Free Speech Really Is Free – Honest, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #145

November 23, 2009 Mike Gold 5 Comments

“There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternative, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.

“But today other voices are heard in the land – voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties, doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of weakness. At a time when the national debt is steadily being reduced in terms of its burden on our economy, they (perceive)that debt as the single greatest threat to our security. At a time when we are steadily reducing the number of Federal employees serving every thousand citizens, they fear those supposed hordes of civil servants far more than the actual hordes of opposing armies.

“We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will ‘talk sense to the American people.’ But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this Nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.

Those words were from a speech that was supposed to have been delivered 47 years ago yesterday. They weren’t because the speaker, President John F. Kennedy, was murdered by party or parties known and/or unknown. If you take out the phrase “wholly unsuited to the sixties” and replaced it with “wholly unsuited to our time” and you fussed a bit with the debt language, the speech could have been delivered yesterday. And maybe it should have.

Then again, Paul Simon said “After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same.” Speechifying has its limits.

The fact is, in America we are supposed to be able to say anything as long as we realize we can and should be held responsible for our actions. Free speech is just that: free. That’s why I’m not particularly offended by those morons who run around carrying placards and wearing tee-shirts that call for the assassination of our current president.

Actually, I’m slightly jealous. Back in my day, we were arrested for wearing American flag shirts – if we donned clothing that called for the murder of Nixon or Johnson (and, possibly, even Agnew), we’d be dancing to the last act of Easy Rider.

It’s not that I dismiss these jerks. Most governmentally-acknowledged assassins are purported to have been lone crazed gunmen and, as we all know, we can’t protect our presidents from those types. But I think they have the right to request that somebody go out and kill Obama, or whomever. It’s free speech, folks. If you can prove that the tee-shirt in question was directly responsible for influencing somebody to kill the president and that the wearer understood there was such a possibility, well, then the wearer should be held accountable. The problem is, I don’t understand there is such a possibility – which, of course, is a statement guaranteed to make my wife and daughter check out my tee-shirt collection.

Yes, there’s a racial component to all of this. You look at those shirts and you remember the lynchings and such. Being our first and so-far only Catholic president, Kennedy was hardly free from such discrimination-based fears either. But I’d rather see the threat coming at me than wonder where it may be hiding.

And I probably wouldn’t get behind allowing people to bring semi-automatics to my rallies. But the threat is there, it will always be there, and I appreciate those who make our lives easier by broadcasting their desires.

As The Waco Kid said to Sheriff Bart, “What did you expect? ‘Welcome, sonny?’ ‘Make yourself at home?’ ‘Marry my daughter?’ You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.”

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather show starts up Sundays at 7:00 PM Eastern on www.getthepointradio.com , replayed the following Thursdays at 10:00 PM Eastern. Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind rants pop up every on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday exclusively at www.getthepointradio.com . The regular Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind rants continue every Monday and Friday on The Point podcasts, available right here at www.michaeldavisworld.com , as well as at www.comicmix.com, www.getthepointradio.com,www.zzcomics.com, and www.ravenwolfstudios.com. You can subscribe to The Point podcasts at iTunes by searching under “The Point Radio.”

Gold is also a regular contributor to www comicmix.com, and edits their online comic book content. Check out the all-newGrimJack: The Manx Cat #6 and Jon Sable Freelance: Ashes of Eden #4, and Andrew Pepoy’s The Adventures of Simon and Ajax, now being solicited in the IDW Publishing section of this month’s Diamond catalog.