Now, people who have read what I post here will know I like Tony Kushner and admire his abilities as a writer a thinker and a dramatist and consider him possibly the best living American playwright. Though I have had my criticisms of him as well, flowing mostly from the fact that writing a play isn't writing non-fiction. I am troubled by even his relatively modest alteration of history, such as in his script for "Lincoln" and I anticipate disagreeing with him if his script about the kidnapping of Egardo Mortara finally gets the Speilberg treatment*.
But this is about what I said earlier in response to the attacks on five people at a Hanukkah party in what is obviously a hate crime. I have no doubt about that, what other motive could there be?
I said that hate talk leads to hate violence. A person who commits hate violence, hate murder, has to feel they are justified or have a right to do what they did and that would have had to have been validated in hate speech, freely expressed, most likely through media, social if not broadcast or cabloid or online media. If it were possible to plumb the experience of the man who attacked those people, I am 100% certain that such a message would have been given to him by someone else, another person directly. through pop music, through some movie or TV show or cable show or online something or other. I think that's true of everyone who is not delusional and many who are who take the lives of people they don't know and some they do, something gave them the idea that they were entitled to kill.
The nice and entirely predictable free-speechy objection to what I said is the ridiculous idea that speech so targeted for criticism will inevitably be claimed to be innocuous, that it has the odd feature of being innocent of promoting what its content contains.
I have over and over again pointed out that such claims are very often made by writers of political persuasion pieces who, oddly, feel that their own writing can have such an effect in changing peoples minds and, often, their actions in such things as voting or expressing the same opinion the writer is trying to peddle. And if the writer doesn't have that fervent hope about their own writing, their employing magazine or paper or radio or TV network of online venue of transmission of information will hope that those they sell advertising time will believe, fervently that their messaging will have the effect they claim it will to peddle ad time and space, that the words and images in 20 second increments or fractions of an inch, with change the behavior of those who see it, hear it, are effected by it.
Tony Kushner provides an interesting contrast in how that double-speak is done in two articles he wrote, one on the repulsive Mayor Giuliani's political use of censorship of art.
But censoring art, even indecent art, isn’t decent; it’s thuggish, it’s unconstitutional, undemocratic and deeply unwise. Censoring art doesn’t promote civic stability; censorship promotes only the illusion of civic stability, the illusion of homogeneity; and the health of the state is consequently imperiled, because a healthy state needs vigorous, lively, pluralistic debate, not enforced acquiescence to a bullying majority. And as for God…
Well, my God is very, very different from the God worshiped in any church or synagogue or mosque whose Will it is that art, or free thought or speech of any kind, ought to be forbidden. I can’t imagine that a God who gave us the power to create, the powers of curiosity, empathy, analytic thinking and deep compassion, who gave us open hearts and the power of love, at the same time commands us to avoid the ideas and the art these powers produce. I can’t imagine that God has so little faith in our faith,
Stirring words, I'd say grotesquely simplistic, largely empty words, flag waving of the first amendmenty kind, similar to what George M. Cohan said had saved many a bum show. And I say that despising Rudy Giuliani then as much as I despise him now and as not a fan of much of the censorship that has succeeded, which is more generally successful when the content is relatively innocuous. Birth of a Nation, the movie that revived the major American terrorist group, the Klan, was never censored successfully that I'm aware of. Ulysses was, for a time.
Of course the question has to be asked, does Kushner really believe that all "art, or free thought or speech, of any kind" MUST be allowed? What if it has the effect of getting people killed, as those often do? Why should the "freedom" of those who want to promote violence win out over the lives of those who are killed or maimed through the message that is freely promoted in that unrestricted "free speech". Did Kushner really believe that? That all speech must be protected? How about The Turner Diaries that certainly inspired Timothy McVeigh and many other Americanazi style killers? Does the right of William L. Pierce to incite mass murder trump the rights of the lives of his readers' victims? Why shouldn't their right to live be given a benefit of the doubt that Kushner, as a professional writer, demands be given to words on a page? Does he really believe that all words are to be held not guilty or immune from questions of guilt?
I find it curious that he, at another time when there were no words to directly blame for a violent death when he attributed criminal guilt to two people I decidedly disliked and don't like today, John Paul II and Trent Lott when he assigned them guilt for the death of Matthew Shephard Did he even know that the two murderers of Matthew Shephard even knew who the Pope or Majority Leader of the Senate were? I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me if your average homicidal queer bashing pick up a fag at a bar and kill him punks wouldn't have heard of either of them, never mind being able to paraphrase anything they said. Here, from an article that mentions it.
