You're
Wrong
An
Irregular Column
by
Mykel Board
“Without
free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth
is useful... Better a thousandfold abuses of free speech than denial
of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the
life of the people, and entombs
the hope of the race.” – Charles Bradlaugh
[NOTE:
Because of the delay between writing and publishing... and because of
the (especially American) shortness of memory... the circumstances of
this column will probably be forgotten by the time you read it. Even
if you don't remember the case... I hope you get the point.]
It
was more embarrassing than a hard-on at a lesbian bar. Right there,
in the little ads section on the right-hand side of my Facebook
page... among the ads specially chosen for me... mixed in with (my
favorite) FIND GIRLS WHO LIKE TO DRINK
promotion...
an ad sponsored by the lefty phone company Credo:
Tell Rush Limbaugh's advertisers: Stop
supporting attacks on women.
It says.
Not being a regular
Rush listener, I don't even know that he said anything special until
I see this ad. The only way liberals hear about Limbaugh's spew is
through fanatical media monitors... guys and gals who listen to
everything from the other side... then get outraged by it...
professional outragers... call in the protest wagon!
The right-wing has
a slew of these I'm-telling-on-you spies. They monitor every
TV and radio channel, every website... record everything. They urge
boycotts for anything that supports homotude or questions
Christianity. Pro-Israelis also have a slew of these fanatics. They
urge boycotts for anything nice to Muslims.
Example:
when All-American Muslim
premiered on The Learning Channel,
pressure from the pro-Israel right forced the Lowe's company to drop
its ads for that show.
The
right-wing Florida Family Association,
also pushing advertisers to drop that program,
cheered
Lowe's decision. The
rest of us felt a little ashamed.
Remember
Janet Jackson's tit? Hooey, what an outrage. A nipple (and I think
the nipple was covered) on TV! Oh no! Boycott that girl!
And
The Dixie Chicks... saying something nasty about GW Bush Jr.?
Horrible! Boycott them too.
Go
to yourchristianspace.com.
You'll find a list of “companies that support gay rights,” and
suggestions to boycott them...NOW! Before it's too late!
If,
in our society, the way ideas can reach the masses is through the
support of corporations... and the reaction to any idea we don't like
is to boycott those corporate supporters... The corporate world will
just stop taking risks... stop supporting ANYTHING that people may
not like. The range of ideas will shrink. There'll be nothing but THE
FOOD CHANNEL, and JERSEY SHORE. I expect there are people who want to
boycott those too.
Listen
buckaroos, the antidote to speech you don't like is not to ban it,
but to answer it with speech you DO like. When Rush Limbaugh caved in
and apologized for calling this Catholic college student “a slut,”
Michael Moore tweeted this:
Rush--
as soon as you started losing the big $$ from your hate speech you
caved and obeyed the men who pay u. Who's the prostitute now, bitch?
Go Michael! That's
the way to answer the bully pulpit. Don't ban 'em. Yell back at 'em!
As of this writing
50 companies pulled their ads from the show. Two stations WBEC in
Pittsfield, Massachusetts and KPUA in Hilo, Hawaii stopped carrying
the show.
Flash
to a Korean bar in midtown NYC:
I'm with April, one of my colored pals.
[Note to new
readers: I don't get along with white people... especially white
Americans. There are some okay ones, I'll admit. I've even met
some... but as a group, they give me the creeps. Usually, it goes
without saying that I'm with someone of some kind of color...
yellow... brown... black... red...but here it's important, so I
mention it. You'll see why.]
We talk about Rush
Limbaugh.
“Sure,” April
say, “let him say what he wants about us... about Obama... “the
welfare cheats”... everybody knows he's talking about this,” she
points to her brown arm, “but does anyone complain? Naw, no one
complains...no boycotts”
I raise my
eyebrows, signaling her to continue.
She does, “But
let him insult one white girl and POW!! The shit hits the central air
conditioning.”
“So you agree
with me on this free speech stuff?” I ask.
