February 21, 2013
Michael Mayo
The Sun Sentinel

RE: “Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee” – Some comments on your column about whether or not Colonel West should be allowed to speak in a public arena, particularly one funded by taxpayers.

Mr. Mayo,

You may recognize the above as the title of a book on free speech by Nat Hentoff.

In 2000, when I lived in Lauderdale by the Sea, the town council debated a speech bill. They wanted to pass an ordinance banning all “crude and offensive speech” at public meetings.

In a back and forth with “them” I asked what would happen if I were to tell the female clerk to “get thee to a nunnery”? When Hamlet told Ophelia to do so “nunneries” were short hand for French Knocking Shoppes”, AKA whore houses.

My intent was to show that language is a living organism. I was even going to tell them what Yeats meant when he spoke of “dying”. I never did get to Molly’s “Yes” soliloquy. That would have gotten us to Ezra Pound who edited both of them and that would have been an invitation to the notorious chilling effect.

Hentoff told me to get arrested and that he would write a column about me in the Village Voice.

“That’s easy for you to say” was my response.

Your Voltaire-like defense of Colonel West puts you on the slippery slope to having your membership in the modern American Liberal ink-stained wretch cabal revoked. Those poltroons don’t like anyone, particularly those thought to be “theirs”, wandering off the reservation. You may have to spend some time “getting your head straight”.

On September 18, 200i, Agent Thomas and Agent Mineva of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, men with badges and guns as my wife was quick to point out, came to my home because of something I wrote to the paradigmatic template of modern American: Liberalism, then Florida State Senator Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

It was the classic good cop-bad cop routine as any former Bayonne resident could tell you. Agent Mineva, the bad cop, told me – A – to stop writing to Little Debbie and –B – stop writing to all public officials.

My response, “Free men speak with free tongues”, was good advice when it was given by one of those pesky, still dead, White European males 2&1/2 millennia ago. It fell on deaf ears.

3 years later, when Broward Deputy Sheriff Joe Kessling came to my house about something I wrote to Miriam Oliphant [Allah almighty but that woman was world class dumb, wasn’t she?] the first thing he said to me was “You’re not in trouble”.

“What do you mean I’m not in trouble? You have a badge and a fucking gun. What do you mean I’m not in trouble?”

Do you see a pattern developing here?

If Christians are offended because a tax-payer supported play, “Corpus Cristi”, a play that says that Christ was crucified because of a lovers’ quarrel with Judas Iscariot, we are told that artistic freedom trumps your feelings.

Saturday Night Live is being criticized because for a satiric skit about the crucifixion of Christ. The criticism is marginalized because “they”, Neanderthal bitter clingers all, have no sense of the aesthete, no sense of artistic expression.

Can you imagine the uproar if Mohammed were to be portrayed as a goat humping pedophile?

I can’t either because it would never happen. Never ever. Never.

Free speech is like pregnancy. Either it is or it isn’t; either she is or she isn’t.

Have you heard the one about 2 85 year old men, one Black and the other Jewish, fighting in the street? Myron Cohen tells it better. It seems that the Black guy asks the Jew….




KEVIN SMITH
WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET