Last week I ran across an article featured on my Microsoft Edge welcome screen with a clickbait headline reading that John Cleese has gone to “the dark side.” Vaguely curious (and feeling a little dirty for doing so) I clicked through to see what horrible crime the Monty Python funnyman could possibly have committed.
The evidence of Cleese’s neo-fascism? His fixation on free speech and fighting censorship.
“Cancel culture” the unnamed author assured their readers, is nothing more than a “dog whistle” to whip up right-wing fringe types into attacking women and minorities. (Isn’t the phrase “dog whistle” itself the ultimate self-defining phrase? Every time some woke writer uses the phrase “dog whistle,” the intent is to whip their own readers into a frenzy.)
Free speech should not be a political issue. And it mostly hasn’t been, since the early 1980s when Frank Zappa famously showed up Sen. Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, over the issue of labeling record album covers that contained profanities. Zappa may have lost the battle over that law, but he won the larger cultural battle.
Until recently, a certain common ground, a shared acceptance of at least the basics of what free speech should constitute, has ruled our discourse.
But over the past decade or so, the American Left has been hijacked by a small but vocal cohort that sees free speech as a problem. They call themselves “woke” — somehow believing that they’re the only ones who see the world as it really is, and everyone else needs to be muzzled for the good of society.
If the New Left, such as it is, is going to concede the issue of free speech to the Right, the Right is going to win every time. There are simply too many people who still want to be able to hang out with friends and discuss everything from literature to music, science to sports without worrying that a slip of the tongue or an opinion not absolutely grounded in the latest woke theology will lead to their professional ruination.
As President Obama put it a couple days ago, “Sometimes people just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells, and they want some acknowledgment that life is messy and that all of us, at any given moment, can say things the wrong way, make mistakes.”
The New Left seems intent on excommunicating everyone who steps even a little bit out of line — and that’s no way to build a movement. You simply cannot sustain an intellectual life with the kinds of constraints that the woke are intent on placing on society. (And, both predictably and unfortunately, there is a small, equally rabid contingent on the Right that wants to respond to each act of woke censorship with its own act of censorship supposedly targeting the woke.)
I am heartened by the fact that we are seeing a sort of unofficial alliance on the issue of free speech between the Right and the Old Left — and the wokesters aren’t liking it. Not one bit.
The wokesters’ campaign of excommunication depends on being able to leverage fear to impose conformity. What they seem to overlook is that authentic leftists don’t give a rat’s patoot about what is written about them on Twitter; that the old-school leftists understand that nobody gave the wokesters the authority to decide who is and isn’t a “real” leftist. (This indifference of legitimate leftists to political fashion was wonderfully illustrated by the great writer and intellectual Irving Howe at an anti-war rally in the late 1960s, when some bearded student in blue jeans and a faded army shirt stood up and told Howe he was a sell-out — because Howe was wearing a suit and tie. Howe looked at his young detractor and said, “You know what you're going to be? You're going to be a dentist.”)
Some unnamed writer yammering that John Cleese is now a right-winger does not, in fact, make John Cleese a right-winger. Nor does reposting a bunch of tweets from other woke nerds complaining that Cleese is no longer funny make, Cleese, in fact unfunny. (He had a hilarious cameo in 2020's “The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee” — check out the trailer at about the 1 minute mark.)
And so you have both pop culture lefties like Cleese and Bill Maher and old-school intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Salman Rushdie refusing to bow a knee to the woke, and basically ignoring the attacks (which only seems to infuriate the woke even more — as ignoring them rather makes the point that they don’t have any actual authority).
For those much further removed from the spotlight than Cleese, Maher and Chomsky, many of those who are “kicked out” of the nerd club will likewise refuse to bow down and beg forgiveness — and simply shrug, pick up their belongings, and look for somewhere new to hang their hat.
Many of these targets of woke “cancel culture” will find a warm welcome from their conservative friends and colleagues — or even strangers online. We’re seeing this with former New York Times staffer Bari Weiss and Pulitzer-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who both have found lucrative followings here on Substack.
There still are — thankfully — too many authentic leftists who feel no need to try to silence their opponents (nor turn them into enemies), who believe strongly enough in their world view that they are confident it will withstand strenuous opposition and even attacks.
And more and more of them — including Cleese — are refusing to be cowed by the name-calling and threats of “cancellation.”
A healthy democracy needs a healthy Left and a healthy Right, each engaged in the battle for the supremacy of ideas. Our own nation was founded on such an ideological tension, and has only survived going on 250 years because both sides respected voters enough to believe that if presented with compelling arguments, minds could be changed over time.
Free speech is not, as our anonymous writer above claims, some nefarious right-wing conspiracy — it is a core, foundational underpinning of a free society, of a representative government, of the intellectual life.
It belongs to all of us — for Americans, it is our birthright. For too many others around the world, it is only a distant dream.
