Jon Lovitz has something to say

 I was poking around the inter webs recently (as many many many of us tend to do ESPECIALLY under Covid lockdowns) when I stumbled upon an article that piqued my interest just a tad.

The link to that article is here.

As a birthday present to myself, I will make a blog post (as I've done here and on the main blog) about exactly why this article caught my eye in this way.

Firstly, I'd like to state that his comparison of what we call "cancel culture" to McCarthyism is relatively accurate.

"urm............ duuuuuh........... mick.... coffee-ism.......... durrrr........ wutts dat?"

Oh right. I should realize that there could be a number of people reading this that are either to young or just not so astute about history. So, I need to take some time to make sure everyone is as informed a possible on this subject before continuing.

What Jon Lovitz has done here is compare today's practice of getting people in trouble for a social media post or just anything said in public (or even in private) to that of the House Unamerican Activites Committee hearings that Senator Joe McCarthy set up un the late 1940's and continued to use well into the 1950's.  You see, at the time, Joe felt that there may be too many communists in the United States making concerted efforts to subvert America.  His mission was to root them all out and neutralize them whether it be through deportation (for anyone not born on American soil) or to suppress someone's ability to work as a professional.  This "red scare" that Senator Joe was pushing had the hugest impact on Hollywood where so many creative person's were called to testify before his committee of very VERY partial judges.  A testifying person only had two choices: 1) to "admit" to being a communist subversive, or 2) give the names of everyone they knew who had "subversive leanings".  Worse still was that the criteria to be called to testify was simply to be "suspected" of communist sympathies. If, 30 years ago, you had been in a Grade 2 class with someone now under investigation (and you hadn't even seen of thought about that person since), that would've been enough to make you a suspect.  It was a very bleak time in American history full of human rights violations that should never be repeated ever again.

So hopefully you can see how publicly condemning someone for 10 year old tweets or just hitting the like button on something J.K. Rowling posted is similar to what Joe was doing all those decades ago. Although, one key difference is that back then it was being back then it was a sitting senator carrying out this suppression. In this era, we're just doing that to each other. At least Joe and everyone on that HUAC panel were getting paid their salary for their efforts. The people forming online mobs (or in some cases "in the street" mobs) are getting.......... what exactly? Nothing but a release of emotional masturbation, that's all.  (um.... hey.... to anyone coming on here to say "nO nO nO wE aRe FiGhTiNg FoR sOcIaL pRoGrEsS... yeahNO....... it's emotional masturbation. Own it.)

As you can guess, I'm definitely on side with Mr. Lovitz. I also dislike the chilling effect of self-censorship this mob rule has brought onto politics, art, and free speech in general.  The proponents of this mob rule even have to gall to profess that they're "holding people accountable" (this is of course more of that emotional masturbation I mentioned earlier).  It's somewhat ironic that these same people have a problem with an independent journalist known as Andy Gno. He has taken it upon himself to document and report on the activities of Black Block Antifa and frequently does so on his twitter account.  Many of his critics say that Andy presents a highly skewed image of Antifa because he's got a very pro-conservative bias against them, thus all of his reports are at the very least suspect.  Oh ok.  I'm not here to defend nor condemn Andy, so for the sake of argument let's say these allegations about him are true.  From his perspective, he considers himself to be............. wait for it..................... holding people accountable. If his push for accountability is a highly prejudicial overreach based on ideological biases, then so is the other push.  In a truly free society, NEITHER push for "accountability" (which is merely an entire populous acting as judge, jury, and executioner) should be happening.

Anyway, I brought up this whole thing with Jon Lovitz not to merely profess my alignment with him on this topic.  I do so because just a few years back, Jon was saying something different entirely.

I think we sadly can all remember the huge tragedy that happened at Charlottesville back in August of 2017.

