He got up and read some poetry he had written with some fierce and suggestive lines. But before that, he had something to say that made us sit up and pause.
At Writers' Night in Sturgeon Bay, you get about ten minutes to read either essays or poems. The crowd is supportive and largely empathetic; many of them know the kind of chutzpah it takes to display your wares in front of a live audience.
This fellow's approach, though, was a little different. Keeping in tone with recent developments, he opened his remarks by saying that he wondered whether or not it was still all right to say what was on his mind any longer, in a country that had begun to abandon that watchword. A fear had crept up inside of him.
Oh, nothing's been said about limiting people's speech, at least not yet by the overbearing, excessively stupid regime that we have somehow elected. But we all know it's capable of trying it; 47's attacks on undesirable press indicate that all too well. And it's not too excessive to believe that the pressing thumb of authoritarianism and creeping tyranny is within the scope of possibility. If that's what the gentleman meant, he might have been expressing what the rest of us now wonder about.
I had never heard anyone discuss that before in this country, though, and I've been around this country a few times not that long ago, saying pretty much whatever in the hell I wanted. Nowhere, at no time, have I or anyone else ever wondered whether they'd be muzzled from what was supposed to be free expression. But the fact that, upon mere observation, this fellow could come to that conclusion is a danger of which we should take note.
Free expression is America, simple as that. If ideas, however distasteful, cannot be aired publicly, the moment will come when airing them privately might expose someone to penalties as well. At that moment, America will be dead. Laws will not be passed due to open conversation about their possibilities; they will be forced upon us by someone who thinks they know better.
When that happens, self-government disappears. The contentment that comes from understanding that, regardless of what side you're on, you had an equal chance to affect public affairs will be robbed from us as surely as a pickpocket would come and take our money without our knowing of it. We will lose an important part of our individual originality, the sign of what it is to be unique human beings.
So there must be a place in which to engage in opinions and information which cannot be altered or cancelled. The British have one: the Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park in London, a place I attended some forty years ago. According to a website devoted to The Royal Parks, it was established as a send-down from the tradition of the condemned who wished to make some final statement before being hanged. It became a social event and went on for nearly 600 years before hangings became non-public.
The real creation of public speaking in London, though, came from women, namely those belonging to the Reform League in demand of the franchise. They would hold marches and protests normally terminating in Hyde Park with applicable speeches. In 1866, one of these marches resulted in the entrance to Hyde Park being chained shut. Three days of rioting followed. The next year, a crowd of 150,000 formed and the police didn't intervene this time. The Home Secretary resigned the next day, and in 1872, Parliament passed the Parks Regulation Act, officially establishing the right to utilize Hyde Park's Speakers Corner as a place for free discussion, legalizing what had already become true.
Was it supposed to be completely anarchical? Well, no. The police were there the same day I attended to keep order and prevent the speaker's words from being "illegal," whatever that means. Actually, the speaking area of Hyde Park officially extends far beyond the Speakers' Corner, but it's the place people normally congregate. It's also still used for public demonstrations and rallies. On Women's Day, June 21, 1908, 250,000 women marched to the park to hear speeches from 20 different places within it. The police banned the Women's Social and Political Union from meeting in the park in 1913, but the suffragettes ignored it.
Among those who have stood there to express themselves have been Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and George Orwell. Orwell marveled at the opportunity for people like "Indian nationalists, temperance reformers, Communists, Trotskyists, freethinkers, vegetarians, the Salvation Army, and a large variety of plain lunatics" to exercise their free speech rights. About a hundred speaking places were found weekly on London street corners between 1855 and 1939. Speakers' Corner is the last to survive.
Speakers and crowds tend to gather there on Sundays now. The listeners don't stand idly, either; if they have something to shout back at the speaker, they help themselves. Such happened when I was there. The speaker, who had brought his own stepstool, had some nasty things to say about homosexuals, and some in the crowd fought back in defending them.
It had the effect of reducing the impact of what the speaker had to say. It's another place where free speech can be claimed but the responsibility and consequences of which can neither be predicted nor necessarily approved. Such is its benefit; you learn that as deeply as you believe in what you might say, as logical as it may occur to you, it isn't the only opinion on God's green earth. And you must respect what comes your way on account of it without committing violence, or orderly society as we know it will be dashed.
I wonder whether we can establish such freedom in this society, so the above mentioned fellow need not worry about whether he will have the opportunity to expound his ideas. Most towns, large and small, that I know have at least one public park in it. Would it be too much to ask for a small part of it to be carved out for the purposes of unfettered, guaranteed public discussion? Would that mean that public discussion elsewhere within its boundaries would be, by implication, curtailed if the police think it necessary? Would that work at cross purposes? Or would it calm people down and keep them from the tension that removing civil and human rights causes? Would such an arrangement also need a "no solicitation" warning nailed to a nearby tree, limiting the free market in favor of free speech?
The police here in America would have to be just as wary about protecting the speakers themselves than they would about "illegal" speech. Wherever you find free expression now, there is always fierce pushback that sounds increasingly ugly and threatening. The common phraseology about that is that it provides a "safety valve" and allows people with edgy, controversial philosophies to get what's bothering them off their minds to no or little real effect.
But I wonder: Would that be where it ends now, with an actual attack on our U.S. Capital lurking in the background, many of its perpetrators now pardoned by a political monster? Will they then get away with masquerading as purveyors of "free speech," when it actually was an assault on democracy? In the name of democracy, would a Speakers' Corner in every town serve to ruin what democracy actually means?
Hard to say. The need for maintaining political speech could beget efforts to contain, and thus reduce and/or control it. In 1791, the states chose to codify what the republic was supposed to stand for by passing the First Amendment. They understood that, in order for liberty under law to properly function, a wide berth must be given for allowing ideas to flow and be exchanged, popular or otherwise.
I find it stunning that someone might need to suggest that the places for that expression previously provided--practically everywhere--might be closed here and there. Would we instead have to guarantee such discussion in carefully outlined territories? The edge of that cliff is still in the distance. But we can see it from here.
Mister Mark
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