I've been watching the recent crackdown on free speech by the non-elected illegitimate regime that recently seized power in Honduras with great interest for the last few days. Television and radio stations are being shut down, protesters being beaten bloody in the streets by corporate-funded riot police. It brought me back to post-9/11, when Bill Maher's show, Politically Incorrect, was cancelled, and rumors flew that all disc jockeys working for Clear Channel radio stations had been forbidden to play John Lennon's "Imagine".
In contrast, today, Bill Maher has a new show. Jon Stewart is still going strong, and Steven Colbert is perhaps the most politically influential comedian and social critic since the late great George Carlin. By all appearances, free speech is alive and well in America, as evidenced by Steven Colbert's public nose-thumbing of conglomerate media magnate Sumner Redstone (Rothstein), who, it turns out, voted for George Bush in the last election. Yes, one can certainly enjoy a remarkable degree of credibility with the masses when it appears that they are willing to bite the hand that feeds them in the name of the principle of free speech. But what does this evidence really mean?
Back to Honduras. When any regime cracks down on free speech, they do so not because they fear ideas, but because they fear revolution, the social orchestration of a plan to physically remove them from power. Those who take power through violence can usually only be removed the same way. A crackdown on free speech says as much about the populace as it says about those in power. It says that a large number of members of that society are willing to fight and die rather than accept the authority of a government they did not choose, a large enough number to pose an actual threat.
If we accept this basic premise, then it's possible that post 9/11, there was a moment, however fleeting, that the powers that be here in the land of the free felt a potential revolutionary threat to its power. That a large number of Americans with very little to lose felt that they had chosen neither their government nor its actions abroad which resulted in the attacks, and given the opportunity, may have united in revolt. The crackdown, which took the form of using media to accuse dissenters of being unpatriotic, resulted in a competition to see who could have the greatest number of American flags waving from their porches, the most yellow ribbons attached to the radio antennas of their vehicles. I remember being saddened by the public display of these tokens of fear, fear of being the lone wounded zebra separated from the herd with a predator nearby. Fear of having started a fight over some resources, being in the process of making off with them, and then looking behind you and realizing that your gang isn't there, watching your back.
While it may look as though freedom of speech is alive and well, in reality, these bought and paid for public dissenters are merely serving the purpose of providing a safe and meaningless outlet for our outrage. Their being allowed to say for us all that we wish we could say means only that the power structure is so deeply entrenched that there is nothing anyone could say that could possibly pose a threat to it any longer. Not only that, but there is big money in "free speech." So long as a show's content brings in advertising dollars, it will remain on the air, and apparently, right now, dissent is so popular that it's making its corporate sponsors a bundle.
It is worth noting, however, that Bill Maher's former show was on network television, where the poorest of the poor were exposed to his ideas. We now have a multitude of shows which express dissent, but not one of them is on network television. No, these shows may be viewed only by people invested enough in the system to have enough money to purchase cable television and internet service. In other words, by people highly unlikely to foment revolution. People far more likely to pound their ineffectual little fists on big daddy's chest before being turned over his lap for a spanking and then bursting into tears of gratitude in the knowledge that it was for their own good.
If you doubt just how firmly entrenched the media power structure, which serves as the mouthpeice for the corporate power structure, actually is, just remember that Steven Colbert's boss is majority owner of CBS, MTV, BET, Paramount Pictures, Dreamworks movie studios and Viacom. Are you sensing some concentration of power in the hands of a very few yet? Lloyd Braun, former executive of ABC, the man who cancelled Politically Incorrect, later went on to oversee the content at Yahoo. How about now? Steven Colbert recently did a great job of railing against the notion that corporations have the right of free speech, which they may exercise with their dollars serving as their words. Let's not forget that he works for those same corporations, and that his seeming political power and influence will continue to exist, or not, at their discretion. In the final analysis, I suspect that as long as they serve their purpose as social release valves, allowing us to blow off steam to avoid any sort of explosion that would result in any meaningful change while it makes them money, they will be allowed to speak as "freely" as they like.
But I guess a populace which is incapable of rising up even when their government supports and is supported by banks which steal their money and then loan it back to them with interest, insurance companies which exact huge premiums in exchange for denying them health care, media conglomerates which pervert and divert free speech towards their own ends, and arms manufacturers who create wars to sell weapons to both sides for a profit deserve whatever we get. My thanks to the Hondurans with the courage to pose a viable threat worthy of a media crackdown, for supplying me with much-needed evidence that some people still value the REASON for freedom of speech--the prevention of tyranny, and are willing to give their lives for it rather than live in a world in which it has become irrelevant.