Land of the "Almost Free"

It is a sad day when former subjects of the Warsaw Pact deride American freedom as a farce. That day is here, and while this post is inspired by an anecdote, it is backed up by statistics.

According to Reporters Without Borders, Estonia currently ranks third in terms of press freedom, while the United States heaves its way to 48th. Nowadays, we are outpaced by Latvia, the Czech Republic, and Chile. Unfortunately, it is not just our press freedoms that have atrophied. Leonard Pitts wrote an editorial this weekend, centered around a conversation with an Estonian friend who said that "she didn't find this country to be especially free." See Correctness, control, The land of the almost free to speak up.

Americans, she said, love to trumpet their freedom. But it’s hard to square that with political correctness that straitjackets communication for fear of giving unintended offense, hair-trigger litigiousness that requires major corporations to treat customers (”Caution: Coffee is hot”) like idiots for fear of being sued, zero tolerance policies and mandatory sentencing guidelines that remove human judgment from human encounters for fear of rendering unequal justice.

Most people are reading Mr. Pitts' piece as an indictment of right-wing "security theater" and "tough on crime" initiatives.  It is easy to read it that way when we read this passage:

And if this impulse toward uniformity sounds noble in theory, what it leads to in practice is kids kicked out of school because Midol violates the zero-tolerance drug policy, or a parolee getting 25 to life because the pizza slice he stole violates the three-strike law.

However, I see Mr. Pitts' words as cutting both left and right.

[O]originality is anathema to uniformity and, make no mistake, uniformity is what we’re talking about here, the campaign to regulate language, law, culture and every other aspect of human intercourse in the hope of thereby removing from that intercourse every hint of risk or danger of unequal treatment.

I have never heard an analogy more appropriate than the "hall monitor".  Whether it is right-wing neo-fascists in government or left-wing neo-maoists in academia, both come to us with the overwhelming desire to stifle any sense of individuality or dissent.  To force us all into their pre-determined holes, no matter the shape or size of the peg. These people remind me of a character in one of my favorite movies, Happy Feet (yes, really!).  As Neil Cavuto lamented, that children's film is a scathing indictment of the right wing's closed-minded conservatism.  (source).  However, the uptight "Noah the Elder" character's most telling line is this: Dissent leads to division and division leads us to doom! You, Mumble Happyfeet, must go! It certainly is easy to imagine Dick Cheney grumbling these lines.  But, anyone who thinks that this mentality remains on the right hand side of the aisle is as foolish as those who believe that AIDS only strikes homosexuals.  You need only take a look at the comments to this post and this post to hear Noah the Elder speaking with a left-wing accent. It is no wonder that the attempted debate over "Intentional Sex Torts" spawned this (very insightful) blog post "If You Don't Already Agree, Get Lost!"  Nor is it any wonder that a Dartmouth professor is considering suing her students because they didn't kowtow to her orthodoxy, or BJ's won't let a guy fly his confederate flag, or that there are calls for government and tort lawyers to squeeze under our sheets. Mr. Pitts sums up the state of our freedom:

A nation of iconoclasts and originals seems hellbent on becoming a nation of hall monitors. A nation born in revolution has lived to see revolution neutered and co-opted.

Out there, somewhere, hall monitors on the left and the right are scowling down at us... because they just can't stand the thought of us making decisions for ourselves, having fun in our own way, or stepping out of their moralistic line. 

What are you going to do about it?  If I, for one, may be so bold as to ask that you do something about it, I'll not ask much.  I simply ask that you exercise the rights that you have left -- in particular, your right to free speech. 

Chile may have us beat in that department, but we still have enough left that we can stop the bleeding.   Perhaps we can work off our free speech beer gut by exercising our rights a little more often, a little more strenuously, with a little more passion.  Fill the air, and the blogosphere, with your rejection of the hall monitor mentality.  Don't let the hall monitors take one step without resistance.  Don't say "what's the sense?"  Don't wait for someone else to write about it.  And most importantly, don't doubt your ability to make a difference.  Get out there -- find the hall monitors, no matter where they hide, and drown them in the only cocktail that can destroy them:  Equal parts liberty, passion, and free speech — serve scathing hot.

Comments

[Fantaschtick]

The article by Pitts that you cite is hard to take seriously considering that it's chock full of hyperbole. The worst part is the quote that rails against American attempts at civility as taking away from our freedom. It is well established that true freedom encompasses both the freedom to act and the freedom from being acted upon in harmful. In particular, I fail to see how any of the following are a net freedom-loss for society:

1. political correctness: PC does not "straitjacket[] communication for fear of giving unintended offense" but rather maintains a level of civility in the free flow of information.

2. litigiousness: This is one of my pet peeves. People rail against "hair-trigger litigiousness" but would we rather that injured parties settled their differences outside of the courtroom? Courts are the great equalizer in that they give the little guy a chance to enforce his rights against a larger, more powerful entity. Plus, courts help correct externalities. Let us not forget that tort law has been developed by juries of our peers. While the person being quoted might think that the law "requires major corporations to treat customers (?Caution: Coffee is hot?) like idiots for fear of being sued," a jury presented with the facts of the case came to the conclusion that people should act in a certain way. (I also note that the whole coffee reference is ridiculous because (a) the warning may be reasonable under many circumstances and (b) the McDonald's case (to which the quoted person is probably referring) was one in which McDonalds had super-heated coffee and used defective lids, which resulted a pattern of extremely serious injuries.)

