La liberté de parler

It’s a strange time to be in journalism.

 

Normally, when someone says that, they’re referring to the advent of Internet-connected mobile devices, which threaten to relegate traditional journalism to the realm of the antiquated – the 21st-Century equivalent of curly-mustachioed shoe shiners. And that is a threat, though mostly to those unprepared for the transition; they’re the living embodiment of that Darwinian creed, “Adapt or die.”

 

Until recently, though, that was the only serious threat. The mission itself – to inform, entertain, and enlighten – was never really under attack. And most run-of-the-mill Westerners might well ask, “Why would it be?” Particularly for Americans, who enjoy First Amendment protections, the freedom of the press is a right so ingrained in culture that it’s almost taken for granted, like the right to vote, or the right to choose Coke over Pepsi. Which one should do every time, by the way. Pepsi tastes like sugary back sweat.

 

Then a dopey comedy called “The Interview” inspired North Korea’s ire. Weeks later, 12 people at a satirical magazine in France lost their lives to terrorists over – of all things – the publication of a cartoon.

 

Grim stuff. Ridiculous stuff. But the media is no stranger to the grim and ridiculous. Reporters being killed by radicals has become a sadly commonplace phenomenon, and this isn’t the first time a cartoon has caused controversy; one may remember a few years ago when an episode of “South Park,” a comedy program whose bread and butter is social commentary wrapped in fart jokes and curse words, aired an episode that depicted the Muslim prophet Muhammed. Outrage among sects of the Muslim world inspired death threats to the show’s creators, which probably proved their point: That finding offense in a TV show is about as silly and illogical as the search for Bigfoot, or wearing tube socks to the beach.

 

Likely for that reason, the media stood its ground after the “South Park” fiasco, taken aback but still steadfast in its commitment to the right of expression. Lately, though, there have been cracks in that stoic veneer.

 

We all know what happened with “The Interview.” Sony Pictures, in an act of cowardice, pulled it from theaters, instead releasing it as a digital stream for paying customers over the Internet. The events in France, meanwhile, have inspired more in the way of journalistic solidarity, but the long-term implications – that purveyors of free thought may think twice before using their medium to satirize – are troubling, for no less grandiose a reason than the threat it poses to the right of people to say whatever the hell they want.

 

Journalism has had its challenges, yes. But I never thought it’d come down to this.

 

Look, I don’t pretend to accomplish anything of great importance in this space. I poke fun at things, I slip in random drug references, I cross my eyes and go “Wakka wakka wakka,” and hopefully people crack a smile. I’m not blazing any groundbreaking trails here. But I’m able to do what I do because I have the requisite freedom. I can joke that Donald Trump is a fat-faced blubberhead with a hairpiece made from the mottled fur of a diseased lemur. I won’t, because A) That would be totally gratuitous (wink, wink), and B) If Trump caught wind of it, he’d probably buy my apartment building and turn it into a gambling casino. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t if I wanted to. Pushing the envelope, frankly, is often part of a journalist’s job.

 

I’ve never been one to provoke for the sake of provoking. There needs to be an underlying reason, whether it be for a chuckle or the occasional stray point. It is, however, the sacred right of any free individual or entity, media or not, to rock the boat just for the sheer heck of it. It’s not always advisable, but it’s an arrow in the quiver. When we willfully surrender our arrows, the solid ground of free speech starts to buck and crumble beneath our feet. (And yes, I also reserve the right to mix my metaphors.)

 

This is what makes Sony’s actions so shameful. By allowing themselves to be intimidated by extremists, they’ve set a dangerous precedent, essentially sending the message that freedom of expression is negotiable.

 

It isn’t.

 

A right doesn’t remain a right unless we periodically stand up for it – even under threat of death. While that’s an extreme scenario, it’s no longer a farfetched one. There exists in every pocket of the globe those contingents who would curtail art or speech in the name of a perceived offense, religious or otherwise. Let them be offended. Let us offend. Bad jokes, bad taste, and bad judgment are all fair game, and should be. If those things are surpressed, then so too will good jokes, good taste, and good judgment. Then we’re all in trouble.

