In Your Heart, You Know He's Right

If I remember right, it was Barry Goldwater who said at the 1964 Republican National Convention that "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice," that "moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue" and a bunch of other things I think about the blood of innocents running in the streets and dogs feasting on the flesh of the infidel. That's a rough paraphrase, but you can see largely what he was getting at: social revolution in the name of a liberating system of prescripted thought. That's Goldwater in a nutshell, but I can't say I'm surprised. He was, after all, Episcopalian, which is as you know, the American arm of the official Church of England. Or after the modern parlance: a sleeper cell.

I bring up Mullah Goldwater and his terroristical firebrandy demogoguery not to slander the man but to portray him in a negative light designed to harm his public reputation. But I'm doing it in writing, so I think it's technically libel.

No, I mention him to illustrate what is to come for our cousins in the United Kingdom and as a warning for ourselves. We already know what happened in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Iran, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen... the police do something shocking and the people rise up. The tense stand-off leads to violence, perpetuating a brutal crackdown as a wounded and cornered regime lashes out. Only a few more dominoes need to fall before there's helicopter footage of a camel running through Piccadilly Circus.

We've already reached the point, just as we had in Egypt, where the government blames it all on social media, complete with threats to shut the whole messy business down. Because nothing good comes out of people talking to one another, ever.

The next step is clear: to blame the unrest on religious extremists and paid foreign agents. The strategy highlights a) the international fear of a government falling into the hands of a group motivated not by the good and pure motivations of the self-perpetuation of its own power or the economic exploitation of the global poor for the benefit of the few most likely to make generous contributions to the election fund but by something altogether sinister, like faith, and b) internal fear of dirty, dirty foreigners. In America, that means Mexicans. In the Arab Middle East, it means Jews. In London, it used to mean the Irish, but the world has changed so much, it's hard to say. Plus, that country is weird about foreigners. Sometimes they're the enemy and sometimes you invite them over to be the royal family. It's happened more than once. 

I don't think we're getting a new royal family this time, though, so you can rubbish those thoughts about a new commemorative plate set. I'm up for looking at this from the perspective of the plight of the working poor, but really it just seems like alot of people being assholes. It doesn't quite have the same motivational and social purity of the Egypt thing.

The complication here is that, if it were just people being assholes, if you clamp down on Twitter and Facebook and whatever else, it will be a government decision that shakes the Etch-a-Sketch and redraws from anarchy some expressions of genuine political discomfort. Although, granted, drawn in a bland grayscale monochrome and with no curvy edges.

Freedom of expression isn't regarded as the unsullied family virgin everywhere as it is in the United States, the besmirching of whose virtue is an act admitting all levels of retaliation up to and including global thermonuclear war. Europeans have a more knotty sort of history with these ideas complicated by a thousand-year headstart of emergency responses and legal precedents. She can stand the occasional smirching and who knows, maybe it will keep her from being such a sanctimonious buzzkill who cries at the banal crassness of your typical PG-13 fare. Europeans, I've always thought, were far less prone to hysteria in matters of speech.

So something like the proscription of expression can happen there in the face of a genuine national emergency because it seems reasonable that justice should be done, even at the price of some liberty.

But that's where they run afoul of Mushroom Cloud Goldwater and his Holy Word Commados. It can happen in Britain, where the language is named after them, so they feel like even if they cut some of it out, it's still going to be around. Over here, no. Over here we can't give one inch. The opposite side of the forms at the DMV are already in Spanish. The next step is Ramadan dinner at the White House. Not on our watch, man.