On Freedom of Speech

The news that Salman Rushdie is recovering and ‘joking’ is good, though his family are also saying his injuries are ‘life changing’. His agent, Andrew Wylie, said his liver had been damaged and that he was likely to lose an eye. We are lucky that Rushdie is an icon of free speech and not a martyr of it.

The author Margaret Atwood has commented (If we don’t defend free speech, we live in tyranny) about the wider implications for democracy  of the attack: “Yet again “that sort of thing never happens here” has been proven false: in our present world, anything can happen anywhere. American democracy is under threat as never before: the attempted assassination of a writer is just one more symptom.”

Ever since the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa – encouraging anyone to murder him – Rushdie has been under threat and almost constant fear of attack. Only very recently did he say that he felt his life was ‘normal again’.

This is not an attack on ‘western values’ whatever they may be, but it is an attack on democracy and critical thinking.

As Suhayl Saadi has written:  “One’s true stance on freedom of expression is demonstrated not by the extent of one’s ferocity in defending the freedom of expression of those with whom one agrees (anyone can do that!), but by one’s principled defence of freedom of expression by those with whom one vehemently disagrees.”

With that simple truth you’d have to completely not just defend Rushdie’s right to write what he likes (a la Biko) but Jerry Sadowitz’s right to say what he likes on a comedy stage too. It’s a long way down from Midnight’s Children to wagging your willy I know, but the thing about freedom of speech is not just the defence of ideas you disagree with but also things that are, well, just a bit shit.

The idea that what the Scotsman and BBC Scotland will inevitably call a stooshie (cringe) was manufactured by Sadowitz (to sell his tour) or by The Pleasance (to adopt some kind of high ground and attract new audiences) seems at best unlikely. A not-very-funny comic tells deliberately offensive material and venue panics after complaints. The End. The festival thrives on this sort of controversy but it’s of little actual consequence and masks the banality of the whole tired bougie phenomena, it’s a sort of cultural desert that coughs-up Simply Red at the Summer Sessions as it slowly destroys its host.

Wishing Salman Rushdie as best a recovery he can make and solidarity to all writers and artists and performers under attack.

Comments (20)

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  1. Squigglypen says:

    Agreed.

  2. 220728 says:

    ‘Jerry Sadowitz’ (who , as a phenomenon, is not about ‘free speech’) is the subject Salman Rushdie’s novel, Fury.

    1. I did not know that novel. That’s funny.

      Clearly I mentioned that Sadowitz is about free speech: “With that simple truth you’d have to completely …defend Jerry Sadowitz’s right to say what he likes on a comedy stage too.”

      The wider phenomenon I was referring to is the festival.

      1. 220728 says:

        Yep, the Fringe no longer subverts itself as a ‘festival’, which is why it can no longer tolerate Sadowitz’s fury.

        1. Derek says:

          It does; I was at a show tonight that was fairly freely making jokes at the expense of all and sundry (both dead and alive). The venue that KB-ed Jerry Sadowitz was the Conference Centre; they must’ve shopped him to the Pleasance management.
          The Fringe is alive and well; you just have to find it.

          1. 220816 says:

            The Fringe is still, indeed, to be found around the periphery of the Fringe. But the Fringe itself has come to be dominated and defined by an infestation of stand-up TV comedy stars, the increasing commercialism of Pay-To-Play fringe venues and their profit-obsessed promoters, and tourism. It’s no longer the spontaneous and somewhat anarchic expression of creativity that barnacled the hull of the International Festival.

      2. 220728 says:

        Fury is the title of Salman Rushdie’s 2001 novel; and fury, mostly repressed, which erupts and feeds upon itself in his performances, is the energy that moves and consumes Jerry Sadowitz.

        Rushdie declared himself delighted by the energy and variety of New York when he moved there in early 2000. He compared it to Bombay, roamed its ’hoods, and bathed in the bubbliest of its literary and celebrity hot-tubs. Malik, the hero of his novel, has a much darker vision of the city

        Malik narrates New York as the ancient Rome of the contemporary world, which is corrupted by the voracity and hideous waste of its hyperthyroid global economy. It engorge its own culture and values like a python swallowing its tail, consuming those of everyone else in the process. Malik’s ventures and misadventures serve largely to expound that vision and cast it in a hallucinatory light.

        Malik’s backstory is that, as an academic historian of ideas, he devised a BBC television show, in which a girl puppet called ‘Little Brain’ interrogates the Great Philosophers. The show was a highbrow success, but, before long, media moguls seized and commercialised it. They created a Little Brain serial, in which she now had a love interest and weekly adventures. The serial spawned Little Brain dolls, speaking tours, tie-ins, spin-offs, syndications… Malik lost control of his creation in exchange for a lot of money.

