Category: Language

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The Myth of the Free Press

Written in August 2018

The myth in question is not that the Press is not free, nor that Freedom of the Press is not essential to our democratic republic, or any society that aspires to some meaningful measure of individual liberty. The myth is that the modern conceit of a free press has its roots in our constitution or the founding of our country. This myth is a self-serving misinterpretation that demonstrates just how illiterate our journalists are. it has been nurtured by the New York Times starting, I suspect, in the 1960s, but I cannot be sure.

To explain, we must explore how to read human language. Human language is not mechanical as is computer, machine, language; although human language is immensely powerful, it is at the same time quite fragile. If you study language and literature, you can gain from the experience of others no matter how remote they be, in time or space, even if you can never know them completely. If on the other hand, as is the practice today, you attack the written word to mine it for data, or to gain an advantage over the writer, you make yourself a fool, and contribute to the destruction of the language itself in the process.

The claim of present day journalists seems to be that they are a singularly privileged and powerful group, or class, based on the First Amendment’s guarantee of Freedom of the Press. That claim can be debunked by simply referring to a dictionary, and confirming what is to be found there, but the question can be raised: Why would I go to a dictionary? What alerts me to the probability that the claim is ill founded, not to say absurd? Why should I question an interpretation that benefits me? The answer is in how you should read a document, if you desire to learn from your effort.

First you should know what you are reading: What is the document? Who wrote it? Under what circumstances? For what purpose? A naive person would have an almost endless tree of ever increasing branches to the above questions, but an educated American should be equipped with some general knowledge and understanding that will inform, and shorten, the examination.

The First Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights, which amends the United States Constitution. The Constitution was written and adopted to strengthen the young country founded on the principles of equality, liberty, and popular sovereignty, and to enshrine the principle of the accountability of all power to the people through their elected representatives. The Bill of Rights was added to detail some of the most important individual rights that arose from the revolutionary concept of the sovereignty of the people, rather than their rulers, which had always been the rule. The First Amendment deals with ideas and beliefs; the sine qua non of individual freedom. One side of the debate about the adoption of the Bill of Rights held that enumerating some rights would weaken or void others that were left off the list; the other side implicitly claimed that the very idea of plenary individual rights was so novel, so revolutionary, that some examples were needed, if only to show the seriousness and scope of such rights. In the event, the Bill of Rights was adopted, and the fears of its opponents were proved well founded, even thought the text itself warns against considering the list complete.

It follows, as night the day, that someone who claims that such a document assures them of a special privilege for their unaccountable group, should face almost insurmountable skepticism and doubt.

It is fashionable today to complain about the lack of objectivity of the corporate media, or about the lack of respect that such media is accorded. The theory, the assumption, seems to be that the founding fathers established, in a list of individual rights, an unelected group of men who they trusted to adhere selflessly to an impartial, objective, truth as a check on the rest of us. In other words, that by innuendo, or metaphor, they betrayed every principle they held, and undermined the project for which they had recently risked everything.

The founding of the United States of American stands four square against the proposition that men are angels and can be trusted unsupervised to operate in the national interest. It stands four square against the proposition that one group of people should have privilege over others. It stands four square against the proposition that any power, under the Constitution should be unaccountable to the electorate. The conception of a free press under discussion, incorporates each of those propositions, and consequently, is odious to that founding.

Armed with the assurance that this conception is untenable, someone who does not understand the plain language of the amendment will have recourse to scholarship about what the language meant, at the time is was written, to those who wrote and adopted it. We have incorporated the metaphor that aligns the practitioners of the trade of journalist with the machine or organization that was their medium; thus “the gentlemen of the press” was shortened to “the press”, but it was not always so; most significantly it was not so when the Constitution was being debated and adopted. So it is inconceivable that the founders referred to journalists when they enshrined “the Freedom of the Press” in the amendment. A quick reference to Black’s Law Dictionary, moreover, reveals that in those days, and before, and since, Freedom of the Press was a term of art, referring to the right to use a printing press–and by extension other advanced technology–to disseminate whatever words and ideas you fancied without prior restraint, or censorship. It was, and remains, an individual right, and thus well-suited to the purpose of the Bill of Rights, and while not utterly absolute, covered all sorts of unpopular, and shocking utterances.

