When Crying “Fire!” Becomes a Slur

photo: lPankonin

This past week witnessed two historical decisions ("'Equal Dignity,’" NYT, 6/27/15,  “Supreme Court Allows Nationwide Heath Care Subsidies,” NYT, 6/25/15) which reaffirmed not only the impartiality of the Supreme Court (with a Conservative Justice upholding the Affordable Care Act), but its imperturbability as an institution in comparison to an increasingly rambunctious and unstable congress. However, the next big decisions facing the Supreme Court are very likely to revolve around the limits of free speech. The famous Oliver Wendell Holmes decision in Schenck v. United States brilliantly prescribed limits to First Amendment Rights. But free expression is one of the most complex matters in jurisprudence and it regularly receives challenges from all sides of the ideological spectrum. This problem is particularly acute in the case of religious expression. Is wearing the Hijab, the veil worn by some Muslim women a right, when hiding one’s face makes identification documents like driver’s licenses and passports almost meaningless? Members of Canada’s conservative government recently courted controversy when they began to question this form of expression (“Harper says majority of 'moderate Muslims' support view on hijab ban,” The Globe and Mail, 3/15/15) Do militantly anti-Muslim groups have the right to promote offensive attacks on Muhammad like the cartoon contest recently held in Texas, under the guise of defending the right of free speech against those who would stifle it (“Pamela Geller, Organizer of Muhammad Cartoon Contest, Trumpets Results,” NYT,  5/4/15).The latter might have given Oliver Wendell Holmes pause, as would have the case of the Nazis marching through the Jewish section of Skokie, Illinois (a case that never made it to the Supreme Court). At the recent PEN conference in New York, otherwise liberally inclined writers signed petitions against honoring surviving Charlie Hebdo staff members, an astonishing turn of events considering PEN’s storied history of defending writers and free expression around the world (“PEN Group Blacklists Charlie Hebdo,” The Screaming Pope, 4/29/15) Those who believe that questioning the First Amendment opens up a Pandora’s Box might ask how exactly “fire!” was cried, how crowded the theater and where the exits were. Salman Rushdie, who had a fatwah issued against him for The Satanic Verses, was incredulous and irate at the waffling some of his PEN colleagues, but the fire has now become the threat of violence and destruction. Liberal western values themselves are like crying “fire?” for fundamentalists of many stripes. In Israel the ultra Orthodox have attempted to inflict their values on a population that doesn’t always cotton to their values. In an age of increasing terrorism, there will be a tendency to constrict both the exercise of beliefs as well as the right to express opposition and outrage at those self-same beliefs. The Supreme Court will have its work cut for it.

PEN Group Blacklists Charlie Hebdo

An attack on free expression has come from one of the most unlikely places. A recent Times headline read “Six PEN Members Decline Gala After Award for Charlie Hebdo," (NYT, 4/26/15). Salman Rushdie, who was the object of a fatwa for The Satanic Verses: A Novel, was not part of the protest. Peter Carey, the novelist was one of the group which included Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, Taiye Selasi and Michael Ondaatje. The Times quoted Peter Carey thusly, “A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about? All this is complicated by PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.” Isn’t this a little like allowing the schoolyard bully to terrorize his classmates by saying that he has a troubled home life?” One of the few good things about the French is the high esteem in which the hold free expression. There's probably no other country on earth where all shades of the political spectrum adhere to a similar veneration for free speech. Yes the French can be arrogant, impossible and even as racially insensitive as liberal American members of organizations of PEN who camouflage their prejudices by signing self-congratulatory petitions against the oppression of  have-nots while lacking countervailing sensitivity to the protecting the rights of the haves--like themselves. But how can they not stand tall for Charlie Hebdo which is after all an equal opportunity employer lambasting both Islam and its most virulent critics. Indeed on January 7, the day of the massacre, Michel Houellebecq, who famously termed Islam “the stupidest religion," was pilloried on the cover of the magazine.

Joseph Anton

Photo: David Shankbone

The New Yorker has run a section of Salman Rushdie’s, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, which deals with his life on the run (“The Disappeared,” 9/17/12). Rushdie writes his own story in the third person, as if he were describing someone else. But the most affecting moment of The New Yorker excerpt accounts the creation of the pseudonym made up from the first names of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. Salman Rushdie becomes Joseph Anton. “He had spent his life naming fictional characters,” Rushdie’s alter ego muses. “Now, by naming himself, he had turned himself into a sort of fictional character as well.” The words by which he would live come from Conrad too, from what he points out to be “the now unacceptably titled ‘The Nigger of the Narcissus.’” When the protagonist of the novel, James Walt, who is suffering from TB, is “asked by a fellow sailor why he came aboard, knowing that he was unwell,” Rushdie quotes Conrad’s character as answering, “I must live till I die—mustn’t I?” Taking the first name of the writer of Heart of Darkness would indeed seem apropos. The will to live itself is an animal urge, but considering the Faustian bargain Rushdie is forced to make, in which he sacrifices his identity to save his body, he could have iterated Janis Joplin’s famous, “take another little piece of my heart now baby!" The question is, now that the fatwa has been lifted and Rushdie is free to take his identity out of the closet, like an old suit of clothes, what to do with Joseph Anton? Joyce Carol Oates wrote books under the name of Rosamond Smith (her first husband was the Ontario Review editor Ray Smith) and John Banville has written novels under the name Benjamin Black.  Will Joseph Anton aka Salman Rushdie also start to get published?