It shocked and horrified many people who watched it on TV and online, and it surely left plenty of physical and mental scars on people who were actually there.  It was after this tragedy that the efforts to suppress speech and expression really got ramped up.  People were calling for the curtailing of speech that upset them. The most extreme example that I saw at the time was the United Nations actually suggesting that then President Trump repeal the First Amendment because "we're afraid of what those alt-right thugs will say next".  Online, Jon Lovitz himself was one of those voices calling for such suppression. "NAZIS SHOULD SHUT UP!!!", was the basic sentiment of his tweets that day.  I remember getting into a twitter feud with him about that very thing. I reminded him that denying speech for anybody, no matter how abhorrent their views of humanity are, leaves too much wiggle room for the suppression of other people's speech.  Well, needless to say, he and everyone on his feed that supported his position were not in the mood to hear any constitutional platitudes that day.  Things got heated for sure, but Im proud to say that neither of us got nasty. We didn't sink to ad hominem and we certainly didn't point to either of our ethnicities in an effort to shut each other down.  Yes, Jon Lovitz is a Jewish man and so it is quite understandable that he would be upset over a line of people with nazi sympathies chanting their mantras in the streets.  All the same, I felt he needed to be reminded that the US constitution has to work for everyone all the time no matter what.  Eventually, he did calm down to a point where both of us could come to an agreement.  I took a screen shot of the tweet exchange that ended our heated discussion on what I think is a positive note:

There it is. He certainly didn't want to throw away the First Amendment. He just didn't enjoy hearing those alt-right people chanting.  That was his biggest concern at the time.  I think maybe now that he's seeing the big chilling effect that anti-free speech sentiment in the wake of Charlottesville has wrought, he can see just how important it is to uphold free speech rather than protect the feelings of those who have trouble handling words.

For real, the absolutely all time dumbest notion to have emerged from that event was that "words can be violent and cause harm therefore such violent words must be suppressed for everyone's safety".  BULLSHIT!!!  Words cannot be violent or hurt anyone or anything. They just sit there being words.  Words are either a brief expulsion of carbon dioxide and water vapour from the mouth, a splash of ink on a sheet of paper, or a tiny swath of digital bits taking up an equally tiny amount of bandwidth on a website.  That's all they are.  In fact, the only time in the entire history of Planet Earth and the universe that words have ever ever EVER and I mean EVER caused any harm was back in 1989.  It was in a made-for TV movie in which Don Adams reprised his Maxwell Smart character that he first made popular in 1965. It was called Get Smart Again.

In that show, the chief is fed up with trying to exchange secret messages to Max through the Cone of Silence because it has always malfunctioned one way or another.  However, one of the engineers at Control Headquarters is very proud of his new invention.  He calls it the Hall of Hush.

How it works is that, whenever either of them says something, the words physically manifest into the room instead of being heard. This way they can foil any bugging devices that their rival KAOS might've planted.

The problem quickly becomes apparent when Max fills the entire room full of words due to his rambling about the merits of this invention.  The room becomes so full of words that the only way Max and the chief can have any room to move is by eating some of the words.

Of course, having to eat a word or two wouldn't count as having pain inflicted upon oneself.  However, just before they start eating, the chief does inform Max of the pain he's feeling.

Right there.  A headache.  That is the only pain ever inflicted upon a person by a word.  A fictional chief in charge of a fictional organization professed to having a headache caused by all of the words physically floating around their heads.  Although, this being a show based on fiction, those words were added afterwards through technology so the actors never really experienced any headache from those words anyway.

So that's the ONLY example of words causing pain. Any other time anyone has claimed to be "harmed by words", it was only because they allowed themselves to feel harmed by those words.  We all have our own agency. We all have the ability to assign as much or as little power to words as we see fit.  That was the philosophy of (certainly who I consider to be) the patron saint of free speech the great Lenny Bruce.  If that brave and courageous man were alive to see the social media mobs demanding the "cancellation" of people who say things that upset others, he would be beyond horrified.  I think, for the good and prosperity of humanity, we need to return and emulate Lenny Bruce's philosophy as much as possible.

I'll end this post with a classic performance of Mr. Lovitz. For his commitment to free expression, he deserves to have his best work showcased for the world to see.  Whether the entire world is reading this blogpost or not is immaterial. Enjoy!