Free Expression: A Progress Report

A midweek Fourth of July is a bit of a cheat, less a holiday than an awkward interruption, unless you can steal some extra days to stretch it out. But, like all the great punctuations of the year, the day--even if tightly bracketed by work--is colored by both memory and anticipations.

The indigestions of Thanksgivings past, for example, are gratefully forgotten, but the family gatherings of those years return to mind, warming but melancholy. New Year’s Eve is more portent than memory, touched with hope but also with a certain amount of anxiety, depending on whatever the state of the body, the job and the world is on Dec. 31.

Independence Day 1990 arrives with a sharp and particular irony as I measure it against recollections of the fervent patriotic oratory that was part of the small-town observances as I knew them. It was all straight out of Norman Rockwell, including the orator who was often a county official.

The thing was, the orator was telling us what we already believed and took for granted: about independence, freedom, the inalienable rights accruing to the citizens of a new nation conceived in liberty. Nobody had much occasion to think about the Bill of Rights. We knew it was there, but nobody had then heard of pleading the Fifth Amendment, and while freedom of expression might lead to the occasional fist fight, that was about it. We lived tolerantly under a canopy of agreed values.

We were doubtless too complacent in our village, and nothing was as simple as distance makes it seem. The news of the larger society as it seeped into us on radio and from newspapers and magazines, left no doubt in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s that there were sharp ruptures over matters of taste and permissibility.

Strippers were arrested, Life was banned in Boston for showing the birth of a baby, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was prosecuted for obscenity but, in one of history’s most triumphant moments, acquitted. Even into the 1950s, language brusquer than hell and damn was rare in novels, and works by John O’Hara and Lillian Smith were prosecuted for language you could now use in prime time.

Somehow, after all the court decisions and all the large but gradual changes in the society’s tolerances and understandings, reflected in everything from comic strips to minimalist music, you would have said the old urgings to censor, ban, proscribe and indict might have waned.

But of course the wish to suppress springs as eternal as hope, and the irony of Independence Day is that it finds us amid renewed allegations of obscenity in art and a noisome battle over the workings and indeed the future of the National Endowment for the Arts.

The endowments for both the arts and the humanities are legacies of the Lyndon Johnson presidency, born, not unlike the civil rights legislation, in the sorrowing aftermath of the Kennedy assassination.

Federal subvention of the arts had never really been part of American philosophy until the Depression years. But the endowments have been by any reasonable accounting phenomenally successful, bringing into being organizations like the American Film Institute with its myriad activities not only in teaching but in film archiving and preservation. The never more than modest appropriations for the endowments have been bread upon the waters, evoking millions of dollars in matched private fundings.

A handful of the art produced out of the thousands of grants has been found offensive by some. It may be; it may not be. Beethoven, Picasso and Joyce have been found offensive.

What is usually found to be true is that the offending art is simply a step ahead of prevailing modes in the expression of emotions, truth and beauty or all three together.

As in almost all the attempts at censorship from the beginnings of time, the present assaults on the NEA seem an attempt to wrench the world back to some pre-existing orthodoxy, some fairy-tale vision of life as it should be lived, especially as played by the censor’s rules. The attempts to impose an anti-obscenity oath on artists--and perhaps even more the timorous acquiescence of officials who ought to know better--is the real obscenity and the graver danger to the cause of art.

The largest worry is whether the repressive moves originating in the right-wing of society have wide support, and thus represent a wrenching back of the pendulum of allowability. In the last half of the 20th Century the pendulum of free expression has swung wide. The novel and the stage, radio, television and indeed all the arts enjoy latitudes of theme and form they have never known before. Despite the excesses and the exploitations that inevitably resulted, history will show that the arts, unshackled, reveal powers and passions and an ability to look deeply into our lives that is unprecedented and positive--even if the results may be unnerving and, so be it, offensive.

Art which can’t be freely expressed and artists who must (but surely won’t) submit to the paint-by-numbers dictates set by politicians are in clear contradiction of everything that is being celebrated on the Fourth of July. In recent times when censorship measures have been submitted to the voters they have been resoundingly defeated. What you have to hope on this day above all is that the ladies and gentlemen of Congress have read their constituencies as well as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.