has been stalled until fifty years ago by a predominantly white fist on the throttle of Western academia. The telling of America's Manifest Destiny was sanitized up through the nineteen-sixties as much by a vilification of the indigenous opposition as the censorship of our frontier, genocidal wickedness. It was perfectly acceptable by such standards to shoot and distribute Hollywood movies capitalizing on a palliated retelling of events. These films simply provided action footage of the caricature of American integrity as recorded in our public school textbooks. However the conspiracy to whitewash the truth about the adolescence of our nation was as near complete as it was doomed to fail.
The notion of truth among the predominant culture of late eighteenth through late nineteenth century was quite different from the truth we pursue today. Our early curiosity about a democracy based form of capitalism led to the development of ever larger investment and trading institutions which proved an ironic obstacle to the extrapolation of severe future economic penalties and moral debt. These circumstances coincided with the discovery of an "endless" supply of natural resources. The industrialization of our cities permitted an explosion of white babies with European genetics whose destiny lay in providing for a perpetual husbandry of the cycle. The savages who feebly defended their ancestral homelands were a modest inconvenience to efforts of a superior sensibility struggling to achieve the bewitching promise of unlimited potential. However, the sciences of these times did not have the methods or tools to calculate the limitations of the dream. That discovery would have to wait another century. The genocide of the American Indian culture, its religions, its languages, art and so on, was simply accepted as the collateral price of bringing Christ's brand of capitalism to the new Promised Land. As Stalin once mused: one cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
History is primarily the story of past events as regaled by the victor; leave the facts for the anthropologists. The story of the United States was handed down from one generation of white men to the next. Nothing would ever need to change as long as the fist on the throttle was white and the blood running through it was from our European cousins. The story of the American West as understood by most children from the nineteen fifties and sixties was the same story told to our parents by their grandparents. This fact, supported by television's successful broadcasts of Wild West shoot-'em-ups like The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, F-Troop and Davy Crocket establishes quite an impressive provenance. This was not the same conspiracy we were taught by our schools and newspapers and radios to fear, like socialism, communism or Orwell’s 1984 nightmare. Instead, this tale came directly from a charming, wondrous past, where fine, strong white American men were reclaiming Eden from the pagan savages; and where our pioneering women were the resourceful, hard working , church-going hostages of the unscrupulous, barbaric Red-Skin. This was our Freedom of Speech speaking.
The history of the American slave trade is equally disgusting. Our contemporary dialogue on compensation for crimes committed centuries ago is the single most conspicuous vacuum of conversation we actively dismiss. Rather, it is far more effective to reinforce our cultural association of black men with crime and prison, black women with welfare, prostitution and fatherless babies and black children as the future of illegal drugs, more feral babies and violent crime, then to face the insidious mechanics of an economic system created by us, White America, to restrict African American families from every fair chance at opportunity’s dinner table. It is criminal of me to write so little of this issue, but in the context of brevity, I will assume that the topic is understood in context well enough by the reader, admit to my fault and maintain focus on the specific topic.
I've often wondered if our Constitution was written to protect these events or simply allow them. In a Democracy, a lie with enough votes becomes the new, legally sanctioned truth. Either way, I am reminded that our courts insist, upon swearing in, that a witness "speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." This is as surgical as one can come to exposing our society's acknowledgement that an individual's truth is held on a separate plane from our collective sense of what is true and what is not. This fact is of profound importance to any discussion of legal limitations of Constitutional rights. Our Laws after all, are never more perfect than our most pragmatic sensibilities, our practical morality; a distinct yet often misunderstood cousin of philosophical ethics. No person who knows that stealing is wrong, would let their child suffer without considering the morality of not stealing. Immanuel Kant(German Philosopher 1724-1804), suggested as much with his Second Formulation of the Categorical Imperative, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.” This is the logic that confounds our world; this is why our judges, philosophers and clerics must always live on the same street but under separate roofs.
So as our history as a Nation progressed, many immigrants came to fill the labor vacuum created by the success of our explosive industrialization. These were people whose ethnicity was increasingly non-white and non-European. Their cultural diversity and immense numbers soon changed the demographic landscape beyond the threshold of political and economic anonymity, and by the early twentieth century began exercising their own brand of cultural self-esteem. As the ghettos of foreign, impoverished outcasts matured to become the neighborhoods of increasing cultural and economic depth, these concentrated pockets of mutual interest were beginning to consolidate their voices, asking for answers to the discrepancies in the white man's school books. They familiarized themselves with the ways of business and began investing these profits in education. They learned about the laws of the land and its politics. They began to hold political office and positions in banks and businesses. Now, when faced with invisible and unlawful restrictions to opportunity, these men and women were positioned for the first time, as plaintiffs, to hold the mirror of fact up to the face of their pink faced oppressors. Now they were positioned to expose "the man" and his “system” in his own court room and be heard in his newspapers.
I am a white man, born of white parents from Western Europe. Being raised during the period when this Renaissance of the Minority reached critical mass, it is difficult for me to understand the contempt of my contemporaries to the call for equality and affirmative action. Rather, I am exposed daily to hard evidence where individuals from my community, a predominantly caucasian suburb on Long Island, would spend the greater amount of energy and resources preventing the proverbial mirror from telling its tale than improving the system. It is far better to ignore the debt than assume the burden of spiritual austerity required to level the playing field. This effort has simply resulted in a phenomenon where two adjacent towns can coexist, sharing no sense of community, the barest, begrudging cooperation between municipal services and zero cultural exchanges. The Freedom to speak in either town would be understood to mean radically different things based on separate rationalizations of identical events.
