Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.-- Pericles (430 BC)
The End of Free Speech in the United States
It feels strange to be living in the twilight of the Republic of the United States of America. Unfortunately, that's when I feel I'm living. The reason? Years of lying, distortion of the truth, threats and intimidation are about to pay off for the people who rule us. You see, for years, the people who run the country have been working on destroying that pesky First Amendment to the Constitution. TV, music, video games, and movies have all been demonized by a diverse group of politicians from both the left and the right.
Does anybody still remember the fight over warning labels? Those explicit lyrics stickers that now appear on CDs? Or the similar fight over the video game rating system? How about the subtle changes in the movie rating system? The V-Chip that you are now forced to buy with every new TV. I remember all these things. I know, for example, that what these new rating systems have accomplished is limited censorship, exactly as they were intended to. (Here's a simple example: There are two versions of the excellent PC Game Sacrifice a Teen version sold in Walmart and a "Mature" version sold everywhere else. Shiny entertainment basically had no choice, there was pressure on Walmart from the government not to stock "M" rated games.)
Limited censorship, created through a combination of a government imposed rating system and government pressure on retail stores was never seen as an ideal solution. After all, the ultimate goal of government censorship is to censor political speech, and you can't rely on this jury rigged censorship system to eliminate that. True, they've managed to make the majority of American culture completely worthless to adults, but again this was only one of their goals.
However, now that the government has successfully implemented a censorship system over every aspect of the media, there is only one step left to end the First Amendment protection we still theoretically enjoy. (We don't really enjoy this protection, the constant battles over Free Speech in this country prove that. It's not a useful right if every time you try to assert it you need a lengthy and risky court battle to fight for it.) What do they need to do? They need to put a government agency in charge of regulating it. Well, this is exactly what they are working on in Congress right now. They plan to make a law which would allow the Federal Trade Commission to outlaw advertising for anything that the government decides falls into a mature catagory. In other words, if you make something our government doesn't like they can drive you out of business. In fact, the level of arrogance in Congress is such that Senators are actually saying things like this:
"Washington can regulate you out of business if you do not have your act together," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.-- Freedom Forum: Congress members urge hip-hop to self-regulate
I'm very discouraged by all of this. Generally, when the government figures out a complex way to disable our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms like this, they are successful. This is the way that things like Prohibition, the drug prohibition and most forms of gun control were implemented. We'll have a little time before they start really cracking down on unpopular political speech. (Even the People's Republic of China is moving slowly in Hong Kong.) However, pretty soon, it will all be over. Without freedom of speech, none of our other freedoms will matter because once you've been able to stop people from talking about opression you make it trivially easy for the state to get away with it. The really discouraging thing, though, is the lack of a public outcry over this. There is no excuse for the public not to be aware of what has been going on. The people in the government are proud of their War on Free Sppech, and trumpet it at every opportunity. This has not been some covert war waged, the government has marched onto the field in bright red coats with bagpipes playing. Yet instead of fighting, the people have surrendered, afraid of superstitious nonsense about "mind warping media."
Created on ... June 17, 2001
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