Florida Right-Wingers Now Want To Censor Shakespeare!

The idiocy of right-wingers never seems to have a limit. Now a Florida school board wants to censor Shakespeare. Drew Lichtenberg (lecturer at Yale University and dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C.) responds to this stupidity in The New York Times:

It seemed, for a moment, that Shakespeare was being canceled. Last week, school district officials in Hillsborough County, Fla., said that they were preparing high school lessons for the new academic year with some of William Shakespeare’s works taught only with excerpts, partly in keeping with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s legislation about what students can or can’t be exposed to.

I’m here to say: Good. Cancel Shakespeare. It’s about time.

Anyone who spends a lot of time reading Shakespeare (or working on his plays, as I have for most of my professional career) understands that he couldn’t have been less interested in puritanical notions of respectability. Given how he’s become an exalted landmark on the high road of culture, it’s easy to forget that there’s always been a secret smugglers’ path to a more salacious and subversive Shakespeare, one well known and beloved by artists and theater people. The Bard has long been a patron saint to rebel poets and social outcasts, queer nonconformists and punk provocateurs.

Yes, Shakespeare is ribald, salacious, even shocking. But to understand his genius — and his indelible legacy on literature — students need to be exposed to the whole of his work, even, perhaps especially, the naughty bits.

The closing lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, addressed to the poem’s male subject, are among the dirtiest — and hottest — of the 16th century. “But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.” A favorite trick of Shakespeare’s was to play with word order, especially when he wanted to disclose something too daring to be said in a more straightforward way, such as the love that dared not speak its name. The untangled meaning here: Your love ultimately belongs to me, sir, even if women (sometimes) enjoy your prick. Or, from the neck up you are as beautiful as a woman, and from the waist down you are all man.

Sex is one thing. The plays are also astoundingly gory. The bloody climax of “King Lear” so horrified the playwright Nahum Tate that he felt compelled to rewrite its ending. Tate’s sanitized version of “King Lear,” premiering in 1681, held the stage until 1838. In the 18th century, Voltaire called “Hamlet” the apparent product of a “drunken savage” who wrote without “the slightest spark of good taste”— which didn’t stop Voltaire, who also recognized Shakespeare’s “genius,” from openly borrowing from the Bard for one of his own plays.

In 1872 in “The Birth of Tragedy,” Friedrich Nietzsche praised this savagery. To him, Shakespeare contained the ne plus ultra of grisly truths. Hamlet, he wrote, “sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence.” Nietzsche being Nietzsche, he considered this a good thing. Art, wrote Nietzsche, transforms “these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live.”

In light of Nietzsche’s counterintuitive epiphany, the notion of Shakespeare-the-hipster caught fire. Hamlet, uniquely among male roles in the classical canon, became an aspirational part for female theatrical stars looking to prove their bona fides and upend gender preconceptions: Sarah Bernhardt most famously, but also the great Danish actor Asta Nielsen. Shakespeare’s sonnets were a source of succor to decadent aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde, just as they had been to Charles Baudelaire. The writings and teachings of queer poets such as W.H. Auden and Allen Ginsberg suggests they saw themselves in Shakespeare’s works, as did anti-racist writers from James Baldwin to Lorraine Hansberry and Ann Petry.

Where the avant-garde led, pop culture followed. Shakespeare’s plays have always lent themselves to all manner of interpretations and they found new life in the postwar era, with landmark works like Basil Dearden’s “All Night Long,” a neo-noir film from 1962, which set “Othello” in a British jazz soiree. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” in 1968 plugged into a different cultural zeitgeist, capturing onscreen the summer of love, while Roman Polanski’s film version of “Macbeth” in 1971 feels like an encomium for the dying utopian dreams of the ’60s.

In the transgressive ’90s, Shakespeare was everywhere: taboo, art house, alternative and cool. Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” reimagined Prince Hal and Hotspur as gay grunge gods and Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” featured Leonardo DiCaprio at the peak of his androgyne allure. Even “Shakespeare in Love,” a relatively middlebrow Oscar winner, presented a vision of the brooding, bearded, sexy Shakespeare, as embodied by Joseph Fiennes.

