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Volume 5, No. 3
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Class clowns We have cheapened political and social discourse --
and are the worse for it Don Imus has finally gone the way of Hooch Hurley. Most of you know who Don Imus is, but I'll wager that few, if any, of you know about Hooch Hurley. So, I'll explain. Hooch, whose baptismal certificate said "Patrick Joseph Hurley" was a classmate in grammar school and a thorn in the collective side of the Good Sisters, who ruled our every waking moment. He was our perennial "class clown." Only his mother and the Good Sisters called him Patrick Joseph. His father and siblings called him "PJ," and in a neighborhood where nicknames were a necessity for separating the redundantly named -- we had four John J. Griffins, for example -- Patrick Joseph became "Hooch." Hooch got his name from the fact he used to brag, even in grammar school, about how drunk he got on weekends from pilfering his father's liquor. None of us in grammar school ever saw him drunk -- that would come later -- but the name stuck. Hooch, without much else to his credit -- he wasn't good looking, athletic, or particularly bright -- gained his notoriety by back-talking the nuns, making smart-mouth comments, and generally acting up. He was punished regularly, but didn't seem to care, as the notoriety, in his twisted calculus, was apparently worth the pain. However, he survived in school, probably because his father sold cars and made sure the clergy got their shiny, black Buicks at or below cost. His mother also had a car -- second cars were a rarity in those days -- and was more than willing to chauffeur the nuns around whenever called upon. But one day in sixth grade, Hooch finally crossed the line. He had somehow grievously offended Sister Victor Marie and had been sentenced to the blackboard, like Bart Simpson, to write his "I will not . . ." 500 times, while we went on with our geography lesson. As Sister droned on about the
tin mines of That might have been overlooked, except that the caricature had rather large, and exposed, breasts and carried the caption "Canteen Kate." Canteen Kate, for those of you who don't know, was a short-lived and racy World War II-era comic book featuring a busty and scantily clad Kate frolicking seductively with leering, but unfailingly clean-cut, GIs. The other fly in that particular ointment was that Sister Victor Marie's pre-nun name had been Catherine, and her family had called her "Kate." Finally, the snorting and suppressed guffaws of 22 pre-pubescent boys alerted Sister to the fact that something was amiss. She turned to see the drawing and Hooch, who was grinning like a Cheshire cat. She turned crimson, sputtered a few times, and bolted from the room, pausing only to charge class snitch Mary Kate Hallihan with taking down the names of anyone who talked in her absence. The principal was summoned. She also turned crimson, something that was accented by her snug and incredibly white wimple, and summoned the dreaded Sister Superior. The three black-veiled figures huddled, like baseball umpires discussing a disputed ground rule, and finally decided that this was a matter for the pastor, Father McCarthy. Because Father McCarthy was called in only on the grammar-school version of capital crimes, and more to deliver sentence rather than verdict, things didn't bode well for Hooch. While waiting for Father McCarthy to drive up in his shiny, black, at- or below-cost Buick, the nuns had to decide what to do about the drawing. They couldn't jeopardize our immortal souls by exposing us to it for any longer, but it needed to be preserved for evidence at the coming drumhead trial. We were hoping for an early and extended recess. The Good Sisters decided that we would profit more from marching two-by-two to the church to say the rosary -- twice. This was in line with the Good Sisters' Prime Directive, which was "If you can't think of anything else to do, say the rosary." Mr. and Mrs. Hooch Sr. were summoned, and it was apparently decided after a short, but direct, conference, that Hooch would fare better in a public school, despite the fact it was, in the opinion of the nuns, "godless." By the time his classmates had finished the last "Hail Mary" in the church, Hooch was gone from the premises, never to return. For the record, the public schools at that time did have morning prayer and bible reading, but didn't come close to our whirlwind schedule of supplication. Note to prayer-in-school advocates: Non-stop prayer in our school seemed to have no salutary effect whatsoever on Hooch. This is the point at which I should say "To make a long story short," but I know it's way too late for that. I bring up Hooch Hurley because I had filed him away in a memory bank somewhere, and thought of him again this past week during the kerfuffle that sprang up when Don Imus finally crossed the line. Imus was, like so many of his broadcasting contemporaries and like Hooch Hurley, a class clown. He said and did outrageous things, and thereby attracted a coterie of titillated followers, much as Hooch titillated his classmates. Neither Hooch nor Imus were particularly funny or clever, but they served a vital ecological role. We all have dark, crazy, outlandish thoughts from time to time. Most of us, are too well-bred, too timid, too kind, or too intelligent to give them voice. When a Hooch or an Imus speaks the unspeakable, then we giggle and titter. It's a nervous laugh, but it acts as a safety valve, releasing the pent-up energy that comes from our being unable to say the same things. So, the question becomes whether the class clown, if you buy my argument that he fills a vital role, does something wrong in clowning around. And the next question is whether, since we have encouraged him, he should be punished. The curse of the class clown is that you always needs to