        Malik swallowed down the rape of Little Brain, but acquiescence breeds ressentiment breeds rage. ‘Fury stood above him like a cresting Hokusai wave.’ That fury is fed by other acquiescent roots. His stepfather abused him as a child, which abuse he failed (because he was powerless) to resist. Dubdub, his closest Cambridge friend, went on to teach at Princeton, became a popular success, submitted to celebrity, and killed himself. ‘The more he became a Personality, the less like a person he felt.’

        New York’s delights are easy and poisonous; Malik’s pronouncements on it are ingenious and acute. Denunciations sprout like dandelions. Malik complains that the shoddy goods sold by sidewalk vendors would count as luxuries in many parts of the world. He speaks of $300 corkscrews, escort services that feature contortionists and twins, and ‘featherlight shawls made from the chin-fluff of extinct mountain goats.’

        And if you think there’s too much confection in the last phrase, that’s the very point: too much sickly-sweet confection masks all that’s wrong in the world, and it’s our acquiesence to such a surfeit that sublimates into the very fury that Sadowitz pours into his stand-up and Malik into his narration, flies airliners into the World Trade Centre (the novel was published seven days before the 9/11 attack), and sends Hadi Matar onto a New York stage with a knife in his hand.

        ‘Anger is heavier than air and comes at the expense of flight.’

  3. SleepingDog says:

    In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the lady Olivia reproves her steward Malvolio (reportedly ‘a kind of puritan’) with the following speech (A1s5):
    “Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste
    with a distempered appetite. To be generous,
    guiltless and of free disposition, is to take those
    things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon-bullets:
    there is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do
    nothing but rail; nor no railing in a known discreet
    man, though he do nothing but reprove.”
    which ties free speech to a kind of role morality. Of course, Olivia can sack her fool if he proves tiresome; others in her household don’t have that power.

    Searching the web for linkages between role morality and free speech threw up this blog post commenting on potential conflicts between the roles of legal representation and pastoral care at an undergraduate college.
    http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2021/09/speech-and-role-morality.html
    I don’t know what limits lawyers accept on free speech in defending clients. But presumably they should have to accept some consequences for the kinds of clients they choose to represent.

    I expect these days that a comedy venue would be considered to have a duty of care to accurately describe and age-rate the material of comedians they choose to host (Stewart Lee writing in the Guardian said that he would have appreciated some advanced warning of the content of the 12+ show he took a 12-year-old to). However, it seems difficult to argue that a novelist has any similar duty of care to readers, unless self-publishing under malicious/harmful deception (Peppa Pig gets tortured by her dentist sort of thing). Well, acknowledging that some, like Jack Zipes in Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter, argue that children’s literature doesn’t exist in practice.

  4. Mr E says:

    Decrying the supression of free speech on internet blogs veers towards the hypocritical. Many internet blogs tend to be little experiments on the implementation of little bubbles of 1984 thought manipulation implemented through language, subject, and vapourisation.

    1. 220816 says:

      Many blogs and their associated communities do tend to function as ‘bubbles’, within which the endless repetition of formulaic language tends to evaporate the matters they address; innovation within these bubbles (i.e. deviation from the prescribed formulae) also tends to be met with behaviour that seeks to exclude the transgressor (e.g. with abuse and name-calling). People do tend to seek out online communities that confirm rather than challenge their own existing prejudices or ‘truths’, and to jealously guard those safe spaces against perceived interlopers.

      1. We are a ‘bubble’ in the sense that if media outlets are just amorphous clouds of ‘opinion’ it’s difficult to connect. We aren’t really ashamed of having an editorial stance – which we regularly articulate – but we do also publish views which clash with that and I (personally) disagree with – but think have merit.

        It’s a challenge, but its one we’ve been navigating through for a while.

        More on this here:

        https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/our-comments-policy/

        1. 220816 says:

          There’s nothing wrong with having an editorial stance; it’s what orients a blog and provides its perspective. Bella represents a particular perspective on ‘Scotland’ without which we would be all the poorer.

          I’m just saying that, in the plurality of such things, people tend to gravitate to those perspectives that confirm rather than challenge their own existing orientations or ‘prejudices’, thus forming ‘bubbles’ or communities of knowledge with their own shibboleths; that is, ritualised ways of speaking that serve to signal loyalty and affinity and maintain the segregation of others. (See Tim Mcnamara: ’21st century Shibboleth: Language tests, identity and intergroup conflict’, in Language Policy 4 (Heidelberg, 2005).)