“I
don't give a shit about that,” she says. “What pisses me off is
that there's plenty of white women in the 1% and not plenty of
African Americans... Colored people
to you, Mykel... That fat white guy can say what he wants about
US...
no boycotts... no demands to take him
off the air.
But let him insult the purity of one white girl and..”
She snaps her
fingers that way that colored girls have of snapping their fingers...
making a large Z in the air, and adding a swish of the shoulder...
You could just die watching it!
She continues,
“you've got Michael Moore tweeting and the president calling her
up.... One white girl... Pisses me off.”
Wow! There's a
point of view I hadn't even considered. Up to now it seemed just a
question of free speech. Give the widest birth to the widest number
of ideas. Now we've got class war... or race war... or something.
Hmmmm.
Flash
back to now: April
was right, of course. The Republican War
on Women has
been the biggest vote getter for the Democrats. Not their war on the
poor... their war on Muslims...their war on colored people... their
war on the 99%... Nope, people with money can't get behind those
things. But a WAR ON WOMEN... that's something Ms.... and Mr.
Middleclass can be proud to fight against.
It only confirms
what I started out saying. That is, we need the widest possible
variety of viewpoints in the media. We need the broadest
representation of politics and of people.
Instead of kicking
Rush off the air, we should be demanding shows for Muslims. Instead
of boycotting Rush's sponsors, we should be urging them to ALSO
sponsor THE NEGRO HOUR, ANARCHY AT NOON and MEXICANS TAKE IT BACK. We
need MORE opinions, not fewer.
Did
you know there was a gay Muslim/Arab
organization? Did you know there
is a Black Agenda Radio program?
They don't have shows on major stations. AOL never supported them,
let alone pulled out. Fans of their shows probably don't have enough
money to make even the minimum for a Capital One account, let alone
threaten a boycott. (Capital One, like AOL, ditched Limbaugh.)
Facebook
hosts Somos
el 99%, a Hispanic group supporting
the struggling barrel bottom. That's it...
just a page on Facebook. Where's their corporate sponsorship? Hello
Fubu?
How come you never
heard of these groups? How come you're not out there demanding a spot
for them... on Fox, perhaps?
I'll tell you why.
You're too busy protesting Rush. You're too busy worrying about how
to LIMIT speech instead of expanding it for EVERYONE.
In Europe, most
countries have a strong government-supported PUBLIC broadcasting
system. This guarantees free speech across a wide spectrum of
speakers. There is no tyranny of the market place on these stations.
Marketplace be damned. But in the US, even the weak “Public”
Broadcasting System is beholden to corporations to make ends meet.
Anything they do is subject to the power of consumers... and their
manipulators.
Am I against all
boycotts?
Of course not. If a
store sells sweatshop clothes... or a cellphone maker uses
exploitation factories... or a restaurant steals tips... or a farm or
a factory exposes its workers to dangerous chemicals... I say, yeah!
Boycott! But the boycott is a tool... like a hammer. You can use it
to pound in a nail... or to hit someone over the head. Boycotts
attacking speech are hitting someone over the head. You may enjoy
seeing it... until the head that's hit is yours.
ENDNOTES:
[email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com)
or blog viewers (mykelsblog.blogspot.com/)
will get live links and a chance to post comments on the column]
-->It's
about time dept:
Awhile ago, I wrote a column talking about how it's time to leave
Hitler behind. How Hitler has become a meme, a cliché, and is used
to justify the most horrible and inane actions.
We can lock the
Palestinians in ghettos... because of Hitler. Hitler was a vegetarian
so you shouldn't be. We see pictures of Obama as Hitler on Tea Party
posters. My Israeli pal, Nadav, tells me the left in Israel dresses
up Prime Ministers in gestapo uniforms-- with little mustaches-- to
complain about them.
ENOUGH ALREADY!
Let's move on.
Hitler has been
dead for longer than 80% of the world has been alive. Get over it!
That's what I said in the column.