I am reminded from my elementary school days back in 1960’s Commack, of the annual celebration of Columbus Day. Here was an occasion to interrupt the regular dull classroom routine with a hallway pageant and an assembly in the cafeteria, which served double duty as an auditorium. Speeches by Grown-ups and high-octane classmates recounted the heroic tale of a brave sailor with a profound vision, battling tremendous odds and triumphantly discovering America so we could have a park with woods to ride our bikes, build our forts and a shopping center to get some soda at. All the pictures in my school books of the landing showed how happy the Indians were to finally be discovered. These were prints of naked savages emerging from the darkness of the dense forest to greet the tall, well dressed sailors in shiny, bullet shaped helmets, with swords and muskets arriving on a ship from the wide expanse of the bright beach and sea. How cool was this?
Commack’s southern border was shared by a small town named Brentwood. Brentwood’s territory began up north at its boundary line with Commack and rolled south along a five mile parcel of Long Island’s flat, featureless midland. Let me remind the reader that Long Island is an island. I’m not talking about vast expanses of land here. This was an area that puzzled me as a kid because it was dull looking . . . very dull. Except when it was quaint and run down. This is the area along Fifth Avenue where all the small fruit stands and gas stations and auto shops and barber shops had signs in Spanish. Sun bleached concrete block shops seemed to sprout like weeds between the harsh factories like Entenmann’s Bakery, with its towering stacks coughing smoke and steam into the vapid sky. Guys would be hanging around in t-shirts and jeans in the middle of the hot summer; guys who looked to be the same age as my father. Why are they dressed like kids and sitting around outside the deli’s, laughing and drinking beer? My father dressed in a white shirt and tie. He went to work every day at the LILCO headquarters in Hicksville. Besides, it’s so hot they should be inside somewhere, drinking in the air conditioning or laying around in a swimming pool. Don’t they know someone with a swimming pool?
These were not “pink people”.
Brentwood was two or three miles from my home, yet somehow it seemed, from the window of my mother’s car, that we were driving through a third world nation. Columbus day in Brentwood was a time to remember the persecution of the Native American tribes; North and South American tribes that is. The people of Brentwood were black and Hispanic. These neighborhoods displayed all the consequences of cultural segregation, high joblessness and anemic buying power. In Brentwood, a tradition of white economic dominance allowed for a low-brow zoning aesthetic, where large factories and clusters of small industrial buildings and warehouses nestled among the tight neighborhoods of low income, multi-family houses. This was the place where low-tech things were made, sorted and distributed, owned by the more successful Americans who chose to keep the industrial landscape out from the viewing distance of their own more exclusive communities just a few miles and many light years away. It was only logical that the unskilled labor necessary to feed the furnaces and dunk the donuts and load the trucks live within walking or bicycle distance, as these jobs didn’t earn enough to by a car, let alone buy the education required to consider achieving the citizenship necessary to come out from the shadows of illegitimacy and drive legally.
Nevertheless, they came, settled, worked and sent for their brothers and cousins and friends. Cheap labor was a profitable resource so the business bosses were delighted. Unskilled jobs were plentiful and the housing was at worst equivalent to the squalor they left behind in El Salvador, Trinidad or Puerto Rico. So another unique community was born. The large majority of the Brentwood population shared more values and traditions amongst themselves, despite their diversity, than with the larger surrounding communities. It was therefore not considered unusual to maintain the customs and languages from far away homes, practices considered alien and hence inferior by our White society. This failure to assimilate enhanced their status as both separate and stubborn, while as unskilled they became merely “inadequate” and conveniently inferior. The resentment by these recent immigrants of such a lousy, self-perpetuating position eventually expressed itself in a simmering rage; the rise of imported gang activity and drugs moved into the vacuum of hope to empower a formerly invisible caste of “illegals and undesirables.
Christopher Columbus is a powerful icon of the Western European tyranny they feel each and every day as underpaid, under-educated, under-skilled, unemployed “brown-skinned”, Spanish speaking, unwelcome “guests” in the White man’s living room. I would hazard a guess that there is considerable animosity among the Brentwood population associated with the holiday. The right to express one’s outrage of such a symbol of exploitation and genocide by the ancestors of the original victims is assured by the First Amendment. But what about the hypothetical aggression of this same community towards a white man from another, non-Hispanic town, who dressed like Christopher Columbus and marched down Fifth Avenue on this October holiday?
I am aware that one’s right to throw a punch ends where another man’s nose begins, but in the context of an employment of the truth, it could be suggested, by an examination of the extenuating circumstances, that the victim in this case is the community and not the individual. The law is simply a formality of that distinction; a formality of consensus. What could resolve an issue in Brentwood might create an uproar in Commack. The concept of justice is never to be resolved among the Nation’s communities along strict federal lines of jurisdiction, yet the door to depravity remains unguarded without it. This is the quandary of the First Amendment.
I would further add that any suggestion that I dress like Christopher Columbus and attempt to march down Fifth Avenue in Brentwood is a waste of time. I would consider it disrespectful and incendiary.
Considering our conjectured free-for-all is eventually resolved by a police citation for both parties to appear in court, I can only assume that the case would be held against some standard of existing ruling from the vast record of precedent. Failing to provide a suitable match, our case becomes a formalized debate on the finer details of our Freedom of Speech. (It would be of equivalent interest to me how the police decided the roles of defendant and plaintiff.)
Either way, our common bond as a larger community under the First Amendment is hauled before a judge because another ambiguous portal of depravity was breached by a single citizen’s choice to exercise his insensitivity inside the gray, valance band of the Maxim. It is my comfort and conviction that these ambiguities in the law exist to allow our differences room to breathe; for our individual ears to hear the distant drum beats of our own uniqueness. And every time a Judge is called upon to settle such disparity, a small piece of our individuality is neutered, then crystallized into a greater homogonous culture, a ruling which of necessity tolerates fewer and fewer outbursts of expression, further codifying the legislation of simple tolerance and respect. This is too great a loss to my cultural singularity to acquiesce to. Decency is always found under the rubble of the ill-fated temple of best intentions. The irony here seems to suggest that the right to express one’s aggressiveness trumps the right to ignore it. Or is this always true?
