The American Dissident: Literature, Democracy & Dissidence
City Lights Bookstore and Beatnik Bullshit—Free Speech in Peril!
Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
—Chief Justice William O Douglas
The selector begins, ideally, with a presumption in favor of liberty of thought; the censor does not. The aim of the selector is to promote reading not to inhibit it; to multiply the points of view which will find expression, not limit them; to be a channel for communication, not a bar against it.
—Lester Asheim, “Not Censorship but Selection” (Wilson Library Bulletin, 1953)
All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of all censorships. There is the whole case against censorships in a nutshell.
—George Bernard Shaw
Gary Snyder, professor emeritus, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, is a proponent of censorship. Allan Ginsberg seemed only to give a damn about his friends. And indeed the American Academy of Arts and Letters is a friends-only institution (see cartoon on right). The Beatniks became a bohemian myth, thanks to intensive marketing. Yet Ginsberg and other Beatnik icons became as moneyed and bourgeois as it gets.
As for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, his City Lights Bookstore operates as one of many modern-day LITERARY CENSORING ORGANIZATIONS akin to the Catholic Church of yesteryear which created the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Democracy continues its downward spiral thanks in part to the democracy-indifferent, censoring bookstores in America. As a fan of Banned Books Week, Ferlinghetti fails aberrantly to showcase the books and periodicals he's personally banned over the years. For example, he's banned Oriana Fallaci’s The Force of Reason and books by Ann Rand. He's also banned The American Dissident because it's been critical of him as a multimillionaire socialist Beatnik. See below for my correspondence with City Lights. Also, read below Catherine Seipp's L.A. Times opinion piece on City Lights, "The Fascists of Free Speech" (see below).
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Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 03:44:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: "George Slone" <todslone@yahoo.com>
Subject: The American Dissident
To: consignment@citylights.com
Dear Chad Rochkind,
I left a copy of THE AMERICAN DISSIDENT at the City Lights desk last week in the hope you might wish to carry it. I am now back in the Boston, MA area. As indicated on the magazine, it costs $8. Hopefully, you received the copy.
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 06:34:45 -0700 (PDT)
From: "George Slone" <todslone@yahoo.com>
Subject: Third attempt to contact you...
To: consignment@citylights.com
Dear Chad Rochkind, Consignment Manager, City Lights Bookstore:
You have still not responded to my request that you stock The American Dissident next to other poetry journals in City Lights Bookstore. I did leave a copy at the front desk when I was there three weeks ago and also sent you a subsequent email. Perhaps you are on a long vacation? Or must I sadly assume that City Lights Bookstore bans books and magazines containing criticism of Beatniks? If the latter is indeed the case, perhaps City Lights might wish to include the copy of The American Dissident left with you in its display during the banned books and magazines week. Thank you for your attention.
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:54:14 -0700 (PDT)
From: "George Slone" <todslone@yahoo.com>
Subject: Howl on Trial, then Howl as an academic assignment...
To: consignment@citylights.com
Chad,
Can't bear the hardcore ripping truth? Too bad for you! I suspect you must have read my review of Ferlinghetti's Howl.
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 07:12:55 -0700 (PDT)
From: "George Slone" <todslone@yahoo.com>
Subject: Hypocrisy
To: consignment@citylights.com
Chad and Lawrence:
Shame on you fellows promoting Banned Books Week, on the one hand, while banning books on the other! How typical of the established order. Attached is cartoon on Ferlinghetti. It goes in next issue of The American Dissident with this email and your likely SILENCE.
The Fascists of Free Speech By Catherine Seipp, 2/25/06, LA Times, Opinion
(http://articles.latimes.com/2006/feb/25/opinion/oe-seipp25)
A friend of mine took his young daughter to visit the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, explaining to her that the place is important because years ago it sold books no other store would – even, perhaps especially, books whose ideas many people found offensive.
So, although my friend is no fan of Ward Churchill, the faux Indian and discredited professor who notoriously called 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns,” he didn’t really mind seeing piles of Churchill’s books prominently displayed on a table as he walked in.
However, it did occur to him that perhaps the long-delayed English translation of Oriana Fallaci’s new book, “The Force of Reason,” might finally be available, and that because Fallaci’s militant stance against Islamic militants offends so many people, a store committed to selling banned books would be the perfect place to buy it. So he asked a clerk if the new Fallaci book was in yet.
“No,” snapped the clerk. “We don’t carry books by fascists.”
Now let’s just savor the absurd details of this for a minute. City Lights has a long and proud history of supporting banned authors – owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti was indicted (and acquitted) for obscenity in 1957 for selling Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and a photo at the bookstore showed Ferlinghetti proudly posing next to a sign reading “banned books.”
Yet his store won’t carry, of all people, Fallaci, who is not only being sued in Italy for insulting religion because of her latest book but continues to fight the good fight against those who think that the appropriate response to offensive books and cartoons is violent riots. It’s particularly repugnant that someone who fought against actual fascism in World War II should be deemed a fascist by a snotty San Francisco clerk.
Strangest of all is the scenario of such a person disliking an author for defending Western civilization against radical Islam – when one of the first things those poor, persecuted Islamists would do, if they ever (Allah forbid) came to power in the United States, is crush suspected homosexuals like him beneath walls.
Yet those most oppressed by political Islam continue to defend it, even (perhaps especially) in the wake of the Danish cartoon furor. I’ve heard that in Europe this phenomenon is now called the Copenhagen syndrome, and some of its arguments really are amazing.
For instance: “Freedom of speech is not absolute. It has to be in the service of something, like peace or social justice,” a young British Muslim woman named Fareena Alam wrote in Britain’s the Observer a couple of weeks ago. Although it’s true that freedom of speech is not absolute – laws against libel and making violent threats are stronger in Britain than here – Alam has it exactly wrong. Free speech doesn’t have to be in the service of anything but its own point of view. If it did, it wouldn’t be free speech.
I saw this sort of thinking for myself up close earlier this month when I spoke at USC about media bias a few days after the first cartoon riots had broken out. A student wearing a hijab came up to me afterward scoffing at the notion that violent demonstrations in response to the offensive drawings were even all that violent.
“Oh, how many people have died?” she asked, screwing up her face in disbelief. At the time, the death total was four or five. By now it’s more than 100.
It isn’t only Muslim women who are out there defending political Islam, though. Another young woman in the USC audience, after announcing that her father had been held in five Nazi concentration camps so she knows about the Holocaust, segued into a long, rambling position statement about just how little we understand the Muslim world.
But the truth is, by now we understand the Muslim world all too well. For those who manage to remain perplexed, there are many helpful news photos of placards (“Behead Those Who Disrespect Islam,” “Get Ready for the Real Holocaust”), often carried by religiously shrouded women, that can clear up their puzzlement.
Back to City Lights, which indeed has no plans to sell any books by the “fascist” free-speech defender Fallaci. The store’s website proudly declares that the place is “known for our commitment to freedom of expression,” in which case you might assume such commitment includes supporting those whose free expression puts them in real danger.
But, although “The Force of Reason” is expected to reach the U.S. this spring, a City Lights clerk said when I called that the store has no plans to carry anything by Fallaci.
“You’re welcome to buy her book elsewhere, though,” my friend was told helpfully when he visited. “Let’s just say we don’t have room for her here.”
OK, let’s just say that. But let’s also say that one of the great paradoxes of our time is that two groups most endangered by political Islam, gays and women, somehow still find ways to defend it.