OVO

It is one thing, I am told, to defend the free speech rights of Holocaust deniers; but to engage and defend the content of their views, however cautiously – well, that’s another matter. Smoky’s over the line, says the one consumed with electric suspicion. And questions must follow. What are your motives? Do you hate Jews? Do you still beat your wife? Of course, the abstract argument is fine as far as it goes. It’s just that it doesn’t go very far. If we are serious, the next question must, at some point, intrude. Put another way, if people are being sent to jail for expressing ideas and writing words – and they are – it is only natural and fair to ask: what are those ideas? What are those words? When does a thought expressed become a crime? When it is incitement? When it is a lie? Could it be more complicated? Or less? My position is simple. I believe that you absolutely have to get your fucking hands dirty. I am convinced this is ultimately a matter of decency, and I mean this without irony. [...]

Decades ago, when the works of Henry Miller and William Burroughs and Hubert Selby and Jean Genet and other “literary outlaws” were at issue, expert witnesses lined up to testify as to the redeeming merit of every presumed obscenity. Sometimes the good guys won, and sometimes they lost. But such recourse is largely denied to today’s class of thought criminal. When Ernst Zundel’s lawyer attempted to defend the credibility of her client’s presumptively criminal views, they locked her up. Thus a game is rigged. Grove Press isn’t going to step up this time. It’s easier to sign the petition and shrug. If the lying fuckers should’ve known better, if they’re as bad as CP traders, if they only stoke the embers of a special hate – then a problem may filed away with an asterisk, that might as well be a swastika.  A subject has become inseparable from the stigma that latches. In lieu of discourse, one finds crass signage and deflective satire. A genuine controversy is held hostage by the nuanced strictures of dinner-party form, by the huff and heat of the latest never forget editorial. Yet the noise can only mask a familiar authoritarian gesture. The greatest taboo of our age is sustained in the synchronized cultural choreography of finger-wagging, sometimes from the professoriate, sometimes from the judge’s bench. You are being admonished. You are being told not to consider that there could be a second possibility. You are being told, in so many ways, not to look. And it’s only too easy to abide. All you have to do is read from the script you’ve been handed. Tell yourself it’s of a class with snuff porn or whatever agreed-to boundary. Console yourself with anti-hate sugarplums and bubbles and Frankfurt-schooled excuses. Play it safe. You will have their blessing. Yet something is wrong. Because people are in prison for writing and selling books. Once again, the public library etagerie is arranged for your edification. Construction paper letters stapled to the tackboard. Mark Twain and D.H Lawrence chain-locked in the display case. Harry Potter facing off against familiar cartoon christian enemies. Newsclips about southern school-board busybodies wringing hands over Heather’s two mommies. Banned Books Week as nostalgia, as distraction. As crude extortion, really – once you know what’s missing. And you don’t even feel the chill.

People are in prison for writing and selling books.

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