the 1st Amendment does not protect Harvey’s right to say only things that won’t upset anyone, or to say them only in places where no one will care enough to stop to listen. And it’s not needed to assure the freedom of Americans to call Osama bin Laden an evil terrorist whose actions cannot possibly be justified. People with that view (which includes me) don’t have to worry about police and prosecutors coming after them.
No, the constitutional mandate was created specifically to safeguard opinions that most of us despise and many of us would like to silence. It was meant to uphold the minority’s right to speak, especially in the face of majority opposition — no matter how stupid the minority or how vehement the majority. Harvey’s indictment, however, is based on the assumption that listeners have a right not to hear anything that may throw them into a fury.
If getting in the way of pedestrian traffic is a crime, of course, it’s not just Harvey but his disgruntled listeners who are guilty. But the police apparently didn’t arrest any of the others. And it’s impossible to believe that the cop would have arrested Harvey if he had drawn a crowd by denouncing bin Laden. “It’s a heckler’s veto,” says UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh. “Anytime I threaten a guy, he gets arrested and I don’t.”
But the heckler’s veto has been rejected by the Supreme Court over and over, in cases where the threat to public order was far greater than it was this time. In a 1949 case, for example, a man was arrested for disorderly conduct after delivering a speech so inflammatory it produced disturbances in a crowd of some 1,000 people outside the Chicago auditorium where he was speaking. But the court threw out his conviction.
“A function of free speech is to invite dispute,” wrote Justice William O. Douglas then. “That is why freedom of speech, though not absolute, is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance or unrest.” That opinion could have been written as a direct rebuke of Harvey’s prosecution.
The fact that this incident took place in wartime doesn’t give the authorities any more power to silence dissent. Nothing Harvey did created the suggestion that he was bent on terrorism. All he was doing was challenging the wisdom of American policies. That’s the sort of message that is especially important to hear at a time when the public is so united in believing we’re in the right.
If we really are in the right, we can certainly survive the criticisms of people like William Harvey. And someday, when we’re in the wrong, we may need someone like him to let us know.
Writing for fame, profit— the easy way
Sunday, March 3, 2002
Conscientious journalists inevitably say they are shocked and saddened when they discover that a fellow practitioner of the writing trade has defrauded readers. Lately, there has been a veritable Tournament of Roses parade of writers who have confessed to making up stories or stealing words.
Stephen Ambrose, who became prosperous chronicling the heroism of ordinary men in World War II, committed the unheroic act of plagiarizing from other accounts in several of his books. Doris Kearns Goodwin, a former Harvard professor, had to acknowledge — 15 years after the matter was brought to her attention — that she appropriated passages from multiple sources in her book “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.”
But while we workaday scribblers regret to see such lapses mar our noble profession, a part of us is also delighted and grateful to these worthies for unintentionally raising the meager value of our work. Those of us who have never written critically acclaimed best-sellers can at least boast that the non-fiction material we have written, we actually wrote, and it’s really not fictional.
Once upon a time, that seemed only obvious. But it’s a claim that a dwindling number of writers can make. We few, we happy few. . . (Whoops! It was some guy named Shakespeare who wrote that, not me.)
Every time you think the cascade of bamboozlement is over, it starts up again. Last week, The New York Times ran one of the most entertaining editors’ notes ever written, regretfully informing readers that an article published in its Sunday magazine was a king-sized whopper.
In the piece, about the indentured servitude of an African boy in Ivory Coast, veteran freelance writer Michael Finkel employed a variety of what you might call unapproved techniques. He created a composite main character, attributed experiences to the character that “did not apply specifically to any single individual,” invented scenes, and composed the entire 6,000-word article “without consulting his notes” — notes that, upon inspection, turned out to contradict much of what he reported. The editors’ note could have just said, “Remember that article? Forget everything you read.”
I would like to say I was shocked and saddened by Finkel’s misconduct. But I was too busy rolling on the floor laughing at his explanations to feel the faintest pang of woe. “I slipped,” he confessed manfully. “It deserved a correction. But there is a great deal of accuracy. Not once has the prose been called into question.”
Well, he’s right. The prose was just fine. The only problem with the article was that it made “Lord of the Rings” look like a PBS documentary.
But you will be relieved to know that Finkel’s bald-faced lies had a noble motive. Said he: “I hope readers know that this was an attempt to reach higher — to make something beautiful, frankly.” What’s the matter, reader — you against beauty?
Ambrose and Goodwin were only slightly less brazen. Ambrose acted as though only schoolmarms and pedants would care if the stories that have made him so rich sprang from his pen or somebody else’s. It was just “six or seven sentences in three or four of my books,” he said dismissively — and besides, his only mistake was that he “failed to put some words and sentences into quotation marks.”
This is a bit like a shoplifter saying that his only mistake was failing to pay. Does Ambrose think there is some other and more terrible form of plagiarism than using someone else’s sentences and pretending you wrote them?
Goodwin, whose publisher settled with one of her victims in 1987 — without bothering to inform readers — insisted that her plagiarism was the product of simple absent-mindedness on her part. She had taken notes from other books in longhand, she said, and then, when it came time to write, mistook the notes for her own original compositions.
How did it happen that vast tracts of her book were lifted from other sources? “The mechanical process of checking things was not as sophisticated as it should have been,” she allowed. Well, surely you wouldn’t expect a simple barefoot Harvard Ph.D. to employ a “sophisticated” approach for documenting her sources.
All these revelations will serve as an everlasting inspiration to ordinary scribes whose work is destined to line birdcages or swell remainder bins rather than make us rich and famous. While churning out unmemorable prose by the sweat of our brow may not seem like a great achievement, it’s more than some celebrated writers can manage.
And the next time my editor thinks my column isn’t up to snuff, I have the perfect comeback: “You think Stephen Ambrose could do better?”
Does free trade breed poverty?
Sunday, March 24, 2002
In the minds of some environmentalists, free trade ranks right up there with the Exxon Valdez as a despoiler of nature. A group called Global Exchange claims that free trade has caused poor countries to “cut down their forests,
