Political tongues are no sharper today than they were in past generations. But in a civic life lived at the speed of sound, the invective seems to be the only thing we hear.
What we’re listening to lately is nothing new: Anti-Christ. Mexican time. Maybe his mother loved him. Never made an honest living. Little Eichmanns.
“There’s always been an ugliness in our political discussion and ferocity in this nation’s history,” says Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor who has written about leadership in America.
It just feels more egregious today because much of the name-calling and tough language arrives without context. Political life has surrendered long speeches, fat pamphlets and subtle language for whatever fits into a sound bite.
“Today, politicians know you need to be shorter, punchier and more impactful, and that leaves you with quick phrases you didn’t really mean,” Cuomo says. “We are all forced into talking in shorthand.”
We the people are asking for it, apparently.
We ask for complicated news to be distilled and delivered in two-sentence shards to the e-mail box or Blackberry.
We tune into political entertainment shows that spit out the bullet points of the day in rapid fire.
We can’t be bothered to wade through heavy speeches or thick books to understand the context or dissect complex political metaphor.
“There’s no more extended debate politically,” Cuomo says. “We get one-minute epigrams and abbreviated responses. Everything is delivered that way.”
Venomous consequences
The body politic’s tolerance for thin discourse opens the door for political rivals to exploit trips of the tongue or snippets of shocking speech.
Some pol watchers have all but declared U.S. Rep. Bob Beauprez’s run for governor dead because he used the phrase “Mexican time” to describe the plodding pace at at which an accused cop killer will be extradited to Colorado from his home country.
U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar has been to the woodshed and back for calling the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family “the anti-Christ” when he says he intended to call their actions anti-Christian.
Constituents were left scratching their heads after a round of interparty sniping between Vice President Dick Cheney, who wondered aloud about who likes Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean. Dean struck back suggesting few Republicans had ever held honest jobs.
University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has turned on the spit of public opinion for seven months, since the phrase “little Eichmanns” was discovered in a long essay written the day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and that he defends as political speech.
“If your political opponent is saying stuff like that, of course you take it out of context to make them appear out of bounds or look like a lunatic,” says Jennifer Wolak, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “But when we see that kind of fighting, we don’t necessarily enjoy it.”
In fact, focus on the vitriol can make ordinary people clam up.
Wolak’s work in political psychology recently analyzed three emotional states pervasive in civic life: enthusiasm, when a person is excited and engaged; anxiety, when a politician’s actions leave a would-be voter uneasy and searching for information; and aversion, the point at which someone is so against a candidate or issue they can’t even talk about it.
“When you end up in those polarized positions, you’re less likely to learn and listen to the other side, and less likely to participate,” Wolak says.
Modern soapboxes
Extreme rhetoric may feel like it’s bubbling up more frequently because there is a shrinking political center. Energy once spent recruiting the undecided is channeled to rallying true believers with powerful, if simplistic, language.
Stem-cell research kills babies! Social Security is on the verge of collapse! Stop the religious right from taking over! Americans are worse off today than four years ago!
Drew O’Connor, executive director of Capital Hill United Neighborhoods, says that until the rules of engagement are changed, some who would be politically active – fearful of rhetoric as sharp as broken glass – will sit out the debate.
“I think until we figure out how to begin to change our political discourse to more rational problem-solving with perspective, rather than going directly to the personal attack, it’s going to be difficult for us to work on the tough issues,” he says.
He was heartened, though, by the number of people who stepped up to the People Speak soapbox at the Capitol Hill People’s Fair last month, where people could sign up to speak for five minutes on the topic of their choice – no cussing and no personal attacks allowed.
No one got the hook at People Speak. More important, individuals sat for hours listening to the political witness of citizen after citizen expressing themselves about topics ranging from religion in schools to the war in Iraq to Denver’s pit-bull ban.
“I don’t think there are enough places and spaces where we can have unframed, unfiltered dialogue around an important set of issues,” he says.
Write a letter to the editor, it will be edited. Call into a radio talk show, and your comments will be framed for the highest and best entertainment value.
The politically pent-up have begun to migrate to the Internet, where Web logs allow them to spout unfettered.
Denver First Amendment attorney Dan Recht likes the blog-based beefing, where people who understand their personal stake in the political process hash out the issues.
“It has a feeling like back in the 1760s, where people literally stood on their soapboxes and preached to anyone who would listen,” Recht says. “People can log on and blog to their hearts’ content. I think it’s sort of cool in that way. It’s a very democratic thing, an equalizing force.”
The case for relevance
Denver artist Rick Griffith worries that the trend toward inch-deep discourse alienates citizens because they can’t understand how they’re affected by what happens in Washington or even the statehouse.
“If we make politics relevant to them, people will talk about it,” says Griffith, whose art installation “Discussion Topics,” hangs in the pool hall at Wyn-
koop Brewing Co. in LoDo through the end of the month.
Pale green panels hanging behind the pool and foosball tables ask charged but party-neutral questions: “How many people in the United States know how to fix a broken voting machine?” and “Do we pay our politicians enough to be honest, and how would we know?” and “What is a neoconservative, and what do they eat?”
There are no easy answers to the questions Griffith’s work begs viewers to discuss.