In many other cultures, the bawdy lowbrow and the poetic highbrow are often personified by separate champions: In France, it’s Rabelais and Racine; in Spain, Cervantes and Calderón. In English literature Shakespeare has always combined both brows into something rich, special and strange. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one of Shakespeare’s most magical and sensual plays, Bottom — a man with the head of a donkey — spends the night in bed next to the fairy queen. He wakes up having had something close to a religious experience. Every play in the canon features something similarly subversive and transcendent — and all of them are essential.

One can no more take out the dirty parts of Shakespeare than one can take out the poetry. It’s all intertwined, so that Shakespeare seems almost purposefully designed to confound those who want to segregate the smutty from the sublime. His work is proof that profundity can live next to, and even be found in, the pornographic, the viscerally violent and the existentially horrifying. So if you’re looking for sex, gore and the unspeakable absurdity of existence in Shakespeare, you will definitely find it. That’s the genius of Shakespeare. And it’s precisely what makes his work worth studying. 

Free Speech Is Under Serious Attack In The United States

Free speech is more than just a right of all Americans -- it is a necessity for democracy to exist. Some speech will probably offend you. That's OK, because you have the right to speak up against it. But what must never be done is to limit speech (even offensive speech). Doing that will be the death of our democracy.

Here is how the editorial board of The New York Times sees the issue:

Some threats to freedom of expression in America, like online harassment and disinformation, are amorphous or hard to pin down; others are alarmingly overt. Consider these recent examples of censorship in practice: A student newspaper and journalism program in Nebraska shut down for writing aboutL.G.B.T.Q. issues and pride month. Oklahoma’s top education official seeking to revoke the teaching certificate of an English teacher who shared a QR code that directed students to the Brooklyn Public Library’s online collection of banned books. Lawmakers in Missouri passing a law that makes school librarians vulnerable to prosecution for the content in their collections.

In Florida today it may be illegal for teachers to even talk aboutwhom they love or marry thanks to the state’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law. Of course, it goes far beyond sex: The Sunshine State’s Republican commissioner of education rejected 28 math textbooksthis year for including verboten content.

This year alone, 137 gag order bills, which would restrict the discussions of topics such as race, gender, sexuality and American history in kindergarten through 12th grade and higher education, have been introduced in 36 state legislatures, according to a reportreleased last month by PEN America, a free speech organization. That’s a sharp increase from 2021, when 54 bills were introduced in 22 states. Only seven of those bills became law in 2022, but they are some of the strictest to date, and the sheer number of bills introduced reflects a growing enthusiasm on the right for censorship as a political weapon and instrument of social control.

These new measures are far more punitive than past efforts, with heavy fines or loss of state funding for institutions that dare to offer courses covering the forbidden content. Teachers can be fired and even face criminal charges. Lawsuits have already started to trickle through the courts asking for broad interpretations of the new statutes. For the first time, the PEN report noted, some bills have also targeted nonpublic schools and universities in addition to public schools.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Republican lawmakers around the country were introducing legislation they said would protect free speech on college campuses. Now, they’re using the coercive power of the state to restrict what people can talk about, learn about or discuss in public, and exposing them to lawsuits and other repercussions for doing so. That’s a clear threat to the ideals of a pluralistic political culture, in which challenging ideas are welcomed and discussed.

How and what to teach American students has been contested ground since the earliest days of public education, and the content of that instruction is something about which Americans can respectfully disagree. But the Supreme Court has limited the government’s power to censor school libraries, if not curriculums. “Local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion,’” Justice William Brennan wrote in a 1982 decision.

There may not even be wide disagreement over what American students are being taught. Despite the moral panic over teaching about gender and race, American parents overwhelmingly say they are satisfied with the instruction their children receive. A pollfrom National Public Radio and Ipsos earlier this year found that just 18 percent of parents said their child’s school “taught about gender and sexuality in a way that clashed with their family’s values,” while 19 percent said the same about race and racism. Only 14 percent felt that way about American history.

And yet, some Republican candidates are using the threat of censorship as a show of strength, evidence of their power to muzzle political opponents. Last year in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin won the governorship after a campaign in which he demagogued the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Beloved” by the Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison. Other candidates are looking to make issues around censorship a centerpiece of their pitch to voters in the midterm elections in races from Texas to New Jersey.

Some want to extend censorship far beyond the classroom. In Virginia, a Republican state representative tried to get a court to declare as obscene two young adult books that are frequently banned in schools, “Gender Queer,” by Maia Kobabe, and “A Court of Mist and Fury,” by Sarah Maas. The case was dismissed on Aug. 30, but if it had been successful, it could have made it illegal for bookstores to sell the books to children without parental consent.

