The Age of Apoplexy
Are the controversial comments of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (or Larry Summers or Bill O’Reilly or NARAL) really so threatening?
* By Kurt Andersen
For a while now, I’ve fretted that we’re turning into a nation of weenies and permanently enraged censors, that too many of us are afraid of letting disagreeable or uncomfortable ideas into the limelight. If it’s not the p.c. overreach of campus “speech codes” or the attempts to criminalize “hate speech,” it’s the FCC’s crackdown on cussing in PBS documentaries and the Secret Service’s keeping protesters fenced off in “free speech zones.” But during the last month, this impulse to squelch—indulged by the left and the right and the milquetoast middle—seems to have reached some kind of tipping point, as if we’ve entered a permanent state of hysterical overreaction.
For me, the opening moment of this scaredy-cat season came during a radio interview I was recording with Sean Penn. While we were discussing Into the Wild, his new movie celebrating balls-out American freedom, I asked about his recent visit to Venezuela. Penn’s endorsement of Hugo Chávez’s socialism is fine with me, I said, but how did he square his embrace of Chávez with the régime’s depredations against liberty in Venezuela? Penn tensed up, but he seemed game to thrash it out, to explain why I was a tool of the Republican Big Lie Machine—until his personal publicist, eavesdropping from the next room, popped in to insist that we stop speaking freely about restrictions on free speech in Venezuela.
Days later, the former president of Harvard, Larry Summers, was disinvited as a dinner speaker by the California university system’s board of regents because of his controversial suggestion in 2005 that the underrepresentation of women in science might be the result of more than just sexism. And at Stanford, students and teachers became apoplectic over the appointment of Donald Rumsfeld as a visiting fellow by the university’s conservative think tank.
Then it was the East Coast’s turn to get all hysterical and drama-queeny: During a single week at the end of September, everyone from the Daily News to the Democratic speaker of the New York City Council denounced Columbia for inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak (and Hillary Clinton joined the mob in saying he should be turned away by police—at gunpoint?—if he tried to go near ground zero); Verizon refused to broadcast NARAL’s abortion-rights text messages; Bill O’Reilly’s goofy can’t-we-all-just-get-along attempt to sow racial harmony was called racist; and Congress, after wasting its time officially condemning MoveOn.org for its stupid, over-the-top “General Betray Us” ad, was asked to waste its time condemning Rush Limbaugh’s stupid, over-the-top crack that only “phony soldiers” criticize the war in Iraq.
Some of these episodes were trivial, some significant. Some were about trying to prevent speech (Ahmadinejad, Summers, NARAL), some only about stupendously overreacting to it (O’Reilly, MoveOn). But they all reflect a common temperament: an instinct to repress the disagreeable or the impolitic.
Almost any argument about race, gender, Israel, or the war is now apt to be infected by a spirit of self-righteous grievance and demonization. Passionate disagreement isn’t sufficient; bad faith must be imputed to one’s opponents: skepticism of affirmative action equals racism, antiwar sentiment equals anti-Americanism (or terrorist sympathy), criticism of Israel is by definition anti-Semitic, and so on. More and more people think they’re entitled to the right not just to ignore or disapprove, but to veto and banish. And the craven fear of triggering tantrums leads the responsible authorities—university administrators, politicians, corporate executives—into humiliating, flip-floppy contortions of appeasement.
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http://nymag.com/news/imperialcity/38948/
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