The Bunkhouse Chronicle: Fire!

It is a delightful day indeed when an angry reader writes in — exercising the First Amendment — to attack a column or, more to the point given the nature of the language, the columnist, written in defense of the First Amendment. It’s delightful for several reasons — not least of which is that when you are taking flak from a sandbagged position on the ground it is a certain indication that you are flying over the target.

Lawyers and judges, though they are often slow to admit it, are often wrong. For instance, a Superior Court judge I frequently visited to have search and arrest warrants signed-off had a chessboard set up in his chambers. This was entirely for affectation, meant to lend credulity and some notion of intellectual gravity to the environment, except that the board was set up wrong. This always bothered me, for obvious reasons. I don’t know if anyone ever told him his board was set up wrong, though somebody probably should have. He’s now retired and raising exotic birds in Montecito, or some such thing, and we can all hope for the best.

Hemingway once suggested that what is left out of a story is often more important than what makes the final draft, which is certainly true in compelling literature. In this case, the angry reader leaves out an important part of the story, half-citing Oliver Wendell Holmes. What the angry reader leaves out in his tirade against free speech which, to be clear, quite wonderfully illustrates the point of the original column, is that it can be illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater, but only in the most stringent case of immediate causal action.

Therefore it is not, de facto, illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater.

It’s notable that both the angry reader and Governor Tim Walz should know this — and worse, probably do — but decide to ignore it while claiming other people are extremists and making an overt demand to cancel an opposing voice in the public arena. Which, when you think about it, is almost a stringent case of immediate causal action.

It is a strange world indeed when a defense of the First Amendment, at the very modest expense of precisely assigning responsibility to some of those most publicly guilty of attacking it, is called hateful, or extremist.

Which is also one gift of a newspaper, which should stoke discussion, though somewhere along the way a culture has developed in America that immediately lashes out — with a surly and elitist vehemence — against contrary voices. Strangely, that approach is most often found on the progressive left these days, which we also know includes a growing number of lawyers and judges whose politics trend toward the exertion of control over others. Saying such things out loud doesn’t make one a right-wing extremist, by the way, it makes one an accurate observer of the era.

A recent dustup regarding one citizen’s views on female leadership demonstrates the point. In this case, a few angry readers wrote, presumably with a straight face, that they wanted to hear from different voices in the community — just not the one that offended them. Which is a very strange approach to wanting to hear from different voices in the community.

We have no right to live our lives free from the offense sometimes found in other people’s points of view. They get to say and think what they want, write letters to the editor, vote for anybody they want, and if we dislike it to the point of quaking with outrage then perhaps we should make a persuasive argument rather than defaulting to personal sensitivities while demanding the offending opinion — and in some cases the whole person — be disappeared.

That’s only a suggestion, of course. You remain free to want people and opinions other than your own to be disappeared. It’s weird, and both intellectually and spiritually fragile, but you are free to want it. What you are not free to do is impose it on others by staking a claim to historical levels of righteousness.

And here’s another thought: if all you are interested in is an echo chamber of your own contrived brilliance, or political views, maybe a newspaper isn’t for you. Maybe avoid other people forever. And don’t read books. You may find things in books that enrage you. You might even come to hate the writer of the book, which is weird but sometimes happens. And whatever you do, do not, under any circumstances, read any of Ben Franklin’s early work in Philadelphia, or Mark Twain’s stuff from Virginia City.

Egads — the shocking number of opinions protected by the First Amendment can be so very overwhelming.