I searched for exceptions to the concept of unrestricted speech and found the following eight exceptions on a Web site hosted by the National Endowment of the Arts:
csulb.edu/-javajvancamp/freedom1.html:
1] Defamation: a publication of a statement of alleged fact which is false and harms the reputation of another person.
2] Causing Panic: Shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, for instance
3] Fighting words: words which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.
4] Incitement to Crime: It is a crime to incite someone else to commit a crime.
5] Sedition: The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld statutes which prohibit the advocacy of unlawful conduct against the government or the violent overthrow of the government.
6] Obscenity: U.S. Supreme Court established a three-pronged test for obscenity prohibitions which would NOT violate the First Amendment: a) does Joe Average, with a mind to “community standards”, find a statement/work appealing to erotic interests; b) whether a statement/work depicts in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by State law; and c) whether the statement/work, taken in whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
7] Offense: Tossed around by theorists, this states that speech which is merely offensive to others should be an exception to the First Amendment. It failed its first trial in American courts. Please visit the web site for further information.
8] Establishment of Religion: Some speech is restricted because it constitutes the establishment of religion, which is itself prohibited by the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.”
So it is with this perspective that I visit the question of Lori Sublette, a Gym teacher in Las Vegas, and the issue of her protection under the First Amendment to use such a platform to express her opinions about the holocaust.
I was born into a family that worshipped at an Episcopalian church. I have had no connection with the Christian faith for over thirty-five years, with the single exception of my wedding, for which the Church served as a mere backdrop for the secular romance of a shared literary/traditionalist theme, and made for some fine photo-ops. My views of the Christian church are not hostile and my relationship with my brothers, who remain within its congregation, is loving and healthy. I hold a similar contempt for the persecution of any individual on the singular basis of their spiritual opinions. An outline of my religious inclinations, “Spirituality and Culture in the 21st Century”, is among the essays I have posted, for public scrutiny on this blog: jeffreygiov.blogspot.com.
The holocaust is a reference to the mid-twentieth century campaign by the German Nationalist party, the Nazi Party, to first, blame the economic emaciation of their country on all individuals who did not fit the socio-ethnic framework of the vast white, Germanic majority, and secondly, resulted in the isolation, collection and murder of these individuals. The number of people estimated to have been slaughtered during the Holocaust exceeds six million. The process of such an extensive scheme produced mountains of records and accessory artifacts. These victims are documented variously to include the Jews, the Blacks, the Gypsies and the handicapped. The Jews constitute the overwhelming majority who suffered under this campaign. After the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, the surviving Jews, exiled by the devastated villages and cities of the Eurasian world, who were anxiously and resentfully working to recover from the devestation, were forcibly settled in the former homeland of the Palestinian people. The boundaries of this new country, Israel, have been expanded through several wars and occupations. The plight of the displaced Palestinians and the occupation of territories gained by illegal settlements and wars have created an environment of perpetual conflict and animosity, erupting periodically to the resolution of continued Israeli dominance. The line between the Jewish State and the Jewish religion as practiced globally has become the victim of collateral obscurity, hence the social persecution, by association, of Jewish citizens in nations and religious temperment unallied with the nation of Israel and its controversial politics.
The distrust and virulence toward the Jew which predated Nazi Germany for thousands of years is an interesting study in and of itself. No discussion of the incendiary potential of Sublette’s irresponsible and insensitive abuse of authority can ignore the briefest acknowledgement of its influence in the incident. It is, after all, the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room.
The first people of the Jewish religion presented to the world as a community which regarded no ruler or law as having authority before the Word of their monotheistic creed. The obvious annoyance of the remaining society to this perceived arrogance and nonconformity landed the Jew on a hit list for criminal beliefs resulting in prison, slavery or death. Thus eventually exiled, (not a bad story at that) they broke from this fate to roam the various lands, chased from one fertile region to the next without the propensity to organize the necessary forces to stay, develop and defend a homeland. History unfolds the tale of a culture of “immigrant guests”, emigrating from the wilderness, to establish the ghettos of Europe and Russia’s urban concentrations. With neither the physical or social means to establish the influence required to rise from the savage, competitive depths of city squalor, the Jewish people drew instead upon the Capitalistic structure of their religion, the first true and modern enterprise of the individual as self reliant; responsible alone before the eyes of his single God for personal success or failure, and applied it to the economic world otherwise consuming them. What these towns and cities welcomed from the Jew was a monomaniacal approach to meticulous form of record keeping; a manner of weaving statistics and predicting events heretofore considered immaterial. With this skill came certain influence and personal, yet modest financial power. The application of these techniques may well have improved their status as skillful businessmen, but at a great price. Debtors, fueled by regret and unregulated interest rates were soon and easily resentful of these marginally welcome “guests” and periodically rose en masse’ to exercise their frustration in violent, mob style outbursts. The Jew was painfully aware that the laws of the city were no place to turn. And so the history of the Jew continued, with subtle variations, with its ups and downs until the philosophy of Herzl and the Great Plan of Adolf Hitler. It is unfortunate for our contemporary society, that vestigial remnants of the less congenial relationship between the Jew and the non-Jew survived the war. This is best evidenced in the denial of the Holocaust and anti-Semitic violence witnessed with alarming frequency in our post World War civilization. Few topics in history are as knotted in social and violent tensions as the story of the Jew’s place in society. Few stories of the Jew’s place in Society are as blatantly obscene and explosive as the programmatic annihilation of six million Jews in mid-twentieth century Europe.
