Censorship vs. Common Decency.

Always worthy of a smackdown...



And not worthy of a smackdown...



One of the Lively Goodnesses of blogging is the elbow room it affords you in being and saying more-or-less exactly what you want.

If, for example, one of Rip Van Friedman’s many, tiny personalities awakes from yet another of its long drowses and bolts from its Snuggle Sack to declare to a waiting world that Something Might Just Possibly Be Wrong in Iraq…we are free to pound his monkey-skull like Chick Webb working the skins.

Or if the rattling-tailpipe of the cheap, flat Champale that is Rightwing “intellectualism” -- David Brooks – chooses to murder a few dozen trees to tell us that Liberals killed Middlebrow discourse in America…we are free to ram his idiot words back down his throat with a backhoe. Remind him that, back in the Good Old White Christian days that Never Were, that things were a lot more racist, conformist and complex that he would like to talk about. For example…

1. One could not buy the Norton Anthology of African American Literature for any price.

2. “Ulysses” was banned. The “Tropic of Cancer” was banned.

3. Just to throw in a VERY little known fact, all adult and sexual references were effaced from science fiction and an entire genre of literature was kept artificially juvenile until the late 60’s due to the blue pen of one woman: Kay Tarrant.

4. The best of cable and PBS television is on a par with the best of world literature, and often is world literature.

5. Sturgeon's Law Invoked. "Ninety percent of everything is shit." And always has been.

6. That when reading the bill of particulars against the criminals who coarsened our culture (and I don’t dispute that it has been coarsened), BoBo conspicuously omits any mention of Commerce. This is because even a brain-rotted, syphilitic whore knows you don’t spit in your pimps face.

7. And BoBo also ominously fails to mention that the Wahabi Christians that run the party for which he carries so much brackish water are the greatest enemies of Science, free thought and intelligent discourse this country has seen in a lifetime. This is because even a brain-rotted, syphilitic whore knows you that while you don’t spit in your pimps face, you REALLY don’t spit in that’s pimp’s bosses face.


In other words, we have lots of latitude to talk about whatever pleases us – and I for one also love the pure wordplaying craft that some of the best bloggers give away at bargain prices every day -- so when I saw this article in the Sun Times, I had a terrifically, tart smartass essay halfway written in my head before I finished the first full paragraph…

Author of fire book accused of arson
June 14, 2005
As co-author of one of the saddest Chicago books ever written, David Cowan helped heal survivors of the heartbreaking fire at Our Lady of the Angels.
Now, he faces charges of setting a fire at another Roman Catholic parish nearly half a century after the blaze he wrote about in To Sleep with the Angels, and his wife is seeking compassion for a man she describes as overwhelmed and traumatized.
…

Then I read the rest of it.

…"He's a wonderful father and a wonderful person and just needed help,'' said
Ursula Bielski.

Ironically, Cowan is a former firefighter, police officer and author of another fire-themed book, Great Chicago Fires. He had been scheduled to sign copies Sunday at the Printers Row Book Fair.
He recently worked as a janitor at St. Benedict's, the North Side parish where he is accused of arson after a Thursday fire. The book by Cowan and John Kuenster, To Sleep with the Angels, helped clear the name of another janitor -- Jim Raymond.
…
Bielski, described as a Chicago "ghostlorist,'' was returning nearby from a
ghost bus tour.
"They're pulling in the parking lot, and Cowan is standing by the building he set on fire,'' said another law enforcement source. "The tour bus pulls up, she [his wife] calls out'' when she recognized him, the source said. "He runs through a gangway between the church and the school.''
After breaking a window as he left the storage building, he went to a hospital, Stanton said.

It goes on at greater length and detail.

For those of you who don’t live here Chicago is, among other things, a City of Ghosts.

You can see the Ghosts of Industries gone-by on brick facades all over town; fading, spectral reminders of tanners, furriers and hat-makers slowly vanishing out of memory. Refrigerator factories being gentrified into tony lofts for suburbanites who are fleeing back to the metropolis.