 

Which is why the staff at Charlie Hebdo, the French magazine, have earned my respect. Though they were victimized and made the subjects of widespread sympathy and support, their brand of satire hasn’t softened any. The cover of their first publication after the attacks is a testament to this. On it is a sign that has now become world-famous: Je suis Charlie. The sign is depicted as being held by the prophet Muhammed.

 

Bold? Probably. Offensive? Most definitely.

 

But it was also brave. And the right call.

 

Ring-a-ding-don't

Here’s a scenario you don’t experience anymore.

It’s late afternoon on a weekend. The sun is setting outside your living room window, and you’re relaxing in a leather sofa – your feet kicked up, a glass of wine in hand, and the soothing strains of Air Supply sauntering delicately through the stereo speakers, ’cause screw the haters, man. On your lap is a magazine, opened to a strangely fascinating article about the nocturnal sex habits of Mediterranean fruit bats. Turns out it starts with the male bat biting the female bat on the neck. You smile, remembering that time in college when...

Ring! The phone! Not your cell phone; those haven’t been invented yet. The phone phone is ringing, that hunk of plastic hanging on the wall in the kitchen, next to the calendar with the photos of kittens dressed as circus clowns.

So you put down your wine and your fornicating bats, wrest yourself out of blissful repose, and trudge over to the kitchen. You wonder who it could be. Maybe Aunt Bertha is calling about the test results of that weird lump on her thigh that looks like the Crimean Peninsula. Maybe dad wants to share his new recipe for a Bavarian-style beer he calls “Throatripper.”

You pick up the receiver.

“Yes, hello, I’m looking for (insert your name here). I’m with Verizon, and I was wondering if I could offer you a long-distance calling plan which...”

Disgusted, you slam the phone back into its cradle, knock down the cat calendar, and wake up your actual cat, who was dozing on a discarded pair of Scooby-Doo underwear.

All that trouble just to be harangued by a telemarketer.

Bet that hasn’t happened in a while, though. It used to be one of humanity’s common experiences, like sitting next to a guy at the movies who won’t stop asking questions about the plot. It was once a go-to topic of conversation for two strangers stuck in a situation in which they have to be social with each other. “So, Bob, you getting a lot of telemarketing calls? I got one yesterday from a guy who said I won a gold-plated bicycle horn from the South Burmese Historical Society’s Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes! What a tool!”

That’s not a conversation recognizable to these teched-up hipster kiddies with their fancy-schmancy smartphones. Or sad sacks like me, whose phones show promise but don’t apply themselves.

Telemarketers can’t be out of business completely, because call centers still exist; there’s one in a mall in my hometown of Lewiston, sandwiched between an empty Radio Shack and a store which seemingly sells nothing but Hallmark cards and ceramic cats. But who are they calling? With portable cell phones now the norm, I imagine it’s more difficult for private entities to store comprehensive databases of peoples’ phone numbers. I say “I imagine” because finding out for sure would entail actual research, which cuts into time better spent in more worthwhile pursuits, like blowing bubbles at dogs to watch their confusion. 

They must be calling the holdovers, the ones who cling to their land lines in case studies find that cellular signals cause blindness and an inability to appreciate mustard. I was a holdover for a long time, until I realized the only calls I was getting were from robots who wanted to refinance things I didn’t own. It was blissful when I finally let go of that vestige of the pre-portable era; in the past five years, I’ve experienced more car accidents than telemarketing calls. Which I’ll say is a good thing. I guess.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably admit that I was once a telemarketer myself. It was a summer job prior to my junior year of college. I’d drive to work in a battered Ford Bronco with an empty socket where the radio should have been, sit down in front of a yellowed computer that smelled like a hospital gurney, and spend hours calling people who vehemently wished I were dead. And you know what? I didn’t blame them. You’d think that experiencing the profession from the inside would have made me sympathetic to the telemarketer’s plight, but no. After three months of hearing people tell me to go to hell, I was half-ready to oblige them.