At some point, authentic leftists are going to have to retake their movement from the woke poseurs who have used social media to hijack the Left.
When that moment comes, those on the Right need to be gracious enough to acknowledge the changing of the guard, and welcome their loyal opposition back to the arena of ideas — and to freely admit that the woke do not represent all leftists, nor even a necessarily authentic model of the Left.
Reading Ted Gioa’s recent column, “How I Got Fired From the Jazz Police,” brought to mind my late friend Doug Balding.
Not that Doug was a musical purist of any stripe — but he had his own unique way of looking askance at bands that became too successful.
I met Doug while working at The Daily Aztec, the student newspaper at San Diego State, in the early ’80s. Or maybe it was at KCR, the student radio station. Doug was one of the few who had a foot in both worlds, broadcast and print. (Doug was also, along with a staff photographer named Jimmy, our graphic artist Joe, and a reporter named Brad E., possessed of one of the great belly laughs in history. When the four of them started laughing together in the Daily Aztec newsroom, it was impossible to resist — you didn’t even have to know what you were laughing at to join in.)
While almost everyone at the Daily Aztec then was into alternative music — just as alternative was beginning to come on the scene — most of the other writers on staff, and most of the other DJs at KCR, all would gladly concede that Doug’s knowledge of the music was far beyond theirs.
Now, being a campus newspaper that had a weekly arts section, The Daily Aztec received complimentary review copies of LPs from just about every label in the country — from the majors down to little one-man shops. I mean, nobody spent more money on buying music back then than college students, and so the record labels sent us everything from classical to country, hoping one of us would be interested enough to write a review.
And nearly every independent and regional label was providing free albums to KCR, hoping to get airplay.
So for a guy in his early 20s, Doug was remarkably plugged into a pre-Internet music scene.
Thus a college student in San Diego got turned on to the groundbreaking post-punk scene in Minneapolis — he was playing cuts from The Replacements and Hüsker Dü before the commercial “cutting edge” station in town had any idea who they were.
But as mentioned above Doug could come off as a bit of an inverse snob. He distrusted fame, questioned success, was suspicious of bands that had large followings.
I think it was the adventure of discovery that Doug so loved — he wasn’t actually a snob; Doug was the most grounded person I ever met.
But when some underground band nobody had ever heard that he was championing somehow broke through and hit the big time, Doug tended to lose interest.
And so it was with The Replacements.
Doug was all over The Replacements from the moment they started recording for their hometown indie label, Twin/Tone, in 1981. He was like an evangelist, wanting to talk about their latest release, some antic at one of their shows, an interview he’d read.
When lead guitarist Bob Stinson — generally referred to by Doug as “Naked Bob” for his propensity to lose his clothes in the midst of a set — was fired in 1985 shortly before the band left Twin/Tone for major label Sire Records, Doug was done. “They sold out!” he proclaimed. I don’t know if he ever listened to them again.
In the late 1980s, I ended up co-editing a glossy table-top politics and culture magazine titled A Critique of America. When my co-editor, Ray (who’d gotten me the gig), and I were told we could hire a full-time music editor so we could expand our arts coverage, we both looked at each other and said “Doug!” There was no doubt in our minds who should head up our music section.
Doug was into a whole new passel of underground bands by then — but his excitement over a new discovery hadn’t dimmed in the half-dozen years since the three of us had worked together at The Daily Aztec.
But by now I think we’d realized that Doug’s relationships with bands was that of a serial polygamist. There was the initial flirtation, the growing infatuation, and then the eventual, inescapable breakup. It was like pre-Amal Georoge Clooney — without the goodbye jewelry.
So when Doug would come to us all excited about some new band, Ray and I would grill him like we would a friend with a bad track record in romance.
“I don’t know Doug, this sounds too good to be true.” We’d ask questions to ensure this new band hadn’t already gotten too successful for Doug’s taste: “Have they signed with a major? A major minor? Is their album on cassette or LP? How many fans at their last show?”
After awhile, it may have gotten a little mean: “I don’t know Doug; are you sure they’re still practicing in their mom’s garage?” or “Hmmm ... playing at a street fair seems a little high-falutin’ for our audience, Doug. I mean, there could be 500 people watching them play!”
Doug — mostly — took the ribbing in good humor. “You guys!” and a roll of the eyes was about the worst he’d give back. And he always humored our weird taste in the blues and jazz when it came to planning out each issue of the magazine.
The owner of the magazine wasn’t much older than us employees, and none of us had any prior experience at running a magazine. It all ended in spectacularly ugly fashion, and Doug ended up relocating to Los Angeles.
We lost him nine years ago this summer; I still exchange Christmas cards each year with his wife and two sons — and can’t hear a song by The Replacements without thinking of Naked Bob, my friend Doug, and Doug’s great laugh.
-30-
Amen!