Kiss My Ass

Some semi-serious, non-preposterous, quasi-random observations on free speech

This is one of Martino’s magnificent drawings.

This piece has been conceived, articulated, and written with my friend

martino/pietropoli

, author of the awesome publication Il Pensiero Lungo.

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When Tipper Gore, Senator Al Gore’s wife, bought her eleven-year-old daughter a copy of Prince’s “Purple Rain”, she was so disturbed by the album's lyrics that decided to found the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), a committee aimed to enhance parents’ control over children's exposure to music deemed to contain themes of violence, drugs, or sexuality. As the PMRC’s proposal threatened the music industry and, implicitly, the First Amendment, on September 19, 1985, Frank Zappa appeared before the US Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation to speak in defense of artistic (and speech) freedom and against censorship in what has since been known as the “rock-porn hearing”.

The PMRC wanted to slap a sticker on every album to rate its lyrics’ appropriateness to a young audience, exposing the author and their art to interpretative and red line positioning issues on the part of whoever was arbitrarily chosen for the job. 

Zappa began his testimony by stating that “The PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children, and promises to keep the courts busy for years, dealing with the interpretational and enforcemental problems inherent in the proposal’s design. It is my understanding that, in law, First Amendment Issues are decided with a preference for the least restrictive alternative. In this context, the PMRC’s demands are the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation.”

What Zappa had at heart was not only the right of free expression and the protection of the creative act in and of itself, but also (and maybe more importantly) the consumer’s self-determination. He therefore proposed to routinely print the lyrics of every album so that anyone could exercise their own judgment independently. This may sound like an easy lift today, but it wasn’t back then -- it was the eighties, there was no internet, let alone social media, and information wasn’t so pervasively available. Printing the lyrics of every song in every album was a titanic project, with huge costs involved, but at least a way to find a common ground. Like, treating dandruff with shampoo.

In the end, Zappa’s proposal didn't go through, and the establishment had their way. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) adopted the PMRC’s proposal and introduced the "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" sticker. Walmart refused to carry "labeled" records, and smaller stores faced eviction threats if they dared to stock them. The city of San Antonio enforced a ban on performances by "labeled" artists, while the states of Maryland and Pennsylvania discussed legislation that would confine labeled albums to an "adults-only" section within record stores. A mess of gigantic proportions was created.

Eventually, the music industry's decline in the recent decades has rendered "Parental Advisory" labels outdated. But the underlying concerns persist -- censoring art and ideas stigmatizes artists and limits access to provocative thoughts, placing unchecked authority in unaccountable and often incompetent hands. Like when Zappa’s 1987 album Jazz from Hell, entirely instrumental, was affixed with an "Explicit Lyrics" warning label by certain Pacific Northwest stores. 

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There has been a noticeable polarization in the free speech discourse in recent years. Some relentlessly strive to censor anything that falls outside their comfort zone and beliefs, while others fearlessly defend the right to voice even the most painful, inappropriate, outrageous, or consequential ideas. In a climate where individuals face deplatforming, job loss, and societal marginalization for simply speaking their mind, and university presidents get fired are pressured to resign for not sanctioning certain types of student expression on campus, with the fear of losing donations from billionaires, the hope for a world where differences in beliefs, opinions, and behaviors contribute peacefully to our values seems to diminish by the day.

Checks and balances are gone -- opinions are manipulated and morphed into statements socially deemed as despicable, with the aim of vilifying, condemning, and ostracizing. Even more concerning is the tendency to not only scrutinize and twist opinions but, more profoundly, judge intentions. In general, we seem to have gotten more worried about opinions because they're now easily found and shared everywhere. As we’re continuously bombarded with all sorts of news and facts and things that upset us, we have developed a natural tendency to process it all by interpreting and judging and attacking. 

Perhaps most disturbingly, a group has emerged, between voters and elected officials, trying to limit what people can say, acting like a non-elected, socially recognized ethical authority on what's acceptable. 

So, what do we really talk about when we talk about free speech? It sounds like a naive question, but it isn’t. If so many believe that free speech should be free up to a certain point, that’s because they also believe that, beyond such a point, there might be undesirable consequences. Whatever that point may be, this limitation makes free speech really not free. It’s like you can go wherever you want within some clearly defined borders, but you can’t cross them. Or rather, you can cross them, but you’ll be punished if you do. How? Most likely, by not being allowed to go back.    