3. zero tolerance policies and mandatory sentencing guidelines: I don't see how this makes general society any less free. There seems to be a reasonable justification for the standardization of the treatment of harmful conduct, and both of these measures have been enacted through the democratic process. I don't disagree that they "remove human judgment from [certain] human encounters for fear of rendering unequal justice," but that is the whole point. Society has determined that certain crimes and offenders should be treated in a certain way in order to protect the freedom of the rest of society. [For the recrod, I don't necessarily support either approach.]

[Marc J. Randazza]

Pitts' article is an editorial -- so it certainly isn't much of a research project.

1. Denied: We should be civil. However, we don't need the government telling us to be civil. "Be civil" is a cry that I raise on this very board. However, "PC" requires conformity to a uniform world view - not civility. It is VERY easy to be PC and uncivil. Just as it is possible to be civil and UN-PC.

2: Admitted in part. I agree that the McDonalds case is a terrible example of litigiousness run amok. You characterize that case 100% accurately. However, that doesn't mean that *every* uncivil or disfavored event needs to wind up in a courtroom. McDonalds case, yes. There was an actual physical injury, and it was caused by McDonalds after ample notice. Cases involving emotional "trauma" from "mean words" (see Dartmouth professor)... no effin way.

3. Denied: I don't think that "society" has made that determination. A few lawmakers call for mandatory minimums in knee-jerk reactions to high profile wrinkles in the legal system. The result is moving flunkiedom up the ladder. For my theory on flunkiedom, see http://randazza.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/flunkiedom-and-mikes-lemonade/.

[Jozef]

A quick anecdote about how Eastern Europeans view the freedom of speech in the US. My sister, still living in Slovakia, came to visit me last year. She stayed with me for two weeks. I personally didn't notice it (I guess I'm doing the same even though I've been living here for 13 years), but my American friends were surprised how careful she was in saying anything. She would say almost nothing of substance over the phone, because she automatically assumed that phones were wiretapped, and she was very careful when saying anything of substance in public (usually lowering her voice into a whisper). Her two main concerns were the anti-terrorist measures and the perceived litigious nature of Americans.

Both are understandable: Most of the news that make their way to Eastern and Central Europe are either horror or off-beat stories. As such, all she read about free speech in the US was either related to people getting arrested for saying the wrong thing (or being overheard and misunderstood), or about people getting sued for saying something politically incorrect. Compound this with English education in these countries, which hasn't changed much from the 1950s. When I studied English in the early 1990s, we still described black people as "negroes"; when I moved to Atlanta this single word caused a lot of trouble for me. There are plenty more examples in European press about lawsuits stemming from this kind of confusion, and my sister tried to avoid it by never speaking her mind.

Still, I consider it very scary that after nearly 20 years without communist rule, my sister switched to her old habits of assuming that anything she said over the phone or in public would be monitored.

[Franchise Whale]

Really enjoyed it, I wanted to click out and
you kept pulling me back in! Many thanks
and keep up the great work!

[Hermes Ten]

"It is well established that true freedom encompasses both the freedom to act and the freedom from being acted upon in harmful."

No doubt a very carefully considered statement. But I say, if you don't want to be acted upon in harmful, don't go there.

Is the "civility" = "freedom" nonsense what they're teaching in public school these days? This is the kind of childish sentiment you get when your number one educational priority is obedience and conformity.

"There seems to be a reasonable justification for the standardization of the treatment of harmful conduct, and both of these measures have been enacted through the democratic process. I don't disagree that they "remove human judgment from [certain] human encounters for fear of rendering unequal justice," but that is the whole point."

Jesus Fucking Christ. Is this a joke? The "democratic process" line is a little humorous, but the notion that mandatory sentencing stems from a "fear of rendering unequal justice" is a total fuckin' hoot. Yeah, mandatory sentencing is "equal justice." There's only one explanation for exposition like this: the author is a public school teacher.

[Marc J. Randazza]

Hermes,

Wow... I disagree with the poster you're arguing with as well. But, how about a "little" civility? I agree with everything you say here, but why the dig on public school teachers?

[Hermes Ten]

I confess Marc: I was "uncivil" and I apologize. I even regret it.

It's just infuriating to see seemingly intelligent people throwing around media degraded and socially meaningless words like "civility" and "justice" and "equal" and "democracy."

It's also disheartening to see someone, who is probably a decent and well-intentioned person, so ready to subordinate herself to some "civility authority" for whom "civility" just means control.

As to public school teachers --I was looking at it from a systemic perspective. Yes, there are good school teachers. We know for sure because we're always reading about them getting fired for failing to be obedient and conform. But for a system to promote obedience and conformity as its highest value, there have to be a lot of obedient little drones.

[Hermes Ten]

Jozef, maybe your sister is just better informed than you are. Everything said over the phone in this country is monitored. EVERYTHING. Just look up the lawsuit against AT&T. ALL traffic over the AT&T network is fed directly to the NSA --including traffic from other companies that passes through the AT&T network. ALL traffic. This includes your phone conversations, internet chats, browsing history, every upload or download, and even the streaming audio or video you peruse.

Granted, they're not looking at most people in real time --they use key word searches and other filters to zero in on whatever they're interested in. But your sister, coming as she did from Slovakia, may well have been a monitoring target. And I'd assume that ANY communication entering or leaving the US is monitored.

This isn't even unprecedented. For something like 30 years, Western Union gave the government a copy of every telegram sent through its system. As a non-US citizen your sister is smart to be concerned. Don't forget, the Bush administration claims the right to abduct and torture Swiss grandmothers for merely innocently donating money to the "wrong" charity.