          1. People do tend to gravitate to communities of interest that’s true. We attempt to disrupt that and present a range of views. Examples might be Maxwell Macleod (reluctant Unionist) or David Jamieson (from a pro Brexit stance from the left) – both opinions I disagree with bit am happy to publish, for example.

            You are an example of someone who challenges and critiques ‘our’ view constantly and that is to be welcomed – as are the people who challenge you? This is an ongoing argument…

          2. 220817 says:

            Indeed, the plurality of views that offer themselves for critique on Bella is one of its great virtues; the open dialogue it allows ‘below the line’, in the comments section, is another. This is all welcomely agoraic.

            There’s a writer who works our of the Department of Anthropology at York University, Othon Alexandrakis, who, earlier this year, published Radical Resilience: Athenian Topographies of Precarity and Possibility, which relates narratives of Athenians struggling to survive the impoverishment of relentless austerity measures, compounding emergencies, and human disasters of successive national crises in Greece since 2010, and which is presented as a kind of ‘prefigurement’ of the more general global crisis we’re currently experiencing. In the book (and in an earlier paper he published in Anthropology Quarterly in 2013, ‘New Agora: Exploring Survival, Emergence, and Political Subjectivity Among Pluralized Subaltern Communities in Athens, Greece’, Othon discourses on the importance of such spaces in the formation of our subjective identities and in the emergence of new forms of collective poitical agency in neoliberal contexts. His basic message that the crises are themselves radically transformative and produce more resilient communities among subaltern or excluded groups in society.

            Anyhow, whether this is intended or unintended consequence your editorial policy, Bella’s ‘anthropological function’ in providing such an agoraic space is of timely value. We could do with many more ‘Bellas’.

    2. SleepingDog says:

      @Mr E, you appear to be confusing moderated platforms with free speech. Bellacaledonia (“our whole purpose is to create a platform”) was in part a response to overwhelming biases in corporate media in the UK. The Internet allows people the freedom to set up their own blogs for close-to-zero cost, where they can express themselves (on their own behalf or that of a patron). Reasonable jurisdictions of free speech don’t just allow anyone to turn up anywhere (a school say, or a library) and start talking at people. As well as being open to abuses (like spam, stalking, information warfare and trolling), the result could be cacophony, and the drowning of voices in the din. Arguing that blogs should not have a distinctive theme and editorial direction seems like calling for a perverse unfreedom. Why are you afraid of experiments?

      1. This is a constant battle and tension between allowing anyone to say anything and moderating a conversation. It is akin to being in a bar with several people around a table. Someone joins and begins to be loud and obnoxious and in your face, this goes on and on and on and eventually the group either leaves or eject the other person. The other person (who is almost never reflective of their own behaviour) then complains that this is infringing their ‘free speech’. The person is almost never had any experience of managing or moderating a public forum.

        Bella does have a theme and an editorial outlook – but also tries to keep that loose and eclectic.

        If you can find me another blog with a wider group and number of contributors Mr E I’d be happy to see it.

  5. Anna says:

    Mike,
    Why do you cringe at the use of “stooshie”?
    It seems appropriate here: my Concise Scots Dictionary (spelling it stushie) defines it as “an uproar, commotion, quarrel, row; a (usually unnecessary) fuss, bother”. In use from 19th century.

    1. 220816 says:

      ‘Stashie’/’stishie’/’stooshie’/’stushie’ seems to have come figuratively from the stramash that starlings (‘stashies’/’stishies’/’stooshies’/’stushies’) make when they’re quarrelling or frolicking.

    2. Hey hi Anna, sorry my confusion. I don’t cringe at the use of ‘stooshie’ I cringe at the BBC Scotland and Scotsman’s use of stooshie. It’s a great word. I’m being a grumpy old git. : )

  6. Niemand says:

    A decent piece except I think it unfair to dismiss Sadowitz as ‘a bit shit’ (that seemed to be the indication). Not seen his latest show but saw him about five years ago and his act was quite extraordinary and exceptional. Hilarious and appalling in some ways but you are supposed to be appalled some of the time, not agree with him. You do realise that he is very highly regarded by other comedians as a very skilled practitioner of the form? And at the end of the day much of the rage is against himself and this is how it works, or at least can be argued to do. Despite all the apparent punching down (and up and sideways) he does, the ultimate target is the worthlessness of himself. He is a mad and bad jester where the insults and rage become surreal and are like a metaphor for everything that is wrong with us.

    It is strong stuff, offensive and there were some jokes I could not laugh at, and having seen him once, it felt like enough. But he is not a bit shit.

    Welcome back from holiday Mike. Hope you are refreshed. Like the new look.

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