The endless carping about how biased, and unfair, and partisan the mewlings of journalists are can be elided by accepting that they should be thus; the error, the cancer on our polity, is to assume that they should be otherwise. The Bill of Rights does not, sub rosa, seek to establish the Ministry of Truth so desired by some, be it for political power or for personal aggrandizement; the Bill of Rights, on the contrary establishes a raucous free for all, a free market of ideas where all can express themselves, and employ, and contract such means as are necessary to amplify their voice in the public sphere. In this we are different from other societies.

If you could return to 1789 to ask Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, or any of the others if they envisioned a priesthood of unelected “journalists” sitting in judgement over the discourse of the nation (picture Jim Acosta, Joy Reid, Keith Olberman, Don Lemon, Nicole or Chris Wallace, or Joe Scarborough) I am confident that they would discretely, to avoid shaming your relatives, have had you committed to an insane asylum. There is absolutely nothing to indicate that they believed that such a thing was achievable, nor desirable. If after explaining to them our public space, you asked them which embodied the meaning of Freedom of the Press, as they understood it, the New York Times, with all its pretentiousness, or the blogosphere, they would have no hesitation in choosing the latter, marveling on how it empowered the individual where power should reside.

NOTE: It is not uninteresting that most of the heroes of reporting are not members of large corporations, or associations, but lonely voices crying out from isolation and oppression.

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Leslie Feinberg Remembered

I read Stone Butch Blues years ago just after it came out. A friend of mine told me that I had to; it had affected her so strongly that she had been ill for ten days after reading it. I was a graduate student with no free time to read; I read the book: reread it, and cried both times. Then I recommended it to every TBLG person I knew, or met, and gave away at least a fifteen copies to straight people where I thought it could do some good. One of my friends told me that she read the book from cover to cover at one sitting, only getting up to pee. I visited Firebrand books, the original publisher, to try to order in bulk and arrange to use a chapter in my English classes at Indiana University. I am glad to see that the new edition will be available free online, not because I begrudge Leslie, or her family, well-deserved royalties, but because, in the past, the book has been hard to get and needlessly expensive, at least to my way of thinking. It is an important work that deserves wide distribution and recognition.

I got to meet Leslie when she spoke at DePauw University in 1998; they engaged her to speak to their students for their Diversity Week, and mandated that the students attend. The students were present and polite, but not really engaged and the question period was soon at an end. A book signing had been scheduled to follow, but the only person to attend was me. As a result, I got to talk to Leslie for at least twenty minutes. She presented as one of the most male presences I have met, wearing a man’s suit that I describe as “sharp” because it looked good on her, but more because I believe that you could have cut yourself on the creases. The suit seemed large on her, not ill-fitting, but as though she was protected inside it, as if she were wearing a suit of armor. Her comfortable shoes contrasted with the rest of her attire.

Reading Stone Butch Blues, I had been struck by the remarkable care she displayed in using pronouns throughout; I was just getting launched in the TBLG community, and knew almost nothing about gender variance; I do not believe that I attached the label “trans” in my mind to any of the characters in the novel. Along with the care in assigning pronouns: each character had a pronoun that fit the person, not the body, and such decisions were highly nuanced, not simplistic, I read a lesson to let people be who they are, without burdening them with a label not of their own choosing, and the difficulty that allowing them this dignity can involve. I believe that lesson was very important and has helped me ever since.

In my conversation with her, I mentioned my admiration for her skill with pronouns, and she expressed gratitude, noting that she had expended enormous effort on them, and was glad to see that it had been recognized. It is my belief that such effort is often rewarded even by those who do not recognize why they are so enthralled by a work.