Right-wing lawmakers are also looking to restrict what Americans can say about abortion. Model legislation from the National Right to Life Committee, which is circulating in state legislatures, aims to forbid Americans to give “instructions over the telephone, the internet or any other medium of communication regarding self-administered abortions or means to obtain an illegal abortion.” That prohibition would extend to hosting websites that contain such information.

Even when such bills fail, these efforts to censor create a climate of fear. Across the country, libraries in small towns are being threatened with closure and library staff members are being harassed and intimidated. The Times reports that librarians “have been labeled pedophiles on social media, called out by local politicians and reported to law enforcement officials. Some librarians have quit after being harassed online. Others have been fired for refusing to remove books from circulation.” The American Library Association has documented nearly 1,600 books in more than 700 libraries or library systems that have faced attempted censorship.

There are factions on both the left and the right that are insecure enough in their ideas that they’ve tried to ban discussion of certain facts or topics out of discomfort, or simply to score political points. But only right-wing legislators are currently trying to write censorship into law. This is not only deeply undemocratic; it is an act of weakness masquerading as strength. A political project convinced of the superiority of its ideas doesn’t need the power of the state to shield itself from competition. Free expression isn’t just a feature of democracy; it is a necessary prerequisite. 

Idiots

I was outraged by these two stories and wanted to comment on them. After thinking about it, I decided they could both be discussed under one heading -- idiots (because that is exactly what I consider these people to be).

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Let me start with this story of a mother in Michigan. Gail Horalek has decided that one of the most widely-read books in the world (and deservedly so), The Diary of Anne Frank, is pornographic. Her middle school daughter was "made uncomfortable" when she read the book, according to Horalek, because there is a passage in the book where Anne discusses her genitalia.

This has horrified Horalek (who is evidently trying to hide from her daughter the fact that humans have genitalia), and she now wants the school to either remove the book or make parents sign a permission slip before their children can read it.

Now Horalek had a choice when her daughter told her it made her "uncomfortable". She could use that as a teaching moment, and initiated a discussion of both human sexuality and the ideas contained in the book -- or she could try to ban the book. Sadly, she chose the latter.

Horalek told her local newspaper, "It doesn't mean my child is sheltered, it doesn't mean I live in a bubble, and it doesn't mean I'm trying to ban books." She's wrong. That's exactly what it means.

The fact is that The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most important books ever published. It is absolutely appropriate for middle school aged children, and in my opinion, should be required reading. I made sure my children read it before they entered high school. They were also made "uncomfortable". But it was by the horrific actions of the Nazi regime in carrying out the murder of innocents like Anne Frank and her family.

This woman is an idiot.

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This story is even more horrific, because it involves the killing of a two year old child. The baby was shot by her five year old brother. And the crazy part is that the five year old didn't use an adult's gun to shoot his sister. He did it with his own gun.

The parents of the two children had bought the five year old his own gun, and given it to him. The gun, a .22 caliber rifle called a Crickett, was like those pictured at the left -- made and marketed to children by Keystone Sporting Arms (a Pennsylvania gun company).

The shooting is being called an accident, but I have to question that. I'm not blaming the five year old, but his parents and the gun company. Giving a dangerous firearm to a five year old and marketing weapons made especially for children are both ridiculously dangerous actions, and create a situation where a tragedy is likely to happen. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out. Personally, I hold both the parents and the gun company responsible for the death of the two year old.

The parents and the gun-makers are all idiots.

Censorship Rears Its Ugly Head Again

Are you offended by the work of art pictured above?   It definitely presents a political point of view -- that war is conducted for profit.   Whether anyone agrees with that point of view or not, it is a valid one.   And the street painting could have provoked public discussion of modern wars, a discussion that could be a public service since this country is currently engaged in two endless wars.

But don't expect to see this picture if you go to Los Angeles.   The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) has whitewashed over it in a display of what can only be called censorship.   The museum had commissioned a street mural from the Italian artist Blu for a celebration of contemporary street art, but they didn't like the painting he produced.

MOCA said the painting was insensitive and offensive in their part of the city because there is a V.A. Hospital nearby and also a war memorial.   I think that's just a lot of horse manure.   For one thing, a lot of street art is more offensive than this painting, and with a lot less socially-redeeming value.   And how much value does a museum have that feels it must censor its own artists?

