Fooling with free speech

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Editorial:

Fooling with free speech

Judging from the news stories I read, the First Amendment has been getting quite a workover lately by abusers on both sides of the free-speech issue.

The stories come from locales as different as Long Island, N.Y., and Rockland, Maine, and they show how both would-be suppressers and vocal advocates of free speech can take the First Amendment into absurdist territory.

Begin with the story of Harvey Kash and Carl Lanzisera, a couple of elderly wiseacres who were arrested for telling lawyer jokes outside a New York courthouse.

It is true.

Kash, 70, was on his way to court to answer a drunken-driving charge. His 65-year-old friend Lanzisera had gone along to keep him company. While the two stood in line outside the building on a cold morning, they noticed that lawyers were being let inside as soon as they showed some identification.

To vent their frustration and kill a little time while waiting, the pair lapsed into a comedy routine consisting of well-worn jokes about lawyers, to wit:

"How do you know when a lawyer is lying?"

"His lips are moving."

Others standing in line reportedly got a boot out of the gags, but a passer-by was not amused.

"I'm a lawyer. Shut up," he told the late-blooming comics before reporting them to court security officers.

When Kash and Lanzisera finally made it inside, they were arrested, handcuffed and charged with being abusive and causing a public disturbance.

As members of a legal-reform group that advocates -- publicly and often loudly -- for such things as cameras in courtrooms and minimum jail sentences for crooked lawyers, the two are used to unpleasant confrontations with members of the bar.

But getting arrested for impersonating Abbott and Costello? That was a new one for them ... and for just about anyone learning about the incident.

Meanwhile, in Rockland last week, an equally improbable but less-amusing free-speech encounter took place on a sidewalk outside the Farnsworth Art Museum, where anti-war protesters demonstrated against a new exhibit.

The show -- "Fire and Ice: Marine Corps Combat Art from Afghanistan and Iraq" -- features the work of Staff Sgt. Michael D. Fay, a Virginia artist assigned to the Marine Corps History Division. His paintings concentrate to a large extent on combat forces going about often-tedious daily duties.

The half-dozen protesters, described as artists themselves, carried signs objecting to the exhibit, saying it showed the museum's "implicit support of war."

From what I have read about it, Fay's work depicts the boring, slogging and exhausting side of war, much as Winslow Homer sketched and painted similar scenes for Harper's Weekly during the Civil War.

Fay, who appeared at the opening of the exhibit in full dress uniform -- something else that upset the protesters -- emerged from the museum at one point to speak with the demonstrators. He said he thought it was a fine thing that they were able to engage in "a passionate debate," but at the same time reminded them that freedom of expression extended to him as well.

He is not, he said, a war propagandist nor do his paintings glorify war.

"I'm an artist," he said. "We do art."

Being against war is a perfectly honorable position for anyone to take. Being against war and saying so publicly is equally admirable, at times even courageous.

But accusing an artist of making a pro-war statement in depicting the banality of military life and criticizing the museum that displays his work as an institutional supporter of war takes pacifism into the realm of the ridiculous.

It also presumes a monumental naiveté on the part of museumgoers. Is it possible they will they come away with the impression that there is glory in the grunt side of war? And if so, so what is it?

It is the protesters who politicize Fay's exhibit by insisting that it lacks a balanced viewpoint in failing to portray, as one demonstrator put it, "the faces of the victims and the ruining of the country."

Furthermore, the demonstrators' implication that the Farnsworth should have suppressed this show on political grounds gives the whole exercise of free speech in this case an ironic twist.

Meanwhile, back in New York, a grand jury this week considered the case against the courthouse gagsters and voted to dismiss the charges. As Kash's lawyer commented, "It's still legal in America to tell jokes ... even about lawyers."

And in Rockland, it is still legal to speak out against war ... even if, in doing so, you trivialize your cause to the point of silliness.