The reason, see, is that telemarketers’ training is basically a crash course in how to be an ass. The one directive which stands out to me, all these years later, is that we weren’t allowed to take “no” for an answer. We had to press on, blithely ignoring folks’ pleas for us to insert hand grenades into our most easily reachable orifices. Only until they gave some version of “no” three times were we allowed to wish them a nice day, even though by then we’d made that pretty much impossible. By the end of my shift I’d ruined dozens of family dinners. I should be collecting roadside trash in an orange jumpsuit for the lives I’ve destroyed.

Then everyone got mobile. Problem solved – or mostly, anyway. Roughly twice in the course of a given year, I’ll still get a random call that’s utterly gratuitous, usually from someone who can’t pronounce my last name. I used to ask to be put on a do-not-call list, but with these interruptions now occurring about as frequently as dinosaur rampages, I just hang up and go about my business. Simple. It almost makes me pine for the days when I’d get harassed by someone intent on disrupting my nightly meal of scrambled eggs and Golden Grahams.

Almost. Because while technology is a double-edged sword, a nice benefit to the cell phone era is that telemarketing is slowly going the way of powdered wigs and frilly pantaloons. Some remnants of the mid- to late-20th Century are sad to see go; not so with this weirdly invasive practice. When the last solicitous call in history is placed, it’ll be a victory everywhere for those who value peace and quiet.

Now I can get some reading done. Did you know fruit bats have lost the ability to echolocate? These are the kinds of things you can learn when the phone stays silent.

I'm dreaming of a white Thankseastermas

It wasn’t until a few days after Christmas that my friend “Gertrude” and I were able to exchange gifts over Indian food and quasi-stale German chocolates. Though the grub was an exercise in multiculturalism – lacking only sitar music and dancers gyrating in lederhosen – the gift she gave me was decidedly American in nature: a ticket to an annual, all-day beer festival in Portland. That’s about as red-white-and-blue as you can get without frying meat. Or firing a gun. At meat.
 

There’s so much brilliance behind this gift choice that it’s almost difficult to fathom. Physicists studying the collisions of accelerated particles in Switzerland can only aspire to Gertrude’s insight and thoughtfulness. Biologists identifying the gene mutations that trigger evolution are rendered cone-capped dunces in the shadow of her towering foresight. Even the guy who invented the cronut is like, “Whoa, Gertie, right on, girl.”
 

See, the beer festival takes place near the end of January. And January stinks. You know it and I know it. After a holiday season rich with elves, lights, and the sweet crooning carols of one honey-voiced Johnny Mathis, the new year’s inaugural month is a bleak stretch of awful. There’s literally nothing redeeming about it, unless of course there’s snow and you’re fond of skiing, in which case you’re a big poopy-face. (Translation: “I’m jealous. And you’re a big poopy-face.”)
 

What the beer fest does is give burgeoning alcoholics like myself something to look forward to – an event that breaks up the monotony of snarling winds and iced-over windshields. It’s exactly what January needs.
 

’Cause let’s face it – it needs something. Some sort of a come-down holiday that eases us into a gentle landing after the whiz-bang rocket flight of Christmas. The way it is now, with four empty weeks of suck, it’s a pretty rough transition back into normalcy. If December is a raging kegger, January is a pounding hangover, one long what-just-hit-me moment which inspires thoughts of glum hibernation in a remote mountain cave. If it were remotely feasible, I’d volunteer to spend the next eight weeks preserved in ice like a Neolithic caveman, only to be reanimated when the first robin makes its initial tentative chirp. Heck, for that matter, they could keep me frozen until 2115, when the Earth’ll likely be a hot molten mess, and civilization reduced to a few wandering tribes hunting badgers with spears. At least then I could start wearing sandals.
 

