UPDATE: Thomas Sowell's column on this subject makes the excellent point that "Freedom of speech does not imply a right to an audience. Otherwise the audience would have no right to its own freedom. Editors, movie producers, speakers' bureaus and other intermediaries have every right to decide what they will and will not present to their audiences." Yes we have the right to speak however we wish but no one has to listen. Read the rest of his article here.

Free speech is a right all of us have by virtue of living in America. The right is not limited to those whose points of vew we agree with. Apparently the Department of Defense is considering putting up internet sites and, not surprisingly, this is causing consternation that it's going to be all propoganda and it's just like paying journalists and therefore pulling the wool over the public's eyes. Propoganda is something that sounds great but is actually heinous and being shoved at the audience. My problem is that a govt. site isn't really propoganda since anyone who reads it knows what it is. I mean, wouldn't you assume the government is putting forth the government's position on their own site? How is it propoganda if you know what you're reading and can agree or disagree or just close the browser? Plus, in the world that has bloggers, go ahead and say something outrageous and get away with it for more than twenty seconds. Not gonna happen.

How is this at all like the dishonest and sneaky journalists who took money and didn't say so but touted the money-giver's points of view? It's not. That's how. I kind of didn't want to saying anything but kind of have to say something about the extraordinarly unpleasant event of the week. I recognize the historical category Ward Churchill was invoking, the one about how all corporate activity is the work of Satan, but, aside from thinking there are lots of things that qualify for the work of Satan (and wondering if there really is a Satan), I can't abide disingenuousness perpetrated by a tenured and well-paid professor at a wealthy university. It wouldn't have stopped the the world's rotation to hear his point of view but when he tossed Adolf Eichmann's name into the fray he made it an incendiary bomb . . . with a bolder-size logical error. Eichmann designed the process with which Hitler hoped to eradicate the Jews. He wasn't even remotely an ordinary person like most of the people killed on 9/11.

Hannah Arendt once remarked, as a friend reminded me, that Eichmann looked banal and ordinary sitting in the dock in his trial (not that he actually was ordinary, simply that he looked it). And, indeed, it's interesting to consider how ordinary and harmless things and people can appear which are actually forces for evil and social unrest. But that's not what Churchill said. What he said was that there was an equal sign between the people going about their lives in the World Trade Center and a deliberate murderer of millions and millions of people. And no matter what Eichmann looked like, he in fact was nothing like those people. He was a decision maker, not a worker. Windows on the World waiters did not deliberately contribute to the evil that Churchill derides so sneeringly (did you see him talk?) unless mere existence in the modern world is the same thing in Churchill's mind, but in that case he too is a perpetrator of evil, as are we all. Churchill's diabtribe desperately needed logic, clarity and measured reasoning. But unfortunately he probably meant to be merely provocative and disruptive, not to start people thinking. Or maybe he was just really really yearning for his very own quarter hour.

Labels: reflections, writing