#5 THE POWER OF THE WORD–Part Three: The Death of Decency

William S Burroughs

One wonders what the Founding Fathers would think of contemporary rightwing media.  Aristocratic and highly educated sophisticates, they thought beyond the kneejerk response of power to pillory or behead anyone advancing an unwelcome opinion.  In their envisioned utopia, you could speak without fear, and the freedom to speak would enable greater understanding and communal agreement.

You wouldn’t be stuck with a king forcing his will down your throat when you had no voice to so much as complain about it.

An interesting historical study would trace just how free free speech was until relatively recently.  What society found allowable tended to fall quite a bit short of complete freedom.  James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), of all things, got banned and branded “pornography.”  Its most famous sex scene depicts Leopold Bloom masturbating on a beach at night under a fireworks display.  Somehow you’d have to get through the library chapter to get all the way to this big erotic payoff.

No pornographer worth his salt would ever have produced Ulysses.

But that’s just it.  What’s allowable within the arena of free speech?–within book covers or a painting’s frame or a political accusation popping up on your Facebook page?  What’s too dangerous or too obscene for public depiction?  XXth century writers Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs all faced obscenity trials for what they wrote, and they all had explicit depictions of sexuality in common.

But they also shared a rejection of consensus reality and a determination to explore art and life on their own terms.

When William Burroughs died in 1997, the Wall Street Journal ran a hatchet job obituary on his literary career by Roger Kimball titled “The Death of Decency.”  Addressing both Ginsberg and Burroughs, he wrote:

“It is [hard]…to admire anything…about the life or work of either. Both specialized in pretentious, proselytizing pornography: Ginsberg of an incense-burning, pseudo-Whitmanesque sort, Burroughs of a much grittier, sado-masochistic variety. There are few poems by Ginsberg that could be quoted whole in this newspaper; I doubt whether any page of “Naked Lunch”…could be.  A generous person might be tempted to describe the accumulated literary value of both writers as null.”

First off, I guess we should credit Kimball for at least reading something of them both; he’s not a post-literate Republican a la Donald Trump.  That he can’t come up with anything but vague cheap shots reveals the whole point of such an exercise: to slime and dismiss the work of the lefty avant-garde (ironically, Burroughs was a libertarian who enjoyed shooting guns).  Probably most of Ginsberg’s poems—a writer who fervently followed in Whitman’s footsteps in vision and aesthetics—would pass the “decency” test for WSJ’s textual standards, though possibly Kimball’s right about Naked Lunch.

In the absence of genuinely looking at their work, he concludes their literary value adds up to zero.  That’s his idea of being “generous.”

Well, this tiny footnote in the unending rightwing smear campaign has no big relevance or centrality, but it does point the way to where we are now, 25 years later.   He won’t take their work seriously, certainly doesn’t have enough familiarity with it to speak knowingly, and he reduces it down to “obscenity” or “indecency” because it doesn’t fit with his family values or view of the universe.

That’s old and baked in.  What seems different nowadays is that the right can’t be bothered with even the most rudimentary level of facts, much less the nuances of argument as, say, Thomas Jefferson might have understood them.  In a screaming plunge into nihilism, they’ve chosen to make it all up and take their fiction as reality, and they’ve become so good at manipulating their audience, the audience automatically accepts that Hillary Clinton runs a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor or Donald Trump is a good Christian who stands up for the little guy or Biden stole the election or Democrats in Washington are alien lizards (I wish I were making this up) or the disease that’s killing you doesn’t exist, but if it does exist, take this unproven, untested medicine to cure yourself.

It’s almost like the Joker got the job of writing the rightwing talking points.

I’m merely scratching the surface of how fucked up this is.  You may never find literary value in the nightmare phantasmagoria and dark hilarity that is Naked Lunch, but is it common decency to pretend someone sex traffics in children as a way to angle for political advantage?  What decency do you find in denying climate change and the scourge of mass murder by guns, ferociously fighting any attempt at reasonable discussion, much less practical action?  Whose decency provides false information about a ravaging disease or denies that a whole strata of people on the basis of color are inordinately shot by police or hauled off to prison?  There’s no common decency, no care for others, not even a willingness to listen to what someone else has to say.  That level of decency has suffered a violent death by the weapon of the word, and who killed it?