This year, there’s beer, a makeshift, stopgap holiday gifted to me by a like-minded summer lover. But what about future winters? I can’t bank on Gertrude’s willingness to make this an annual excursion, and there’s no guarantee the event organizers will be able to keep it going indefinitely, though hopefully they can. What’s needed is an official holiday. Nothing as big or splashy as Christmas, since that would be nervous-system overload, and would probably ruin many a New Year’s resolution to stop gorging on snacks like a malnourished refugee. Nothing too frivolous or silly, since Halloween’s basically got that market cornered.
 

Something like Easter, though ... that might just be the ticket.
 

Easter, needless to say, is a pretty big deal in Christianity, when church attendance spikes to levels not seen since the heyday of Brylcreem. But when you divest Easter from its religious connotations, what’s left, exactly? Some colored eggs, an enormous rabbit, and family members sitting around a giant slab of ham. Take the Christ out of Easter, and it’s Mushroom Monday at a hippie commune.
 

So. You’ve been given a seat on the January Holiday Creation Committee. You’re using Easter as a template. Great. Only you don’t want to plagiarize that holy day, bunny and all; you want your new celebration to be unique, have its own flavor and character.
 

Here’s an idea I’ve been kicking around: Thankseastermas.
 

Held on the last Friday of the month – none of this Thursday nonsense – Thankseastermas gathers the family around an assortment of cheese nachos and $5 footlongs from Subway. The children color marshmallows, and on Friday night, they’re visited by Santa Claus’ brother, Chuck Claus, who travels the world in a flying Dodge Dart powered by pixie dust and leftover chicken gristle. The kiddos leave out their colored marshmallows for ol’ Chuck, and in return, he leaves Dunkin’ Donuts coupons underneath a Chia Pet shaped like Chewbacca. On Saturday morning, the family goes out for bagels and crullers, and once back at the house, they gather ’round the living room and sing Thankseastermas carols, like “I’ll Be Home For Thankseastermas,” and “The Ballad of Acid Indigestion.” Festivities come to a close with the viewing of a holiday classic, “City Slickers II: The Search for Curly’s Gold.”
 

Maybe it needs a little work.
 

But the spirit is there. A laid-back, mid-level holiday, it helps bridge the gap between gray winter and glorious spring, while gradually weaning us off our built-up dependence on mythical creatures and idiosyncratic customs. Plus there’s marshmallows. I smell a winner.
 

The only problem, naturally, is that I lack the authority to implement the idea. With my magic wand on the fritz, I’ve got to rely on Gertrude’s generosity to get me through the rough stretch. Thankfully, a beer festival contains many trademarks of a typical holiday, including overindulgence, throngs of people, a disregard for one’s waistline, and the guarantee of future regret. Throw in a silly hat and all bases are pretty well covered.
 

It’s not Thankseastermas, but it’s something. This time of year, something is all we can ask for.

Times they are a-changin'

Change. I hate it. And like other hermits and shut-ins, I can readily reference movie quotes to adequately sum up my feelings on the subject.

 

In this case, the movie is “Clerks,” a 1994 indie flick from writer/director Kevin Smith, a poop joke-loving, puerile filmmaker with a penchant for arcane Star Wars references and bestiality humor. My kind of guy, in other words.

 

The “film” – if you can call it that – centers around Dante, a 22-year-old convenience store clerk, and his best friend Randall, who works at an adjoining video store. Randall spends most of his time shirking his responsibilities, leaving his post to visit Dante at the Quick Stop so the pair of Gen-X slackers can sardonically mock the clientele, consisting largely of glum smokers and melancholy high school guidance counselors obsessed with finding the perfect batch of eggs. High drama, I know. Makes “Gone With the Wind” seem as exciting as playing canasta against a quadriplegic circus monkey.

 

During one scene, Randall chides Dante for not having the courage to face change. Dante attempts an explanation.

 

“My mother told me once that when I was 3 years old, my potty lid was closed, and instead of me lifting it, I shit my pants,” says Dante.