I cannot rationalize one reasonable alternative to the denial of this event outside its capacity to injure the memory and history of the holocaust and the Jew as an individual and the Jewish people as a whole. The sum effect of this claim can neither be understood to provide anything beneficial to a clearer understanding of those times but rather, simply resuscitate the weakly veiled threat that such group-think is alive and well and should be feared some fifty years after the fact; a grisly warning to look often and forever over one's shoulder. Is this speech protected by the First Amendment? As I look at the list of exceptions above, I can see how it might win a debate against any claim that it could, by sheer utterance, cause someone to commit a crime. In the same spirit, I can see how one might argue against someone’s claim of personal harm from such postulations. [Mind you, I would be both proud and anxious to debate the opposing side to both charges of any infringement of their speech.] Our communities set the standards of civil tolerance in our school rooms. The important events in the life of a man named Christopher Columbus have been cherry picked by teachers on both sides of the Commack-Brentwood border, yet both schools draw from the same legitimate resources. The respective teachers simply enhance or omit facts relevant to their ultimate beliefs, and the fallout of the community is left to grade the effort. One can see how two different communities might condone antithetical summaries of the same event. I find it difficult to believe the community in Las Vegas, Nevada would condone the use of their public school rooms to provide the stage for an intimidating teacher to lord her students with a tale of such proven hurtful capacity and factual vacancy. I find it equally amazing that the same community could acquiesce to such impotence of retribution to the same, yet this woman has indeed managed to keep her teaching position without even apologizing.
The lessons are quite clear. The First Amendment is extraordinary, quite powerful for one. I am an artist and a writer. I hold my freedom of expression as sacred. I further believe that it was this very Freedom that exposed the crimes of the previous Administration, for which I am profoundly greatful. I have no axe to grind with free speech. As Voltaire once famously said: "I may disagree to the core of my soul those things you say, but will defend with my life your right to say it." I simply believe an individual's right to use this freedom for results which harm another individual or group may be debated and censured in accordance with my own right to maintain some truth and civility in my world.
The rules by which Sublette was able to worm her way out of termination were available for scrutiny by representatives of the community long before this fiasco. But it would have taken someone equally sleazy to anticipate this travesty and expose the loophole in the contract which allowed her to remain in her predatory position. But that didn’t happen. Perhaps its human nature to assume that these freakish aberrations of the social contract, of mutual respect for cultural cooperation, occur only on the pages of our tabloids and TV screens; that this brand of filth could never come home to us. Thanks to this example, I’m sure we will all lose another small piece of that fragile truth we treasure in an effort to tighten our hold on whatever uniqueness remains in this crazy quilt of the Nation that we still are.
copyright Jeff Thomas 2010
Dear HotWings,
I read an article on a website belonging to News 3 of Las Vegas. The story was about a teacher at a Las Vegas high school. While in the presence of her students she said the holocaust never happened. She also elaborated on why she has this belief. So, blah, blah, blah, a cry from the public has surfaced to have this teacher fired. I was happy to see a link at the conclusion of the article where I could post a comment. Participants were greeted with, “We welcome your participation in our community. Please keep your comments civil and to the point”. I was looking for your opinion. Do you believe I’ve followed the rules. The following is the comment I submitted:
“So unfortunate that people tend to forget about the Freedom of Speech. It's equally unfortunate when people act irresponsibily when exercising this Freedom. When a teacher can't speak responsibly, ignorance and stupidity are at work. This is truly a shame. But, the firing of this teacher shouldn't be mandated because someone is upset over this incident. The Freedom of Speech is a beautiful thing”.
I’m looking forward to your assessment.
- Let 'er Speak
Dear Let 'er,
The freedom of speech is not without sensible jurisdiction. Think "Fire" in a crowded theater, or the public disclosure of sensitive information on national security. Imagine an American President claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, knowing full well that he could not prove it; or worse, the claim was unlikely. Now imagine your own child failing an important exam as a consequence of wrong information he accurately recalled from the teacher's council. Now consider the possibility that his teacher used her position to undermine your child's chances on the exam for reasons that some might claim were protected by her freedom of speech. I could imagine a single opening at a prestigious university which the teacher held in preference for a competing student.
Now replace this motive with a political agenda, like saluting the flag while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Or perhaps learning about our young nation's obsession with its Manifest Destiny; the sanitizing of our treatment of the Native American in the process. How about the reluctant humility with which we recount our days of slave trading and the deafening silence on the subject of compensation to the families of these victims. I could go on. This essay will not simply discuss the legal parameters of Ms. Sublette‘s right to express her incendiary opinion of the Holocaust in the classroom of a public high school, but rather examine the situation to refine a common consensus on why decisions about the law might be upheld, independent of a balanced sense of moral, logical or civic accountability.
We have a responsibility to view these issues in the context of our imperfect contract as a community, if for no other reason than to validate the coordinates of the line we oblige our soldiers, law officers and politicians to hold. If we send our kids into action in Iraq, you'll want to know that we really needed the oil back home. We salute the flag as a five year old because our government needs to know that the principle of individual sacrifice for the Nation, trumping loyalty to family, is instilled before the child's mind can wrestle with its more unreasonable implications. In most discussions on group or congregational psychology this would be referred to as “indoctrination”. To salute the flag and recite the pledge is a display of patriotism and serves to reaffirm our place in a safe, functional community. Refusing to salute the flag and recite the pledge, although an individual's right or privilege exposes both an irony in the protection he enjoys, while coincidentally alienating him to suffer the derision of the remaining community. I want to focus on the consequences of populist influence when examining the opinion expressed, of a teacher's persecution by her community; the confrontation between laws and popular sentiment.
The laws exist to insure our society against the imperfections of its citizens, the premium being the restriction from absolute free will. In a republic, the laws are both established and periodically reviewed by a pyramidal consensus; that is to say that “We the Public” gather on Election Day to elect an elite handful of representatives who then decide which issues become the subjects of debate by a network of committees and councils whose influence and power is inversely proportionate to the size of its staff. The broader the influences of the decision, the fewer officials are tasked to consider it. It is the struggle for control of the law between the Federal and State/local governments that agitates the ambiguities in the pure logical framework over which the system is stretched.
