New Jersey is a great place to see Private Parts, starring the kindler, gentler Howard Stern as himself in his funny new, adroitly produced movie. A thousand or so of my fellow Jerseyans had crowded into the Sony Wayne Megaplex to yell "Howard! Howard!" as the house lights dimmed.
Once the movie began, they fell reverentially silent, except to laugh. Their connection with Stern was palpable, almost touching.
Stern is a timely reminder of how powerfully popular culture mirrors America these days, much more so than journalism.
I couldn't help but contrast the warm reception Stern got in my local theater with the attacks leveled at The People vs. Larry Flynt by some feminists and journalists, attacks that may damage its ultimate success at the box office and at awards ceremonies. Next up, there ought to be movies about Rush Limbaugh and Don Imus.
Obviously, these four men are different from one another. Flynt is the only one who could be called a pornographer. Limbaugh styles himself a commentator. But I've always perceived him, when he's at his best, as a satirist, which is primarily what Stern and Imus are. They rely heavily on humor, though all with different styles and for different ends.
But the four also have things in common, traits that say a lot about free speech in America and who is and isn't willing to fight for it.
On a personal note, I can't say I'm a big fan of any of them. But Imus, Stern, and Limbaugh - to whom I've listened - occasionally can all be very funny; and they play an important role. These three take on conventional wisdom and the noxious chill of political correctness. By attacking spotted owls, ridiculing Ebonics, and ragging on sexual, racial, and gender sensitivities, they've made careers out of expressing things many people still feel but are no longer free to express. They laugh at the humorless, express the inexpressible, and in so doing, remind us to keep talking freely even as our culture changes dramatically.
Journalists could flap all they wanted about O. J. Simpson and fair trial, but Stern simply announced on the trial's first day that the defendant was guilty and should swing.
I've never read Hustler magazine, but I credit Flynt with fighting harder than he needed to in order to set legal precedents protecting the right of folks like me to poke fun at people like Bill Gates (who have the money and ruthless will to make criticizing them dangerous if they wished).
And it would be a lot more difficult to publicly poke fun at or shed light on the powerful if it weren't for the court battle between Jerry Falwell and Flynt that eventually hit the Supreme Court. I owe him for that. For that and other reasons, I've found the effort of some feminists to attack and damage the movie especially noxious and short-sighted.
Of the four, Flynt seems the most tragically flawed and disturbed. He also appears to be the one with the deepest political conviction about free speech.
These four horsemen from the dark side did a lot to keep the free flow of ideas moving during the uptight '80s.
Journalists, academics, and politicians all began to shut up about controversial subjects like race and gender and pornography. Only acceptable and appropriately sensitive conversation was permitted. Transgressors were drummed out of media, academia, and journalism when they failed to talk the party line. It was our own mini-version of the cultural revolution, when institutions like journalism and academia were slowly but steadily purified of those who wouldn't or couldn't toe the line.
Radio talk-shows were the glaring exception. It's a strange commentary on a country when some of its most offensive public people help keep alive one of its most fundamental core values.
America has never been at ease with the very freedom it brought to much of the world.
Free speech is always an ironic and timely fight here, in the place that invented it. On any given week, from librarians battling to keep books from being banned, to kids trying to buy unsanitized music at Wal-Mart, to schoolteachers fighting to keep lughead school boards from pulling the plug on their Net connections, to webheads taking on the sponsors of the CDA, there are free-speech firefights all over the country. They are not occasional, but endemic.
A recent pick: US Representative Pete Hoekstra's taxpayer-funded assault on the much-praised documentary about black lesbians The Watermelon Woman, produced in part with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which various elements in Congress have been trying to dismantle for years now.
It's a stunner that Hoekstra, chairman of an investigative subcommittee looking into the NEA, has nothing better to do in Washington than watch movies about lesbians. In a country with as many unresolved issues and social problems as the United States, there is never any shortage of dimwitted, greedy, or opportunistic politicians lining up to tell us what we should be reading, seeing, or hearing. His constituents should recall this blockhead and make him download his sexy pictures on the Net like everybody else, at his own expense.
But his bizarre posturing is another timely reminder that freedom of choice, like freedom of speech, is always on the line, often at the hands of the very people sworn to defend and uphold it.
When we think of warriors for free speech, we think of groups like the ACLU or the EFF, of liberals and libertarians and hellraisers. But more and more, we need to credit the road warriors of popular culture.
Stern, Imus, Limbaugh, and, in a different way, Flynt, challenged the strictures that paralyzed our public discussion. They talked about race, homophobia, lesbianism, the environment in ways no longer possible in mainstream media and politics. Sometimes they were tasteless, often offensive. Often, they poked us right where we needed to be poked.
Despite Limbaugh being one of our most reviled political commentators, often criticized for stretching facts, his assaults on political correctness were so uncommon and direct that they became more than entertainment for millions.
Stern has almost single-handedly challenged government efforts to define acceptable broadcast language, and has ridiculed America's bizarre fears of the open expression of sexuality. Imus has savaged political pomposity and is sometimes credited with boosting Bill "Bubba" Clinton's popularity during the fateful '92 primary season.
But neither Imus nor Stern ever took the FCC to court to challenge its ban on words it didn't like. Limbaugh never had to. Flynt didn't have to, but he chose to anyway.
The information reality of the '90s is profoundly different from the one these men faced just a few years ago. There is every kind of speech all over the Web, from Jesus homepages to Web sites devoted to the exploration of sexuality. New information technology threatens to make censorship anachronistic in ways our journalists and political leaders seem hardly to have grasped at all.
Online, we take this freedom mostly for granted. New technology has tilted the odds in our favor, for perhaps the first time in the history of free speech. There aren't enough cops or FCC regulators to police the Web. The Pete Hoekstras and William Bennetts of public life may finally have to go out and find real work to do.
Although critics often deride this new freedom as dangerous and "unfiltered" information, it represents a great flowering of free expression. There may be less need now for people like Stern, Limbaugh, Imus, and Flynt, who already appear less shocking and conspicuous than they once did. In the strange way that popular culture works, they were the right people at the right time doing the right thing.
Odd as it seems, we owe this strange quartet some acknowledgement of their role in this epic battle. And the fact that there may never be posters of them hung in American classrooms doesn't mean that they aren't, in a real sense, important figures in the eternal struggle between people saying what they want and people trying to stop them from doing so.
Along with the usual assortment of lefties, comedians, librarians, and public defenders, they helped keep ideas moving freely until reinforcements could arrive.