 

“Lovely story,” replies Randall.

 

“The point is,” says Dante, “I’m not the type of person who’ll disrupt things just so I can shit comfortably.”

 

I know the feeling, dude.

 

Which is why I’ve built my life on rhythms. Get up, go to work, bust my buns, go home, yadda yadda yadda, repeat. “Yadda yadda yadda,” in case you were wondering, consists largely of watching superhero movies and Photoshopping my head onto the bodies of centaurs. I’ve become disturbingly good at the latter. And yes, this is a cry for help.

 

All this is well and good, until something happens to foist change upon my comfortable routine – and nothing is as emblematic of change as the dawn of a new year. I’ve mused before on how the calendar is largely arbitrary, the numerical uptick indicative of nothing more than our attempts to make sense of time. Which is true. Time is just something that happens, and quantifying it is merely a necessary measure to ensure we make it to juggling practice when we’re supposed to. It doesn’t change the phenomenon. Mother Nature’s indifferent to balls dropping in Times Square; I like to think of her laughing as we spend the better part of January learning to write “2015” on all of our checks. Nothing is ever altered at year’s first light except our own perceptions, and maybe the hangover cures of college students, who use New Year’s as an attempt to ingest more chemicals than a dolphin at a nuclear reactor spill.

 

Regardless, change is constant, and sometimes it does coincide with our calendars.

Take those libation-quaffing students. They’ll start all-new classes this semester, leaving behind Contemporary Russian Feminist Abstractionist Bohemian Poetry 101 for the stimulating discussions of Mid-18th-Century Avante-Garde Impressionist Fingerpainting. Out with the old, in with the new, literally. For them, the switchover into a new year is less an arbitrary necessity than a brick wall seprating one epoch from another. New courses, new faces, new opportunities for skipping class in favor of day-long Lord of the Rings marathons. Clean.

 

In sports, NFL teams lucky enough to make the postseason will start their Super Bowl campaigns, each vying for a coveted spot in the big game – along with the distractions of a lip-synched halftime travesty of baton-twirlers and washed up pop singers who were a big deal in 1996. New year, new goals. Also clean.

 

Then there’s the Journal Tribune. There’ll be changes here, too.

 

Seems like I’m writing goodbye odes every other week these days. This time, it’s our intrepid City Editor, Robyn, who’s leaving. She probably won’t want a big fuss, so I won’t give her one. (Although she just so happens to be eminently professional, superhumanly patient, and encyclopedia-level knowledgeable about the biz. Okay, so a little fuss.) Suffice it to say, we’re gonna miss her.

 

Change. And though her last day is technically today, it coincides roughly with the year’s infancy, lending a little more legitimacy to the notion of new beginnings. For us, anyway, and surely for her.

 

We’re happy for her, of course, partly because she’s no longer forced to read my weekly dissertations on flatulent farm animals and the relative merits of breathable underwear. Speaking personally, though, I expect to feel the void. It’s funny: You walk into a place as a greener-than-grass freshman, wide-eyed and naive, and the cast of characters by which you’re surrounded become your mentors, your teachers. Then time passes. People come and go, the character of a place morphs and evolves, and then one day you take a look around and realize you’re not the kid anymore – your green veneer has faded like the overwashed denim on a pair of jeans. It’s a necessary part of life, but no more comfortable for that. The only thing left is to stay standing and keep flying the flag. Growth and maturation are the result, and these are desirable ends; but there’s still a part of me that clings wistfully to that long-ago innocence, a time when I could easily embrace the delusion of comfortable stasis, the permanence of place of all things. 

 

But that’s just my nature. I’m not the type of person who’ll disrupt things just so I can shit comfortably.

 

So it turns out New Year’s actually means something, after all. What will 2015 bring? There’s no real way to tell; here, prediction gives way to hope, and the yearning to make this year better than the last. Change isn’t always a bad thing, especially when we’re the agents of it.

 

That's something you learn, too.