expand your repertoire. You can't rest on your laurels. Once uttered, the outrageous becomes mundane, and you need to push the edges of the envelope further each time, but you do so at your own risk. One fateful day, the envelope tears, and you have crossed the line. It should be noted that "the line" exists only in the abstract, like the strike zone in baseball. We kind of know where the strike zone is, but it does change -- from season to season, umpire to umpire, and sometimes from inning to inning, or pitcher to pitcher. Crossing the line just takes some people longer than others. Hooch's moment came in sixth grade, although I understand he had a similar moment years later during Marine boot camp, after which The Corps decided he would do better elsewhere, and, like the nuns, showed him the door. Imus almost made it to the end. I've had some people express concern and confusion over Imus' firing. Surely, they tell me, other class clowns -- you know who they are -- say similar outrageous things on the radio and television, and those people are right, but, as we all know, that's no defense. They counter that Imus has said similar things in the past without repercussion. Again, they're right. He has a long history of racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, sexist slurs. My question is why he wasn't called to account earlier. Aren't we treading on his free speech rights, they wonder? As luck would have it we're not. Your right to speak your mind, as small and twisted as your mind might be, does not create for me an obligation to provide you a platform. So, if Imus were merely standing on a street corner delivering his shtick to passers-by, or muttering racial and sexist slurs as he pushed a shopping cart up and down the sidewalk, I would defend his right to do so. When he takes to the publicly owned airwaves, that's a different story. Then I, as part owner of those airwaves, get a say. The bigger problem, however, is not with Imus. It's with the broadcasters and advertisers who see him -- and others like him -- as attracting the demographics that generate sales and therefore ad revenue. Imus, and his smarmy colleagues, are a product of the new ethical theory of Marketism, a consequentialist theory in which "good" is determined by whatever sells. Working from that flawed theory, broadcasters -- who in a former time had to prove that their programming was in the public interest -- are all-too-willing to overlook the near-hate speech in a frenzy to make a quick buck. It's just a larger version of the same self-interested ethic that led Father McCarthy and the Good Sisters to overlook Hooch's long history of anti-social behavior in the interest of cheap cars and free rides. There is a place in society for people who will push the edges of the envelope and will flirt with what is considered outrageous. We benefit if they are, at the very least, talented and don't say outrageous things merely for the sake of being outrageous, but to point to a larger truth. In sixth grade, we were smart enough, even as we were titillated, not to take Hooch seriously. We laughed at his antics, but were, at the same time, horrified, and none of us wanted to be Hooch. And, none of us thought he had much to offer besides comic relief in the grim reality that was post-war Catholic grammar school. Today, to our eternal discredit, our society has failed, as grown-ups, to make similar distinctions with Imus and his fellow class clowns. We elevate them to positions of undeserved importance. We take their increasingly outrageous comments as well-thought out political commentary. We take their purposeful distortions as fact. But, worse still, unlike my wise sixth-grade colleagues, too many people in the audience have begun to emulate the clowns. Their own political, and increasingly social, discourse consists of uncritically parroting what they hear coming over the airwaves -- fatally flawed logic, mean-spirited ridicule, xenophobia, half-truths, distortions, lies, and outright bigotry tarted up in pseudo-patriotic or pseudo-religious drag. In fact, on one Internet discussion board, a poster expressed dismay at Imus' firing. "My generation talks like that all the time. What's the problem?" Ironically, the poster was unaware that this is exactly the problem. The "star" treatment of bigots and blowhards has led far too many people to believe that this behavior is acceptable discourse in a civil society. If you don't frequent Internet discussion boards, it's worth a quick trip, just to see how low we've sunk. The upshot is that, when clownish behavior passes for political discourse, meaningful discourse begins to seem like Sister Victor Marie droning on about Bolivian tin. Those who try to engage us in thoughtful comment -- or those who, horror of horrors, try to get us to think -- are dismissed as "boring," and we ridicule them, as we allow ourselves to be distracted and titillated, snorting and guffawing at the salacious caricatures that the clowns draw on the blackboard provided by the greedy media. I don't mourn the firing of Imus. He's had a long and lucrative career, much of it at the expense of innocent people who couldn't defend themselves against his slurs and his bully pulpit. Besides, the forces of Marketism are strong, and he will probably find a haven in satellite radio, which doesn't ride on the public airwaves and doesn't rely on advertiser dollars. The real losers are the rest of us. We have turned our political and social discourse over to clowns, the Hooch Hurleys of our generation, and for that we share the guilt for what it has brought about in the world, not much of which is good. (All names, other than Imus, have been changed -- not to protect the innocent, since there are few innocents to protect, but to spare me from retribution, divine or otherwise.) |
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© Copyright 2007 Carlton Vogt |