I propose that it would be correct to describe myself as both an American and a New Yorker. It is my intention to emphasize to the reader that I recognize no redundancy in this. New York is a fine example of one region of American citizens whose majority opinion on many issues remains at odds with those of both our fellow states and the nation as a whole. Issues such as the death penalty, abortion, car insurance and gay rights serve to illustrate my point. As an American, I am a member of a society which sent soldiers into Iraq. From the first moment I recited the Pledge, I accepted my role in a contract with my neighbors which required my compensation of the afore-mentioned premium each day and on time: in this case I would support the American Servicemen and women involved with the campaign while using my modest influence, my First Amendment right to speak freely, to end the war through writings, conversations and the voting booth. I am not in a position at this time to offer the anti-war effort more. This then, places the consequences of a failure to rally enough of my fellow Americans to effectively oppose the war directly on my shoulders.
The image of America by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century became one of arrogance and clandestine tyranny throughout the world. To our allies we simply succumbed to a fevered paranoia through a sense of rage at the terrorist success on September 11th and our own impotent might. We stated our disregard for the Geneva Articles on a world stage, undermining the single most influential text on the subject which we, ironically, were instrumental in drafting. As a nation, we operated a campaign of aggression into a sovereign nation (granted, a nation ruled by a despotic lunatic and his creepy family) with an increasingly unilateral mission statement. Disagreement with this mission resulted more readily in alienation than dialogue; thus we expressed an unwillingness to cooperate with our allies to an unparalleled degree.
To our enemies, we simply reinforced a caricature of “the Great Satan”, by our interrogation techniques, our extraordinary renditions, our incident at Abu Ghraib, with world condemnation and weak domestic support, all which helped the recruitment of fresh, young jihadists immeasurably.
My continuing denial of "America's" justification for this aggression changes nothing with respect to the actions of my country and the disgust of the rest of the world. However, my "free speech rights" allowed me to help change the tide over the past eight years. By speaking out against our behavior in the Middle East, bonds among my New York neighbors were created and broken at a rate more favorable to those in my community opposed to the war. Hence the establishment of a growing "Blue" voice in a time of a "Red" administration. New York's voice against the war eventually out-paced the incumbent Red majority and joined with similar sentiments gathering force in other states to win the majority voice in the 2008 Presidential election. The face of America is slowly beginning to regain its former, multi-lateral sophistication and intelligence.
We are likewise a country of increasingly diverse racial and ethnic complexity where you will still find a majority of American communities utilizing a social structure founded over a few centuries and many generations ago by powerful western European traditionalists. Our laws, our economic structure, public school system and in some cases the faith in Jesus Christ, are all staunch examples of specific, essential tools variously adopted and employed by a broad spectrum of the nation's ethnically diverse communities, while maintaining a fixed philosophical core. We live our life in a community as unique from our distinct individuality as the neighboring town’s collective identity is from our own. Multiply the degree to which this phenomenon might divide two small fractions of a society, in a nation as enormous as our own and the question which began this dialogue becomes less about a common sense of moral or legal purpose, overshadowed instead by the miracle of any remaining consensus of purpose at all.
The issue of United States compensation for the Native Americans for example has been stalled until fifty years ago by a predominantly white fist on the throttle of Western academia. The telling of America's Manifest Destiny was sanitized up through the nineteen-sixties as much by a vilification of the indigenous opposition as the censorship of our frontier, genocidal wickedness. It was perfectly acceptable by such standards to shoot and distribute Hollywood movies capitalizing on a palliated retelling of events. These films simply provided action footage of the caricature of American integrity as recorded in our public school textbooks. However the conspiracy to whitewash the truth about the adolescence of our nation was as near complete as it was doomed to fail.
The notion of truth among the predominant culture of late eighteenth through late nineteenth century was quite different from the truth we pursue today. Our early curiosity about a democracy based form of capitalism led to the development of ever larger investment and trading institutions which proved an ironic obstacle to the extrapolation of severe future economic penalties and moral debt. These circumstances coincided with the discovery of an "endless" supply of natural resources. The industrialization of our cities permitted an explosion of white babies with European genetics whose destiny lay in providing for a perpetual husbandry of the cycle. The savages who feebly defended their ancestral homelands were a modest inconvenience to efforts of a superior sensibility struggling to achieve the bewitching promise of unlimited potential. However, the sciences of these times did not have the methods or tools to calculate the limitations of the dream. That discovery would have to wait another century. The genocide of the American Indian culture, its religions, its languages, art and so on, was simply accepted as the collateral price of bringing Christ's brand of capitalism to the new Promised Land. As Stalin once mused: one cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
History is primarily the story of past events as regaled by the victor; leave the facts for the anthropologists. The story of the United States was handed down from one generation of white men to the next. Nothing would ever need to change as long as the fist on the throttle was white and the blood running through it was from our European cousins. The story of the American West as understood by most children from the nineteen fifties and sixties was the same story told to our parents by their grandparents. This fact, supported by television's successful broadcasts of Wild West shoot-'em-ups like The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, F-Troop and Davy Crocket establishes quite an impressive provenance. This was not the same conspiracy we were taught by our schools and newspapers and radios to fear, like socialism, communism or Orwell’s 1984 nightmare. Instead, this tale came directly from a charming, wondrous past, where fine, strong white American men were reclaiming Eden from the pagan savages; and where our pioneering women were the resourceful, hard working , church-going hostages of the unscrupulous, barbaric Red-Skin. This was our Freedom of Speech speaking.