“What discourages people from having political opinions is the obfuscation of relevance to them,” he says. “It’s stopped being personal. We talk in the abstract and think it’s OK.”
Although it may at times feel like America has lost its etiquette bearings, pity the person who tries to shove a bar of soap into the political mouth.
“If you try to wash all of the strong feelings and sharp disagreement out of the political process and censor everything down with political correctness, and do a kind of emotional blackmail of hurt feelings on your opponent, self-government isn’t going to work,” says John Andrews, a Colorado Republican leader renowned for powerful speeches on the Senate floor and in editorial pages.
“We have to have an outlet for strong passions and deep disagreements of interest and principal.”
Staff writer Dana Coffield can be reached at 303-820-1954 or dcoffield@denverpost.com.
Americans have say on civil freedoms
Each year, the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va., and Nashville, Tenn., surveys American attitudes toward freedom of speech, press, religion and the rights of assembly and petition. Its 2004 report surveyed 1,000 people. Some of the results, with a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, are below. Visit firstamendmentcenter.org/sofa_reports/index.aspx.
About 65 percent of respondents indicated overall support for First Amendment freedoms, while 30 percent said the First Amendment goes too far – a dramatic change from 2002 when Americans were evenly divided on the question at 49 percent each.
About 58 percent said the current amount of government regulation of entertainment programming on television is about right; 21 percent said there is too little.
About 53 percent of those surveyed opposed a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning, a proposal now pending in the U.S. Senate.
About 36 percent of respondents said Americans have too much press freedom, while 46 percent said the media have the right amount.
About 72 percent said public school students should not be allowed to wear a T-shirt with a message or picture that others might find offensive.
Only 35 percent said people should be allowed to say things in public that might be offensive to racial groups; 63 percent strongly disagreed.
Of the respondents, 59 percent said musicians should be allowed to sing songs with lyrics that others might find offensive.
About 54 percent said people should be allowed to say things in public that might be offensive to religious groups, while 44 percent disagreed.
These cases have molded First Amendment rights
At America’s inception, citizens demanded a guarantee of their basic freedoms. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, the press, religion, assembly and petition.
When the U.S. Constitution was signed on Sept. 17, 1787, it did not contain the essential freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights. The first 10 Amendments to the Constitution went into effect Dec. 15, 1791.
As Justice William Brennan wrote in New York Times vs. Sullivan in 1964, the First Amendment provides that “debate on public issues … (should be) … uninhibited, robust and wide-open.”
However, Americans vigorously dispute the application of the First Amendment, and the courts wrestle daily with such controversies.
Following are a few cases that have molded First Amendment rights:
1918 – Congress passes the Sedition Act, which forbids spoken or printed criticism of the U.S. government, the Constitution or the flag. The act is repealed in 1921.
1931 – In Stromberg vs. California, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses the state court conviction of a 19-year-old member of the Young Communist League who displayed a red flag. This is the first case in which the court recognizes protected “speech” may be nonverbal or a form of symbolic expression.
1940 – Congress passes the Smith Act, or the Alien Registration Act, which makes it a crime to advocate the violent overthrow of the government.
1940 – In Thornhill vs. Alabama, the court strikes down a law prohibiting loitering and picketing “without a just cause or legal excuse” near business. The court writes: “The freedom of speech and of the press guaranteed by the Constitution embraces at the least the liberty to discuss publicly and truthfully all matters of public concern without previous restraint or fear of subsequent punishment.”
1942 – The U.S. Supreme Court determines “fighting words” are not protected by the First Amendment. In Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire, the court defines “fighting words” as “those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of peace.”
1949 – In Terminiello vs. Chicago, the court limits the scope of the “fighting words” doctrine. It says: the “function of free speech … is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”
1969 – The rights of public school students suspended for wearing black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War are vindicated by the court in Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent School District. Justice Abe Fortas writes that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
1971 – In New York Times vs. United States, the court allows continued publication of the Pentagon Papers. The court holds the central purpose of the First Amendment is to “prohibit the widespread practice of governmental suppression of embarrassing information.”
1971 – In Cohen vs. California, the court reverses a conviction of a person who wore a jacket printed with a profanity and concludes offensive and profane speech are protected by the First Amendment.
1989 – Congress passes the Flag Protection Act, which punishes anyone who “knowingly mutilates, defaces, physically defiles, burns, maintains on the floor or ground, or tramples upon any U.S. flag.”
1989 – In Texas vs. Johnson, the U.S. Supreme Court rules burning the American flag is a protected form of free speech.
1990 – The court invalidates the Flag Protection Act of 1989, saying the statute violates free speech.
1998 – President Clinton revises his 1995 “Guidelines on Religious Expression in Public Schools” in an effort to promote public understanding that the First Amendment provides for religious expression by students simultaneously forbidding government-sponsored religion.
2005 – The U.S. Supreme Court lets stand a lower court ruling that South Carolina’s license plates, which bear the slogan “Choose Life,” violate the First Amendment because abortion rights supporters weren’t given a similar forum to express their beliefs.
2005 – Legislation prohibiting flag desecration passes the U.S. House.
– First Amendment Center