I'm not even sure that many veterans would find the street mural offensive.   Many of them might even agree with the sentiment of the artist.   And even if they didn't -- did they fight for freedom or censorship?   I'll bet most of them would tell you it was the former.

We are supposed to be living in a free country, and in a free country the right to free speech must be jealously guarded and protected.   And the right to free speech is much more important than the right not to be offended (which I can't seem to find in the Constitution).

The museum was wrong to whitewash the artwork.   Maybe a few people would have been offended by the painting, but that's just part of the price we pay for living in a free country.

U.S. Is Attempting Internet Censorship

A few days ago the website called WikiLeaks released many U.S. State Department documents, and are in possession of thousands more which will probably also be released.   Any names that are sensitive (and might put someone in danger) have been redacted, and no government official has been able to give a single instance where anyone's life was put in danger or the country's security was compromised.   While this information was "classified", it really shouldn't have been.  

Most U.S. politicians and government officials are quick to claim that the United States is a free and open country.   I wish that was true.   In a free and open country the people have a right to know what their government is doing.   They need to know this so they can make an informed decision when they go to the polls to vote.   Voters can't be expected to make good decisions when information is kept from them by the government, and any information not required to be kept secret because of a compelling national security matter should be made public.

Some politicians have labeled the head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange (pictured), as a traitor.   Some have even asked that he be put to death or put in prison.   That is patently ridiculous.   Mr. Assange has done a favor for the American people and should be given our thanks -- not hounded and vilified.   He has struck a valuable blow for free speech and open government.

Since the release of some of these documents, we have seen several attacks on WikiLeaks.   Amazon kicked the site off of their server.   PayPal, MasterCard and VISA have cut them off.   And EveryDNS has refused to translate their organizations address into an IP address (which is necessary for anyone to find them on the internet).   This is an effort to drive them off the internet and silence their website, and it was done because of pressure from the United States government.

When he was campaigning for president, Barack Obama promised to have a more open and transparent government than previous administrations.   It doesn't look like he really meant that.   The efforts by his administration to shut up WikiLeaks and kick it off the internet is nothing less than an effort to censor the internet -- something that should never happen under any circumstances.

This should scare the hell out of anyone who has a website or a blog or anyone who uses the internet to get news and information.   If WikiLeaks, whatever you may think of them, can be censored, then anyone or any organization can also be censored.   Anyone who says something the government doesn't like can be censored.   This is what countries like China do.   Do we really want our government doing that?

WikiLeaks is luckier than most people with websites or blogs.   They were big enough to establish servers in 14 different countries -- making it much harder for any single government to shut them down (even the United States government, as powerful as it is).   Most internet writers and users are not that big, and are really at the mercy of the United States government.   These people should be very worried by these first steps by the U.S. government toward establishing a policy of internet censorship.

The United States government (or any other government) is wrong to try to censor any part of the internet for any reason.   It is an attack on free speech and freedom, and must not be tolerated.

U.S. Government Muzzles Scientists

If you're a scientist going abroad on business for the U.S. government, truth should not be your primary concern. Instead, you should focus on presenting Bush's position - even if that position is wrong.

Memos from the United States Fish & Wildlife Service to scientists going abroad have been exposed by two environmental groups - the National Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity.

The memos state that any scientist traveling abroad on government business must understand that climate change, sea ice and polar bears are delicate subjects. The memos say that top officials of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service must be assured that the traveling scientist "understands the administration's position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues".

In other words, toe the party line or don't go! After all, a scientist speaking the truth is a nightmare for the Bush administration. In the neocon world of Bush and Cheney, science is not determined by experimentation - it is hatched in the Oval Office.

Doesn't this tell us that Bush knows he is wrong on these issues? If he was even close to right, there would be no need to suppress the truth or muzzle U.S. scientists.

Eben Burnham-Snyder of the Natural Resources Defense Council says, "The administration has a long history of censoring speech and science on global warming. Whenever we see an instance of the Bush administration restricting speech on global warming, it sends up a huge red flag that their commitment to the issue does not reflect their rhetoric."

It is very troubling to see our president trying to hide the truth, and it has to make one wonder how many other truths he is trying to hide. Can we believe anything he says?

We need a president who will tell Americans the truth - even if it is a truth that he does not like.