The history of the American slave trade is equally disgusting. Our contemporary dialogue on compensation for crimes committed centuries ago is the single most conspicuous vacuum of conversation we actively dismiss. Rather, it is far more effective to reinforce our cultural association of black men with crime and prison, black women with welfare, prostitution and fatherless babies and black children as the future of illegal drugs, more feral babies and violent crime, then to face the insidious mechanics of an economic system created by us, White America, to restrict African American families from every fair chance at opportunity’s dinner table. It is criminal of me to write so little of this issue, but in the context of brevity, I will assume that the topic is understood in context well enough by the reader, admit to my fault and maintain focus on the specific topic.
I've often wondered if our Constitution was written to protect these events or simply allow them. In a Democracy, a lie with enough votes becomes the new, legally sanctioned truth. Either way, I am reminded that our courts insist, upon swearing in, that a witness "speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." This is as surgical as one can come to exposing our society's acknowledgement that an individual's truth is held on a separate plane from our collective sense of what is true and what is not. This fact is of profound importance to any discussion of legal limitations of Constitutional rights. Our Laws after all, are never more perfect than our most pragmatic sensibilities, our practical morality; a distinct yet often misunderstood cousin of philosophical ethics. No person who knows that stealing is wrong, would let their child suffer without considering the morality of not stealing. Immanuel Kant(German Philosopher 1724-1804), suggested as much with his Second Formulation of the Categorical Imperative, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.” This is the logic that confounds our world; this is why our judges, philosophers and clerics must always live on the same street but under separate roofs.
So as our history as a Nation progressed, many immigrants came to fill the labor vacuum created by the success of our explosive industrialization. These were people whose ethnicity was increasingly non-white and non-European. Their cultural diversity and immense numbers soon changed the demographic landscape beyond the threshold of political and economic anonymity, and by the early twentieth century began exercising their own brand of cultural self-esteem. As the ghettos of foreign, impoverished outcasts matured to become the neighborhoods of increasing cultural and economic depth, these concentrated pockets of mutual interest were beginning to consolidate their voices, asking for answers to the discrepancies in the white man's school books. They familiarized themselves with the ways of business and began investing these profits in education. They learned about the laws of the land and its politics. They began to hold political office and positions in banks and businesses. Now, when faced with invisible and unlawful restrictions to opportunity, these men and women were positioned for the first time, as plaintiffs, to hold the mirror of fact up to the face of their pink faced oppressors. Now they were positioned to expose "the man" and his “system” in his own court room and be heard in his newspapers.
I am a white man, born of white parents from Western Europe. Being raised during the period when this Renaissance of the Minority reached critical mass, it is difficult for me to understand the contempt of my contemporaries to the call for equality and affirmative action. Rather, I am exposed daily to hard evidence where individuals from my community, a predominantly caucasian suburb on Long Island, would spend the greater amount of energy and resources preventing the proverbial mirror from telling its tale than improving the system. It is far better to ignore the debt than assume the burden of spiritual austerity required to level the playing field. This effort has simply resulted in a phenomenon where two adjacent towns can coexist, sharing no sense of community, the barest, begrudging cooperation between municipal services and zero cultural exchanges. The Freedom to speak in either town would be understood to mean radically different things based on separate rationalizations of identical events.
I am reminded from my elementary school days back in 1960’s Commack, of the annual celebration of Columbus Day. Here was an occasion to interrupt the regular dull classroom routine with a hallway pageant and an assembly in the cafeteria, which served double duty as an auditorium. Speeches by Grown-ups and high-octane classmates recounted the heroic tale of a brave sailor with a profound vision, battling tremendous odds and triumphantly discovering America so we could have a park with woods to ride our bikes, build our forts and a shopping center to get some soda at. All the pictures in my school books of the landing showed how happy the Indians were to finally be discovered. These were prints of naked savages emerging from the darkness of the dense forest to greet the tall, well dressed sailors in shiny, bullet shaped helmets, with swords and muskets arriving on a ship from the wide expanse of the bright beach and sea. How cool was this?
Commack’s southern border was shared by a small town named Brentwood. Brentwood’s territory began up north at its boundary line with Commack and rolled south along a five mile parcel of Long Island’s flat, featureless midland. Let me remind the reader that Long Island is an island. I’m not talking about vast expanses of land here. This was an area that puzzled me as a kid because it was dull looking . . . very dull. Except when it was quaint and run down. This is the area along Fifth Avenue where all the small fruit stands and gas stations and auto shops and barber shops had signs in Spanish. Sun bleached concrete block shops seemed to sprout like weeds between the harsh factories like Entenmann’s Bakery, with its towering stacks coughing smoke and steam into the vapid sky. Guys would be hanging around in t-shirts and jeans in the middle of the hot summer; guys who looked to be the same age as my father. Why are they dressed like kids and sitting around outside the deli’s, laughing and drinking beer? My father dressed in a white shirt and tie. He went to work every day at the LILCO headquarters in Hicksville. Besides, it’s so hot they should be inside somewhere, drinking in the air conditioning or laying around in a swimming pool. Don’t they know someone with a swimming pool?
These were not “pink people”.
Brentwood was two or three miles from my home, yet somehow it seemed, from the window of my mother’s car, that we were driving through a third world nation. Columbus day in Brentwood was a time to remember the persecution of the Native American tribes; North and South American tribes that is. The people of Brentwood were black and Hispanic. These neighborhoods displayed all the consequences of cultural segregation, high joblessness and anemic buying power. In Brentwood, a tradition of white economic dominance allowed for a low-brow zoning aesthetic, where large factories and clusters of small industrial buildings and warehouses nestled among the tight neighborhoods of low income, multi-family houses. This was the place where low-tech things were made, sorted and distributed, owned by the more successful Americans who chose to keep the industrial landscape out from the viewing distance of their own more exclusive communities just a few miles and many light years away. It was only logical that the unskilled labor necessary to feed the furnaces and dunk the donuts and load the trucks live within walking or bicycle distance, as these jobs didn’t earn enough to by a car, let alone buy the education required to consider achieving the citizenship necessary to come out from the shadows of illegitimacy and drive legally.