As Tony Kushner calmly explained in The Nation: "Trent Lott endorses murder, of course; his party endorses murder, his party endorses discrimination against homosexuals and in doing so it endorses the ritual slaughter of homosexuals." And the Senate majority leader had an accomplice. Kushner also calls the pope "a homicidal liar" who directly led Shepard's killers to commit the crime – by, for example, refusing to ordain openly gay priests. ("Let's follow the lead of the crazies who killed Matthew Shepard, and take the Pope at his word.") Despite the high-school-poetry phrasing ("And then, after we've drawn a few skin-prickling breaths of the aroma of torture and agony and madness, we shift a little in our comfortable chairs....") and the omission of any evidence at all that Shepard's killers were either Catholic or even vaguely aware of Trent Lott's existence, Kushner's argument is only about half-wrong. But this particular brand of misguided and oversimplified blame strikes us as just another example of that common condition in which the clear-eyed observer sees the manipulative intent behind the media item, while all the other poor, dumb bastards can't help but fall into the trap; everybody else is tragically susceptible to papist mind-control techniques and the pernicious voodoo of dangerous, unstoppable smoothies like Newt Gingrich.
In Kushner's turgid fantasy, Little Johnny is on his way to the mailbox with his check to Lambda when his eyes fall on a pamphlet fluttering in the gutter. The next thing he knows, he's lurking about the streets of West Hollywood with a baseball bat and a shaved head. He's helplessly struck homophobic by a bit of Q&A with some shithead who got himself elected to the Senate.
I don't quote from the original article where Kushner made those accusations but an article from Wired which slammed Kushner for being an example of "the echo ][of right wing criticism of speech] from the other side [the one I generally share with him] of the canyon".
I would, actually, say that Kushner in the second instance went way, way too far because there were no guilty words and he chose two inaptly chosen and too easy targets (always a temptation when it's a professional artistic writer) but that he is right about the power of words to get people killed.
I wonder why someone as brilliant as he is can't get the discrepancy between the two stands and the total hypocrisy of a writer who writes with the purpose of changing minds, lives and actions then claiming that all words have rights above the lives of people that words intentionally get killed. That's the rotely-recited, rigorously-enforced point of view, alleged-left and very real neo-Nazi right that makes absolutely no sense at all if you believe people have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
* I can't imagine how he would make a play on it that doesn't replace his and the popular view of the life of the very real boy who grew up into a very real, very well educated and capable man who had his own view of his kidnapping by Pope Pius IX who, as an adult, wrote his own memoir of it saying he did not think it had been a bad thing. Does anyone have the right to second guess him, the greatest possible authority on his own life? No matter how much you disagree with what Pius IX did? I don't like what that nutcase Pope did but I don't have the right to put my view of Mortara's life before his own view of his own life. If Kushner found a way to do both, or even to present both in a compelling dramatic way, presenting valid expressions of both at the same time, he would have cemented his reputation as a great writer in a way that I don't think anyone else has. I have never seen a movie made about history that didn't contain lies.
In a sort of footnote to the footnote, I'll point out that the guy who wrote the NOVEL! that inspired his script about the kidnapping of Mortara, David Kertzer, in an Atlantic article critisized the first published translation of Mortara's own Spanish language account of it (Mortara's education as the Popes' ward made him an impressive linguist). When I read Kertzer's crtique, I couldn't help but notice that instead of dealing with what Mortara said, he described the, agreed, unacceptable liberties the translator took with it.
Which leads me to believe that the original wasn't something the novelist really wanted to address or perhaps didn't find of interest. He seems to be far more interested in just about anyone else who had anything to say about it. He addressed the distortions of the conservative priest-translator, not what Mortara said in the original. In one of the few places he deals with what Mortara said, it was to accuse him of lying!
If ironies didn't already abound in this, he's criticizing the translator for doing something he, as a novelist using Mortara's life story as material certainly would have done far more extensively. And if the novelist did what the translator did, I can imagine a cinematic treatment of it will be even farther from the man's own words about his own experience.
Some want to endlessly go over the story of the boy kidnapped in which the boy has no voice, I'm more interested in the story of how he, man and boy, is made use of by people entirely unconnected to him. And I say that agreeing that what the Pope did was wrong. I don't have the ability to untie that knot but my own satisfaction in having the wrongness of what the Pope did told and condemned pales beside the right of the man to evaluate his own life. First I'd like a clean and accurate translation or the original of what the guy wrote or said about himself. To not take that into account is vilely dishonest.
Update: I wouldn't be surprised if the killers of Matthew Shephard may have gotten the idea to kill him from movie or TV depictions of manly men, men defending their honor, cowboys, soldiers, deranged cops, etc. And if not them then guys in their peer group or family who passed it on to them. I'd think it's far less likely they'd have gotten it from listening to speeches given by Senators or reading Papal letters. I'm surprised that a playwright who went on the movies wouldn't realize they have those powers as opposed to decidedly unentertaining media. It's remarkable that entertainment, THE FRIGGIN' MOVIES which are all about attracting the most eyeballs for the most time, is the thing that they deny has that ability. The longer you think about the free-speechy, first-amendementy line of B.S. the more obviously ridiculous it becomes. But it's such a pithy line that it short-circuits thought. That's what entertainment does.
Update 2: As I pointed out when I had an online brawl over this issue, if Mortara as a boy had been converted to atheism many of the very people who love to use the real man's life for their own polemical purposes, against his own, stated conclusions ABOUT HIMSELF, would consider those who alienated him from the Jewish religion of his parents as heroes.
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