When Free Speech Collides With Free Commerce

The video snagged my attention--bodies pushing and shoving, faces angry and livid. Was this another C-SPAN moment from the Taiwanese parliament, whose honorable members have been known to bite and slap and kick their fellow honorable members?

Turns out I was off by about 11,000 kilometers. This footage was fresh out of Westminster, an Orange County city named for the site of Britain’s parliament--home to civil discourse between opposing parties symbolically seated two sword lengths apart.

It’s a new Tet Offensive, 31 years after the first one, when North Vietnamese soldiers laid siege to South Vietnamese cities. This time, hundreds of Vietnamese have been laying siege to a video store in a strip mall where the shop owner, likewise Vietnamese, has had the audacity or the forthrightness or the flat-out idiocy, your choice, to hang the flag of the former North Vietnam and the present unified Vietnam, and a picture of Ho Chi Minh. Also your choice: In doing so, the owner, Truong Van Tran, is either waving a red flag, or the Bill of Rights.

In the month since it began, police in riot gear have shown up. So have some U.S. Vietnam veterans. Their Orange County chapter has gone on record both hailing the South Vietnamese “who fought with us side by side” and endorsing Tran’s right to hang the enemy’s symbols. To those protesters who stand outside Hi Tek Video and cry, “We came here for freedom!” the veterans’ words are a reminder from friends that freedom is not a mirror, it is a pane of glass.

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We Americans aren’t much for history. We like to believe that we are the masters of our fate, the captains of our souls, dissevered from class and religion and all that Old World baggage, that the distinctions among us are blotted out in our common footrace to the only color that matters, the mottled hue of the greenback.

I once taught at a local university, where some of my students couldn’t find Chicago on a map, much less Vietnam. It was for the likes of them that British distributors of the film “The Madness of George III” renamed it “The Madness of King George” for American audiences who might think this was a sequel, and they’d missed parts I and II.

For good and ill, we are both ignorant of history and unencumbered by it. So it’s been a stretch to understand that “immigration” means not just foreigners who open great little ethnic restaurants, but who may carry baggage of their own.

Two years before the sweaty amity of the 1984 Olympics, an Armenian American teenager assassinated the Turkish consul general of Los Angeles to avenge the genocide of Armenians by Turks in World War I, when neither victim nor killer had yet been born. The murder perplexed Angelenos; in a new country, with so many new battles, why keep fighting the old ones?

Likewise, no one seeing these protesters’ fury, hearing cries of “Let the Communist die!” is learning a damned thing about Communism or Vietnam. The medium drowns the message--and protesters let Tran jerk their chain by allowing a piece of paper and a piece of cloth to control them.

And in waving pictures of Hitler, likening Tran and “Uncle Ho” to the Nazi Devil, they forget that it was Hitler who first burned books--burned ideas--before moving on to people.

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There was something grand and sad about the quandary of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s exile years here--the fearless writer, the persecuted dissident who earned the admiration of the free world and the venom of the Soviet apparatchik, living at last in the cradle of freedom.

He hated it.

He hated the “squalid mass culture,” hated the exalted concept of freedom squandered on “the collection of gossip” by “casual, trivial pens.”

In his homeland, he was read in secret, talked about in whispers. Here, his was just another voice in the noise and trivia of democracy. It made him one more guy--albeit a Nobel laureate--with a book to sell and a speech to make. Americans’ notion of freedom, to Solzhenitsyn’s mind, was not civics. It was marketing. Well, that’s our disgrace and our defense. It dulls us to public discourse, but it makes us less vulnerable to demagoguery.

If Tran is forced out, it will be in the showdown between free speech and free commerce; the mini-mall has issued him an eviction notice, prompted by problems this has made for other merchants. And in commerce may lie the protesters’ answer: boycott. It’s been used on furriers, on apartheid South Africa, on slumlords. Why not “Don’t Buy Tran”? If anything is the American way, that is.

In a word, you can shut him down, but you cannot shut him up.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com