You can see the Ghosts of Entertainment; stand where Comiskey Park once stood, or (if you’re lucky) buy a slice of the magnificent terracotta façade that used to frame the Granada Theater on the far North Side. Visit the building that was for a time the pivot around which Vaudeville turned, or do a slow, respectful roll past 2120 S. Michigan Avenue – the birthplace of Chess records.

Mostly though, we live chockablock with our Ghosts of Fire and Water.

The Great Fire leveled the City, and the recovery from that disaster shaped the soul of the city forever. Until the Titanic, the worst maritime disaster in American history had been the Eastland** , a pleasure boat that rolled over in the Chicago River, killing 844 passengers.

Then there was the Iroquois Fire (this quote via the Public Library site): “Chicago's most deadly fire occurred less than a month after the opening of the new, supposedly fireproof Iroquois Theater at 24-28 W. Randolph. It was standing room only for a holiday matinee of the popular musical "Mr. Blue Beard, Jr." Of the 1,900 people in the audience, mostly women and children, at least 600 perished.”

Then comes the Our Lady fire. This also from the Public Library site: “…The fire was brought under control at 3:45 p.m. and the work of recovering bodies began. Ninety students and three nuns died.”

Our Lady was the one that changed fire codes for schools everywhere. That mandated sprinklers, alarms wired directly to the Fire Department; fireproof stairwells and fire-doors.

You live here long enough, and the Ghosts – all of them -- get into your bones. You know where the Couch memorial is, all the stories about Resurrection Mary, and on a winter’s night on a half-dare, you and your friends may well have cut slowly down the alley on Randolph where so many from the Iroquois jumped to their death – smack in the middle of the cacophony and traffic of urban life -- and noticed that it’s always quiet there, and that even the homeless avoid it.

So when a story pops up that the co-author of the definitive book on the Our Lady’s Fire was busted for setting a fire at a Catholic School, it was almost too good to pass up. At the reading of the headline, my snark-saber was already halfway out of its sheath.

Such symmetry! Such perfect irony! Such a clever entrée into larger issues! Such a lavish gift to a hungry, on-the-run blogger!

Such bullshit!

I was racing along in my head, thinking what a terrific little piece of writing I could turn out before I ever really let what was going on sink in.

This guy is no Friedman or Brooks stinking up the intellectual landscape, hiding a few wingnut razors and drops of poison in the mealy apple of their flaccid prose.

This guy is no Bush Administration professional liar, using taxpayer dollars to fund an all-out, 24/7 Noise Machine to make sure that those same taxpayers pay no attention to the crimes being committed in their name.

Those people deserve all the brickbats in the Universe, delivered with all the throw-weight that any of us can manage.

This is just a guy with serious problems, who is maybe too weak for his circumstance. Has perhaps lived too long with the Ghosts, and too far away from help and support and praise. Who perhaps looked too long into the Abyss, and who doesn’t deserve to be taken to task by me, or anyone, just because the raw materials of a good story – especially for a Chicagoan -- are so irresistibly present.

This for me is the distinction between Censorship and Common Decency.

So I put up my snark-saber and wrote this instead.


**(Update/Correction. My thanks to "prof fate" for correcting my error in citing maritime history: any day I can correct something I thought I knew that was just plain wrong is a good day. Here's a bit of the correction [the rest are in the Comments]:

"prof fate said...

...Until the Titanic, the worst maritime disaster in American history had been the Eastland, a pleasure boat that rolled over in the Chicago River, killing 844 passengers.

The Eastland was the worst maritime disaster in the history of the Great Lakes, but the worst of them all -- even exceeding the death toll on the Titanic -- was the Sultana.

The Sultana was a Mississippi steamboat that was carrying 2300 just-released Union POWs (although it was only rated for a maximum of 376 passengers). At 2 AM on the morning of April 27, 1865, just seven miles north of Memphis, three of its four boilers exploded.

The immediate death toll was 1700 passengers, and an additional 200 died from injuries (including scalding by live steam) in the following days.
...)

Thanks, professor.