Recently, I saw a
different way that we could kill Hitler once-and-for-all. Make him
CAMP... like Che Guevara. That's the second best solution (after just
forgetting him, or relegating him to the past... like Attila the
Hun).
CAMP
is what's going on in
Thailand. Colonel
Sanders with a mustache and comb-over. Hello Kitty... Mickey Mouse
with just-under-the-nose-mustaches. It's so extreme. I love it. It
makes the guy FUNNY... KITCH... IMPOTENT. I'll take that over a
Hitler-faced Obama (or Netanyahu)any day.
-->Could
be good-bye dept:
I started writing this before my African trip. I emailed it in from
France. Right now there are riots in Senegal, exactly where I'll be
going. There's always a chance I won't make it back. Up until the
point of my demise, in any case, you can read my travel adventures
at: http://mykelsdiary.blogspot.com/
By the way, how
much do you hear about Africa on TV in America? Fox... or CNN? Only
if it affects “our” interests, then we hear something. Could we
have some free speech about Chad? Don't get me started.
-->Happened
again dept:
The Indiana Star reports
that an anti-gay Republican representative, Phillip Hinkle, arranged
to pay an 18-year old guy $140 for "a really good time" at
an Indianapolis hotel. The two met on Craigslist, and Hinkle "exposed
himself" to the guy. The politician has decided not to run for
reelection.
Actually,
the most disturbing thing about this is how The
Indiana Star found
the emails that set it up. They seem to be e-spying like in the
Murdock papers. Nobody on the left is complaining though. They like
the scandal too much... as long as it's THEM, not US. Fuck the rights
of the accused. Right? He's on the OTHER side anyway.
-->Try
it with the crescent and star dept:
The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles has approved a license plate
with three crosses and the words "One State Under God." on
it. Somehow, the locals say, it's a free speech issue, though this is
THE STATE speaking, not some individual like Rush Limbaugh.
I hope others:
Satanists and Muslims for starters... demand their own license
plates. We'll see how far they get.
-->Tossing
out the bad Apple? dept: For
the past few months I've been ranting against the fashion that is
Apple. Why hit it when so many other targets (like Wal-Mart) are so
much easier, and maybe nastier?
The
answer, of course, is that the readers of this zine are likely to use
Apple products and support all the associated evil. Now, it turns
out, Apple might get Obama reelected. (Me? I'm voting for the GREEN
PARTY ticket!)
The
Wall Street Journal reports
that the recent economic upturn-- and fine future projections-- are
lies, distorted by Apple.
Says
the Journal, Fourth-quarter earnings in
the S&P 500 are up over 6.6 percent from the previous year. But
if Apple's earnings are bracketed out, the gains shrivel to just 2.8
percent.
If
Obama wins on “the economy”... Apple did that too!
-->Isn't
Google a good company-- just like Apple dept:
This Week Magazine reports
that Google has been bypassing privacy settings to track the web
habits of people using Apple's Safari browser. Google put cookies on
the phones and computers of users, even if they said they don't want
to be tracked.
Google says it has
halted the practice, but Microsoft charged that Google also
circumvented privacy controls on their Internet Explorer... and still
does.
-->Tough
one to call dept:
Church and State Magazine reports
Oregon's ban on teachers wearing religious dress has been repealed.
Civil rights groups had been fighting against the law, stating that
it “denies equal employment opportunity to religious minorities.”
Christian crosses have long been allowed, but headscarves and turbans
were banned. Sounds like a victory for free religious speech, right?
Hold
on: The problem is that the law's repeal could
allow teachers to claim any attire as part of their religious
exercise, including proselytizing pins and t-shirts.
That could be a serious violation of church-state separation, and a
toe in the door to allow teachers to preach to students.
I
donno about this one, though I'm inclined to say, fuck it. If
teachers want, they can wear their What
would Jesus do? pins.
BUT, students have to be allowed to wear their equally religious What
would GG do? pins
in reply.
--end-
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