We want free speech; it’s cool to say that we’re advocates of free speech, that “I don’t agree with what you say, but I’ll fight to death to make sure you can say it”. But we also want to draw a line beyond which we believe free speech is dangerous, and we’re no longer willing to hear. Not only that, we don’t want anybody else to hear either. In fact, we’d be willing to silence. Are we bullshitting our way to free speech advocacy self-proclamation? 

And that line that we want to draw is arbitrary, our own personal red line. A red line that varies from person to person, so that, at the end of the day, one might say “my idea of free speech is freer than yours”. Do we live in a world where “free” really exists? 

Two key questions are usually left unanswered, or not answered convincingly enough, by those who are inclined to limit free speech:    

1. What are you really scared of?

Broadly speaking, one would supposedly tend to limit free speech if they believed that what’s being said is (a) offensive or uneducative, (b) incitement to violence, or (c) part of an ideology that is considered wrong or unacceptable or dangerous or destabilizing. There may be other reasons, but these seem the most frequent. If you get offended easily, respectfully, that’s your problem. You may choose to avoid certain places, or maybe block people on social media; there’s not much more to say here. Are you scared of being offended? Nothing wrong with that. But more than censoring the source of the offensive speech (thereby implicitly assuming that everyone is like you) and depriving them of their right to speak, you should probably try and work on your fear, as life gets a little harder with it. 

Today, some people tend to call Nazi or bigot or racist anyone whose words or opinions deviate from a certain mainstream “body of thought”. That’s too easy. It looks like a form of self-defense mechanism. Of exorcism, almost. Sometimes, it is unclear whether they do that to summon the immense social power of stigma, and let it do the job for them, or to narcissistically establish the superiority of their critical thinking. Whatever the reason, it seems clear that they fear a scenario where the world turns into a Nazi den, or an overwhelmingly racist place. Clearly, many have no idea what Nazi really means and what it would take for an extremist, violent ideology like that to (1) make inroads in the minds of moderate people (the vast majority), (2) become established, and (3) subjugate the rest of us (at this point, a minority). What’s the probability of such a scenario? Zero point zero zero zero zero something, maybe. Are there Nazis out there? Yes. Are they a small minority? Yes. Will this small minority turn into a large minority or even a majority by virtue of some phrases and slogans slapped here and there on social media? Nope. So, sleep well, as the probability of aliens taking over the Earth is higher than that of Nazi ideas spreading like a virus (and aliens do not write on social media).

As daunting and painful and unlikely as these fears may be, they cannot be a justification to silence anybody. Come up with better ideas, if you really want to fight those that you consider toxic, and let them naturally win the favor of others. How would it feel to win a football game without allowing the opponent team to enter the pitch? 

2. Do you think we’re stupid?

Perhaps these silencers aim to protect us poor devils incapable of discerning good from evil, who knows. Perhaps they think we lack the education or the knowledge to tackle themes deemed as delicate and complex and controversial. That, if we tried, we wouldn’t understand, or make a mess. 

The notion that the general public needs guidance is a foundation of representative democracy; delegate things to me, I’ll take care of them for you. We don’t have to hear those toxic ideas, let alone engage with whoever spreads them, they’re bad stuff, they say. Leave it to us. 

Except, we’re not stupid. We may be simple minded, but we’re not stupid. Given enough accessible information, we can make decisions. And discern.  

But let’s pretend we are indeed a mass of dumb people. Whose job is it to protect and decide for us? More importantly, who makes the assumption that we are, in fact, dumb and cannot exercise independent judgment? Would this be “protection of minorities” or “fear of being powerless”? Or simply “need for recognition”? 

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In 1986, Frank Zappa appeared on Crossfire, a “current event debate TV program”, to talk about -- you guessed it -- freedom of expression in music lyrics. Well, he didn’t really go there to talk about that. He went on to let three guys grill him on it. A sort of sequel of the Senate “rock-porn hearing” of just a year prior, but with a debate of sorts. At some point, one of the three guys asked “Would you look at the camera and say with a straight face that the Founding Fathers had in mind the kind of garbage you sing and write, when they drafted the First Amendment? Do you really believe that, Mr. Zappa?”. Frank’s response was Absolutely. “You’re an idiot, then!”, the guy continued, matter-of-factly. To which, Frank gave the perfect, most appropriate, complete, and self-explanatory reply.

Kiss my ass.

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