I hesitate to question Minnie Bruce Pratt, Leslie’s spouse, but when she quotes Leslie in her lovely, caring, obituary: “I care which pronoun is used, but people have been disrespectful to me with the wrong pronoun and respectful with the right one. It matters whether someone is using the pronoun as a bigot, or if they are trying to demonstrate respect.” The language persuades me that she has erred, probably in the emotion of the moment. I believe that what Leslie said was rather: “I care which pronoun is used, but people have been disrespectful to me with the right pronoun and respectful with the wrong one. It matters whether someone is using the pronoun as a bigot, or if they are trying to demonstrate respect.”

Because I never saw Leslie using male pronouns for herself, I have persisted in using “she” and “her”, always a little worried that it would not be what she wanted. I am somewhat relieved to see that is what Minnie Bruce called her in her obituary, but even more so to have confirmed my sense that she would have cared more about the effort, and the care, than about the details of the final result even though the details mattered so much to her. I feel that Stone Butch Blues and other writings by Leslie Feinberg constituted a graduate course in the use of pronouns and respect for individuality that was of great benefit to me as I learned to honor people as they wished to be recognized.

In Transgender Warriors, she exposed the slight of hand that makes gender variant persons disappear when they can be classified in some other way. The example that struck home to me was Joan of Arc (who among other achievements invented the modern nation state). I knew for as long as I can remember that Joan was burned at the stake for refusing to wear a dress (yes, there were political influences, but they only served to ensure that the charge was brought and the penalty enforced). Until Leslie pointed it out to me, I did not make the connection in a meaningful way that Joan was trans; she was a warrior, a saint, a visionary, but those qualities did not accrue to the transperson, they overshadowed, erased the trans identity.

Leslie was a Communist. I disagree heartily with her politics, but still admire the person and the writer.

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What does the Second Amendment Mean, Part II?

After Andrew Cumo, governor of New York, recently used a rant scarily reminiscent of demagogues from past days, to ram a bill through his legislature, a bill so carefully thought out that it served to disarm most of the police in his state; now Colorado is considering seven anti-gun bills. Most of the discussion is not about what happened at Newtown, and how we might prevent its recurrence; not about the daily slaughter in Chicago, a city with among the most restrictive gun laws in the country, but about what is the best way to infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms, and how much we can get away with if we use the emotion of the moment to drown out reason. Is there a better example of the meaning of the word “demagogue”?

The Second Amendment is part of our national Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, presented as a whole and meant to clarify important aspects of the original document. Knowing the care with which the authors crafted the Bill of Rights, we should study and can draw conclusions from exactly what they wrote. They did not wait for a bill to be passed before they read it. It is well to note that the founding documents are the foundation of this nation. More than anything else they are what define us and what bring us together. The oaths of office of public officials throughout the nation require such officials to preserve, protect, and defend our Constitution. It is not something to be taken lightly, particularly by those who have sworn a sacred oath to uphold it.

Amendment one starts out “Congress shall make no law . . .” meaning that, at the time, the prohibition was on Congress to stay completely out of matters of religion, and free speech. The various phrases work together to explain that, no, free speech cannot be limited by, for example, blasphemy laws, no matter how much believers yearn for such restrictions. And freedom of speech means in public, and with the right to spend money on high technology to spread our individual thoughts and the right to band together so to do.

Amendment two says that the right to bear Arms “shall not be infringed”. It does not limit the prohibition to Congress. The word “infringed” is about as sweeping as I can imagine. I have to assume that limits on this right will have to be very, very well justified.

