Free speech
Last night, I did a long post that covered, among other things, the long, drawn out death of Free Speech at San Francisco State University, a place so radically Left that Angela Davis is a faculty member there. As is so often the case, immediately after I’ve done a post, as I’m reading my usual morning fare, I stumble across things relevant to that post.
First, I found this Jon Sanders article about famous people on the Left who pose as martyrs persecuted by the Government for exercising the First Amendment rights — a position he eventually contrasts with the clamp down on free speech taking place at federally funded college campuses:
“I think people are paranoid” was how former Grateful Dead member Mickey Hart’s comments to Reuters began. Hart was speaking about this year’s Grammy Awards and the Dixie Chicks. Then he provided a sterling example of that very paranoia.
“I think that if they speak out, they think they’re gonna get whacked by the government. It’s pretty oppressive now. Look at the Dixie Chicks. They got whacked.”
What? The government did nothing concerning The Dixie Chicks after they “spoke out” against President Bush while they were in concert in London. The singers were free to say whatever they wanted, just as the buying public was free to say whatever they wanted with respect to what the Dixie Chicks said.
There was public outcry, and indeed the Dixie Chicks lost fans and concertgoers. But they also garnered new fans, including fawning press. Their “naked” cover on Rolling Stone seems to have started a new fad: the Multimillionaire Artist As Suffering Figure of Persecution.
They would be followed in magazine-cover martyrdom by Kanye West, who nearly ruined a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser with his off-the-cuff remarks about Bush hating black people. His cover shot on Rolling Stone showed him wearing a crown of thorns.
Madonna, as is her wont, took the fad to its logical extremes; comparing Bush to Hitler and Osama bin Laden and then hanging herself on a crucifix.
But it’s all vanity. Hart’s comments, the “musical martyrs,” the paranoia — it’s just self-congratulatory hooey. Musicians aren’t getting “whacked” by the Bush administration for “speaking out.” But it’s fun to believe it, because only then could the very mundane act of speaking out in this, the Land of the First Amendment, appear dangerous and brave instead of merely mercenary.
Second, FrontPage Magazine chose this morning to link to information about erstwhile 60s/70s radical, and former SFSU (and current UC Santa Cruz) professor , Angela Davis. Just a few of Davis’ career highlights:
# Communist professor at the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus
# Recipient of the Lenin “Peace Prize” from the police state of East Germany.
# Provided an arsenal of weapons to Black Panthers who used them to kill a Marin Country judge in a failed attempt to free her imprisoned lover, Black Panther murderer George Jackson
# A highly paid professor at UC Santa Cruz and icon of the campus left and frequent guest speaker at anti-war rallies
# Leader of a movement to free all criminals who are minorities claiming that they are political prisoners of the racist United States
# “The only path of liberation for black people is that which leads toward complete and radical overthrow of the capitalist class.”
Lovely woman, and isn’t it great that she’s in control of young people’s education?
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