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Filed September 24, 2001
Friends,
As you will see from today's column, we need your
help if we are to stop ABC from canceling "Politically
Incorrect." A small group of zealots have intentionally distorted
comments made by Bill Maher, and succeeded in putting the show's future in
jeopardy. If you agree that we can simultaneously rally around the flag
and allow dissent and free speech to flourish, please email comments
directly to ABC at netaudr@abc.com
Also, if you know anybody in the ABC or Disney
hierarchy, please give them a call. This is not just about one show --
it's about avoiding the first step on a really dangerous slippery slope.
Thank you so much.
Arianna
LAND OF THE FREE?
Since Sept. 11, we've been told again and again that
our failure to act in a certain way would be the moral equivalent of
allowing the terrorists to win. As in: "If we don't get back to work,
they win"; or "If we don't go ahead and play football this
weekend, they win"; or "If this changes the way we think about
Arab-Americans, they win."
And, in a way, it's true -- few us of are going to
be fighting the battle on the ground in Afghanistan, but there are ways in
which we can all do our part. Ways that include resolutely defending
values that define our country. But just as this new military battleground
is going to be complicated and risky, so, too, is the one at home. And in
the last few days, there is one front where it appears that our enemies
might be winning: the First Amendment. To the extent that we give up our
fundamental freedoms of expression and dissent, then, yes,
"they" have clearly won.
One of those battles is going on right now. It
involves Bill Maher, who has been excoriated for what he said on
"Politically Incorrect" last week. But excoriation -- a valuable
form of free speech -- is not a problem. Censorship is.
Aren't "they" winning when three ABC
affiliates, including the Washington, D.C., station, cancel the show?
Aren't "they" winning when networks cave
in to rabble-rousing, self-promoting radio shock jocks like Dan Patrick
from Houston who started this tempest in a teapot, and who midweek called
the show to suggest himself as a guest?
And aren't "they" winning when major
sponsors like Federal Express and Sears put a higher price on their
corporate image than on the essential democratic ingredient of free speech
by pulling their ads? These companies have no problems defending
capitalism, but they shrink from defending the values that make it
possible.
When the country just learned with such penetrating
anguish what real terror is, how can the corporate logo polishers fear
Bill Maher? Particularly when the point he was making was such an
important one.
So what, exactly, was his point?
In response to guest Dinesh D'Souza's assertion that
people who are willing to die in service to their cause, whatever else
they may be, are not "cowards," Maher said: "We have been
the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's
cowardly."
I was sitting next to Bill when he said this. And
not only did I not object, I wholeheartedly agreed. In fact, in the past,
I've made much the same criticism of a foreign policy that obliges our
military to fight at great remove from the theater of battle. It was a
mistake when we bombed a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan, and it was a
mistake when we killed the very Albanian refugees we were trying to
protect with our indiscriminate carpet-bombing of Kosovo.
President Bush, himself, has been making much the
same point that Bill Maher did: "It will not look like the air war
above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a
single American was lost in combat."
Presumably, if Maher had made those same comments on
Sept. 10, nobody would have batted an eyelid. But by uttering the same
opinion seven days later, he put the very existence of his show at risk.
Have we all gone mad?
What becomes of a country when opinions considered
perfectly legitimate -- and indeed uttered by hundreds of academics,
journalists and members of Congress -- suddenly become a crime worthy of
the media death penalty?
If the attacks on innocent American lives end up
making us more like our attackers, don't they most spectacularly win? And
don't the corporate sponsors, the affiliates and ABC itself see the
inconsistency in the fact that, as a way of showing solidarity against the
Taliban, they are using the Taliban's trademark weapon -- the stifling of
dissent?
Isn't freedom what we're fighting for? And isn't
lack of freedom -- including freedom of the press -- the hallmark of our
enemies?
"Cowardly" was the injurious word uttered
by Maher. Well, let me use it now where it really belongs -- to describe
ABC if it decides to cancel a show that is, after all, called
"Politically Incorrect."
The show in question was the first since the attack.
At curtain time, the studio was electric with anxiety. "Politically
Incorrect," though it deals with serious subjects, is, after all, a
satirical program. So we all held our breath as Bill stepped onto the
tightrope.
Maher's tone-setting opening comments, which took
the place of his usual monologue, were nothing short of brilliant and --
in light of the media firestorm that followed -- remarkably prescient.
"I do not relinquish," he said, "nor
should any of you, the right to criticize, even as we support, our
government. This is still a democracy, and they're still politicians ...
Political correctness itself is something we can no longer afford.
Feelings are gonna get hurt so that actual people won't, and that will be
a good thing." At the end of the show, the audience rose in a
standing ovation -- something I had never seen before.
As well as being the host of the show, Bill is my
friend. And, as his friend, I was really proud of him. Proud of how
perfect a note he had struck between rallying around the flag, showing
grief and expressing dissent. How he had shown that they are not mutually
contradictory. And everything that has happened since has only made me
prouder of him -- and more disgusted at the politically correct cowards
who are trying to stifle him.
We cannot let them succeed, for, as Benjamin
Franklin put it, "Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation
must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/092401.html
Copyright © 1998-2001 Christabella, Inc.
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