Nevertheless, they came, settled, worked and sent for their brothers and cousins and friends. Cheap labor was a profitable resource so the business bosses were delighted. Unskilled jobs were plentiful and the housing was at worst equivalent to the squalor they left behind in El Salvador, Trinidad or Puerto Rico. So another unique community was born. The large majority of the Brentwood population shared more values and traditions amongst themselves, despite their diversity, than with the larger surrounding communities. It was therefore not considered unusual to maintain the customs and languages from far away homes, practices considered alien and hence inferior by our White society. This failure to assimilate enhanced their status as both separate and stubborn, while as unskilled they became merely “inadequate” and conveniently inferior. The resentment by these recent immigrants of such a lousy, self-perpetuating position eventually expressed itself in a simmering rage; the rise of imported gang activity and drugs moved into the vacuum of hope to empower a formerly invisible caste of “illegals and undesirables.
Christopher Columbus is a powerful icon of the Western European tyranny they feel each and every day as underpaid, under-educated, under-skilled, unemployed “brown-skinned”, Spanish speaking, unwelcome “guests” in the White man’s living room. I would hazard a guess that there is considerable animosity among the Brentwood population associated with the holiday. The right to express one’s outrage of such a symbol of exploitation and genocide by the ancestors of the original victims is assured by the First Amendment. But what about the hypothetical aggression of this same community towards a white man from another, non-Hispanic town, who dressed like Christopher Columbus and marched down Fifth Avenue on this October holiday?
I am aware that one’s right to throw a punch ends where another man’s nose begins, but in the context of an employment of the truth, it could be suggested, by an examination of the extenuating circumstances, that the victim in this case is the community and not the individual. The law is simply a formality of that distinction; a formality of consensus. What could resolve an issue in Brentwood might create an uproar in Commack. The concept of justice is never to be resolved among the Nation’s communities along strict federal lines of jurisdiction, yet the door to depravity remains unguarded without it. This is the quandary of the First Amendment.
I would further add that any suggestion that I dress like Christopher Columbus and attempt to march down Fifth Avenue in Brentwood is a waste of time. I would consider it disrespectful and incendiary.
Considering our conjectured free-for-all is eventually resolved by a police citation for both parties to appear in court, I can only assume that the case would be held against some standard of existing ruling from the vast record of precedent. Failing to provide a suitable match, our case becomes a formalized debate on the finer details of our Freedom of Speech. (It would be of equivalent interest to me how the police decided the roles of defendant and plaintiff.)
Either way, our common bond as a larger community under the First Amendment is hauled before a judge because another ambiguous portal of depravity was breached by a single citizen’s choice to exercise his insensitivity inside the gray, valance band of the Maxim. It is my comfort and conviction that these ambiguities in the law exist to allow our differences room to breathe; for our individual ears to hear the distant drum beats of our own uniqueness. And every time a Judge is called upon to settle such disparity, a small piece of our individuality is neutered, then crystallized into a greater homogonous culture, a ruling which of necessity tolerates fewer and fewer outbursts of expression, further codifying the legislation of simple tolerance and respect. This is too great a loss to my cultural singularity to acquiesce to. Decency is always found under the rubble of the ill-fated temple of best intentions. The irony here seems to suggest that the right to express one’s aggressiveness trumps the right to ignore it. Or is this always true?
I searched for exceptions to the concept of unrestricted speech and found the following eight exceptions on a Web site hosted by the National Endowment of the Arts:
csulb.edu/-javajvancamp/freedom1.html:
1] Defamation: a publication of a statement of alleged fact which is false and harms the reputation of another person.
2] Causing Panic: Shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, for instance
3] Fighting words: words which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.
4] Incitement to Crime: It is a crime to incite someone else to commit a crime.
5] Sedition: The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld statutes which prohibit the advocacy of unlawful conduct against the government or the violent overthrow of the government.
6] Obscenity: U.S. Supreme Court established a three-pronged test for obscenity prohibitions which would NOT violate the First Amendment: a) does Joe Average, with a mind to “community standards”, find a statement/work appealing to erotic interests; b) whether a statement/work depicts in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by State law; and c) whether the statement/work, taken in whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
7] Offense: Tossed around by theorists, this states that speech which is merely offensive to others should be an exception to the First Amendment. It failed its first trial in American courts. Please visit the web site for further information.
8] Establishment of Religion: Some speech is restricted because it constitutes the establishment of religion, which is itself prohibited by the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.”
So it is with this perspective that I visit the question of Lori Sublette, a Gym teacher in Las Vegas, and the issue of her protection under the First Amendment to use such a platform to express her opinions about the holocaust.
I was born into a family that worshipped at an Episcopalian church. I have had no connection with the Christian faith for over thirty-five years, with the single exception of my wedding, for which the Church served as a mere backdrop for the secular romance of a shared literary/traditionalist theme, and made for some fine photo-ops. My views of the Christian church are not hostile and my relationship with my brothers, who remain within its congregation, is loving and healthy. I hold a similar contempt for the persecution of any individual on the singular basis of their spiritual opinions. An outline of my religious inclinations, “Spirituality and Culture in the 21st Century”, is among the essays I have posted, for public scrutiny on this blog: jeffreygiov.blogspot.com.