Much has been made of the preamble to the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State . . .”, most notably to try to say that it limited that right to a right to join the army or perhaps the National Guard. That idea, rejected by the Supreme Court, is obviously erroneous because, while the phrase “the people” can mean many things, including, for example, the prosecution in a criminal case, or the government in official documents, in the Bill of Rights, we have only to glance at the Tenth Amendment to see that the authors of this document drew a sharp distinction between the United States, the several States and “the people”. It is the people individually who have the right to bear arms, and to keep them. And it is the people individually who make up the militia.

So the Militia referred to is not the army nor the National Guard. It is the people, and therein we find what is at stake here. Remember that at the time, there was no police force, as we now know it. As a rule people not only took care of themselves, they banded together to protect each other and the community. You can see the idea in the modern neighborhood watch, but it is much more profound. A recent court decision holds, so I have read in the New York Times (28 June 2005), that the police have no duty to protect you. Certainly in the recent desperate man hunt in California, the police made it clear that they placed a higher priority on defending each other than on defending the general population. On 9-11, when the government failed to protect the people, Todd Beamer and the passengers of Flight 94 took charge; although unarmed, they were the only American response on that day and it is likely that they saved the White House or the Capitol. We can speculate that if the accepted safety policy at the time had not been to disarm (morally) passengers on airlines, telling them to submit to hijackers with the idea that resistance would only cause needless injury, perhaps one or more of the other flights might have been stopped. In the months following, trying to take over an American air liner was vigorously discouraged by the passengers. I present these musings, not as a well-thought-out policy, but merely as rebuttal to the prevalent assumption that a disarmed population is a safer population. That question has not been settled.

I contend that the Militia referred to in the Second Amendment is the people acting as the first line of defense of their country. In that case the issue under discussion is not the number of bullets in a magazine, nor as the Vice President seemed recently to indicate what is the proper gun with which to murder a six-year-old girl, but to quote Lincoln accurately: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth” The current President misquoted that phrase in his Second Inaugural Address when he said “government of, by, and for the people. . .” I do not believe that this is an inconsequential error. In Lincoln’s speech, “government of the people” meant the people are governed by themselves and for themselves. Pretending that he spoke of a remote government that could be said to emanate somehow from the people, distorts Lincoln’s powerful statement that the American Revolution (not the War of Independence, but the challenge to the very order of things that this country has always represented) was the idea that the people should not be governed by their betters, or any other distinct, distant, group, but essentially by themselves.

People who love to quote Lincoln while holding that there is nothing particularly admirable, nothing exceptional about America, should note carefully that he feared that if, in 1863, the experiment failed here, it would thus vanish from the earth.

As the American revolutionaries had learned, the world was not ready for anarchy, and agreements and institutions were necessary, but they intended that as much as possible the people should be their own government, and when they needed state institutions, those institutions should be answerable to the people and not vice versa. This idea was, and remains, truly revolutionary; I would say that it is the only real political revolution of lasting value to the people of the world.

An armed populace is not necessarily a violent population. The value of respecting the right to bear arms is manifest long before we reach armed confrontation. In the first place, accepting the people’s right to bear arms, recognizes their status as sovereign, and accords them due respect. In the second place, governments are wont to treat an armed populace with more deference than one that they have successfully disarmed. In the third place, the people are the only ones who can be counted on to be present when bad things happen.

We do not honor or memorialize the dead children of Newtown or Chicago by throwing out our birthright; and stripping their brothers and sisters of the American dream. We do not make others more safe by passing laws that everyone knows would not have stopped those tragedies. If we want to honor those children, we should thoughtfully, and without prejudice, examine how we might make such occurrences less likely in the future. If, perish the thought, another troubled person should invade an elementary school, and we know that no measure of gun control, not even total confiscation, will make that impossible, we know that the President, the Vice President and the Governor will not be there. It is very likely that the police will not be there and will take some time to arrive. If we want to help those children on some unhappy future day, we can think about how we could discourage such a person from choosing a school, or even choosing such a course, and we can think about what the people who are present when it comes to pass can do to stop it. Americans should always understand that they are each first responders and the last line of defense.

In case it is not clear, there is much to consider in the wake of recent tragedies, but we should not carelessly, and without discussion, abandon what made this country unique in history and what Lincoln thought was the justification of the carnage of the Civil War.

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What does the Second Amendment mean?

There is a lot of noise recently about guns. It would be inaccurate to call that noise a debate for many reasons. An important reason is that the language used in the noise, and the language we have available to use, is degraded to the point that it is hard to determine what is being said. It is sad to note that, very often, speakers want to confuse rather than elucidate their listeners. I hope to clarify some of the issues at stake; it is not my intent to argue for an answer, and my reason for avoiding a personal opinion should become clear eventually.

The echoes of gunfire in Newtown, Connecticut, had not stopped reverberating, and as we can all remember; the stories being reported were still wildly inaccurate, when politicians jumped on the opportunity to grab the spotlight and further their agendas. Since they acted before anyone knew what had happened, there is little reason to suspect that they were responding to the events. Some may have thought they were, taking the well-known tack: “I know it will not help, but we must do something.” Certainly, in such a case, there is no great probability that what we do will help others, so it must be done to help ourselves. Emotion is a better tool for a demagogue than reason.

The Second Amendment is invoked to in such expostulations. But an important aspect of this lack of communication is the failure to ask, let alone answer, the question: “What does the Second Amendment mean? What right does it protect?”

That is called “begging the question”. This phrase has become popular recently with people who want to appear more erudite than they really are, and throw it around, usually in situations where it seems they mean “raise the question”, but that is precisely what it does not mean. This is more than mere whining by a grammarian. Symbolic language is what set us apart from other animals, and it is the tool we use to survive and improve our common lot in life. A dull tool is less useful than one that is well maintained, and a perverse disdain for proper language and the learning of good language and the improvement of our language will disarm us in our daily struggles to help ourselves and each other. This theme will reappear in this blog.

To beg the question means to avoid discussing the question at issue, and proceed to argue as though the point were settled in your favor. If you have not been taught this technique, you will more easily fall for the gambit.

First, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting or “legitimate sporting purposes”. Go read it. Read the whole Constitution. Read the copious documents that were written to support and oppose it. Nothing there. Nevertheless, Americans have a right to hunt, and a right to use firearms for sport; it is just not in the Second Amendment. For that reason saying that you do not intend to infringe the right to hunt, in no way indicates that you do not intend to infringe the right to bear arms a set forth in the Second Amendment; as things stand, it rather raises the suspicion that you do.

Some people have recently begun to voice the obvious fact that the Second Amendment refers to guns that could be used to oppose a usurpative government. That is perfectly true, and remember that the people who wrote it were not thinking, any more, about King George, but rather about the very government they had just established according to the best principles they could hammer out together. It is true, but not the whole story, and for people today, some of whom cannot conceive a world outside their own comfortable existence, not the best argument. It should be noted on this score, that since the Second Amendment clearly refers to a militia, the assault rifle is probably just exactly what the delegates meant. Not that that means that we have to allow people to own fully automatic weapons, but rather that we have to argue and agree democratically why they should not. We cannot just pretend that such a thing is ridiculous.

The larger meaning of the Second Amendment may be found in its environment, both in the words around it and the culture from which it grew. It may come as a surprise to many people that the Constitution was not the result of a manufactured crisis, hatched in secret, and adopted with no time to read it, let alone debate it. Every word was discussed, every phrase scrutinized, by people who had been developing their ideas of self-government in their various colonial governments for scores of years. The Bill of Rights came about because enough people thought the Constitution lacked explicit protection of certain rights that they deemed essential to the survival of a free people to persuade the majority to correct the oversight. Hunting and sport do not rise to that level; there is something very basic at stake here and it is important to think seriously about it before throwing it away in a fit of manufactured emotion.

 

Next:  what are we overlooking by failing to understand the Bill of Rights as a whole, as more than the sum of its parts?