The holocaust is a reference to the mid-twentieth century campaign by the German Nationalist party, the Nazi Party, to first, blame the economic emaciation of their country on all individuals who did not fit the socio-ethnic framework of the vast white, Germanic majority, and secondly, resulted in the isolation, collection and murder of these individuals. The number of people estimated to have been slaughtered during the Holocaust exceeds six million. The process of such an extensive scheme produced mountains of records and accessory artifacts. These victims are documented variously to include the Jews, the Blacks, the Gypsies and the handicapped. The Jews constitute the overwhelming majority who suffered under this campaign. After the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, the surviving Jews, exiled by the devastated villages and cities of the Eurasian world, who were anxiously and resentfully working to recover from the devestation, were forcibly settled in the former homeland of the Palestinian people. The boundaries of this new country, Israel, have been expanded through several wars and occupations. The plight of the displaced Palestinians and the occupation of territories gained by illegal settlements and wars have created an environment of perpetual conflict and animosity, erupting periodically to the resolution of continued Israeli dominance. The line between the Jewish State and the Jewish religion as practiced globally has become the victim of collateral obscurity, hence the social persecution, by association, of Jewish citizens in nations and religious temperment unallied with the nation of Israel and its controversial politics.
The distrust and virulence toward the Jew which predated Nazi Germany for thousands of years is an interesting study in and of itself. No discussion of the incendiary potential of Sublette’s irresponsible and insensitive abuse of authority can ignore the briefest acknowledgement of its influence in the incident. It is, after all, the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room.
The first people of the Jewish religion presented to the world as a community which regarded no ruler or law as having authority before the Word of their monotheistic creed. The obvious annoyance of the remaining society to this perceived arrogance and nonconformity landed the Jew on a hit list for criminal beliefs resulting in prison, slavery or death. Thus eventually exiled, (not a bad story at that) they broke from this fate to roam the various lands, chased from one fertile region to the next without the propensity to organize the necessary forces to stay, develop and defend a homeland. History unfolds the tale of a culture of “immigrant guests”, emigrating from the wilderness, to establish the ghettos of Europe and Russia’s urban concentrations. With neither the physical or social means to establish the influence required to rise from the savage, competitive depths of city squalor, the Jewish people drew instead upon the Capitalistic structure of their religion, the first true and modern enterprise of the individual as self reliant; responsible alone before the eyes of his single God for personal success or failure, and applied it to the economic world otherwise consuming them. What these towns and cities welcomed from the Jew was a monomaniacal approach to meticulous form of record keeping; a manner of weaving statistics and predicting events heretofore considered immaterial. With this skill came certain influence and personal, yet modest financial power. The application of these techniques may well have improved their status as skillful businessmen, but at a great price. Debtors, fueled by regret and unregulated interest rates were soon and easily resentful of these marginally welcome “guests” and periodically rose en masse’ to exercise their frustration in violent, mob style outbursts. The Jew was painfully aware that the laws of the city were no place to turn. And so the history of the Jew continued, with subtle variations, with its ups and downs until the philosophy of Herzl and the Great Plan of Adolf Hitler. It is unfortunate for our contemporary society, that vestigial remnants of the less congenial relationship between the Jew and the non-Jew survived the war. This is best evidenced in the denial of the Holocaust and anti-Semitic violence witnessed with alarming frequency in our post World War civilization. Few topics in history are as knotted in social and violent tensions as the story of the Jew’s place in society. Few stories of the Jew’s place in Society are as blatantly obscene and explosive as the programmatic annihilation of six million Jews in mid-twentieth century Europe.
I cannot rationalize one reasonable alternative to the denial of this event outside its capacity to injure the memory and history of the holocaust and the Jew as an individual and the Jewish people as a whole. The sum effect of this claim can neither be understood to provide anything beneficial to a clearer understanding of those times but rather, simply resuscitate the weakly veiled threat that such group-think is alive and well and should be feared some fifty years after the fact; a grisly warning to look often and forever over one's shoulder. Is this speech protected by the First Amendment? As I look at the list of exceptions above, I can see how it might win a debate against any claim that it could, by sheer utterance, cause someone to commit a crime. In the same spirit, I can see how one might argue against someone’s claim of personal harm from such postulations. [Mind you, I would be both proud and anxious to debate the opposing side to both charges of any infringement of their speech.] Our communities set the standards of civil tolerance in our school rooms. The important events in the life of a man named Christopher Columbus have been cherry picked by teachers on both sides of the Commack-Brentwood border, yet both schools draw from the same legitimate resources. The respective teachers simply enhance or omit facts relevant to their ultimate beliefs, and the fallout of the community is left to grade the effort. One can see how two different communities might condone antithetical summaries of the same event. I find it difficult to believe the community in Las Vegas, Nevada would condone the use of their public school rooms to provide the stage for an intimidating teacher to lord her students with a tale of such proven hurtful capacity and factual vacancy. I find it equally amazing that the same community could acquiesce to such impotence of retribution to the same, yet this woman has indeed managed to keep her teaching position without even apologizing.
The lessons are quite clear. The First Amendment is extraordinary, quite powerful for one. I am an artist and a writer. I hold my freedom of expression as sacred. I further believe that it was this very Freedom that exposed the crimes of the previous Administration, for which I am profoundly greatful. I have no axe to grind with free speech. As Voltaire once famously said: "I may disagree to the core of my soul those things you say, but will defend with my life your right to say it." I simply believe an individual's right to use this freedom for results which harm another individual or group may be debated and censured in accordance with my own right to maintain some truth and civility in my world.
The rules by which Sublette was able to worm her way out of termination were available for scrutiny by representatives of the community long before this fiasco. But it would have taken someone equally sleazy to anticipate this travesty and expose the loophole in the contract which allowed her to remain in her predatory position. But that didn’t happen. Perhaps its human nature to assume that these freakish aberrations of the social contract, of mutual respect for cultural cooperation, occur only on the pages of our tabloids and TV screens; that this brand of filth could never come home to us. Thanks to this example, I’m sure we will all lose another small piece of that fragile truth we treasure in an effort to tighten our hold on whatever uniqueness remains in this crazy quilt of the Nation that we still are.
- Prof. HotWind
copyright Jeff Thomas 2010
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