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Tuesday, October 03, 2000
Last week, I got a phone call from a very nice lady who went out of her way to assure me she wasn't a prude. What she was, she said, was disappointed: In me. For using bad words. In public.
In the nicest way possible, she rebuked me for using the word "ass" and a vulgarism alluding to bovine excrement before I read aloud from the novel "A Clockwork Orange" at the Carnegie Library Wednesday.
As one of seven "celebrity" readers at the American Civil Liberties Union banned books gala that night, I probably took more liberties than were necessary in my introduction to Anthony Burgess' 1962 dystopian novel about a Beethoven-loving sociopath and his murderous street gang.
"Yes, ma'am," I said, quickly conceding that my explanation of how the novel became important to me at age 16 really didn't require a gratuitous reference to a crazy man's bare bottom, even metaphorically speaking.
The woman had attended what she assumed would be a high-minded lecture about literary censorship. My coarseness immediately lowered the evening's tone as far as she was concerned. All she and her friends could talk about on the ride back to the suburbs was how profane I turned out to be.
At this point of the story, dear reader, I suppose a little context would go a long way.
While I was commuting to high school one morning on the El 24 years ago, I saw a man one could reasonably assume was a bum by the look of his tattered clothes rub his stomach and laugh. This in itself wasn't a big deal in Philadelphia in 1976. Every elevated train was a homeless shelter on wheels in those days. What was unusual about the laughing man was his choice of reading material. He clutched a dog-eared copy of "A Clockwork Orange" in his grimy hands.
I asked the 200 or so people in the audience Wednesday night why a guy who should've been busy bemoaning life's daily indignities was "laughing his ass" off during morning rush hour on the El nearly 25 years ago.
Had he stumbled over a funny section in the book or was he, as I suspected, just another freak "acting out" in Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia? After school, I picked up Burgess' novel just to see what was so funny. To my surprise, I found its synthesis of King James English, invented words and Euro-slang initially impenetrable. That's when I uttered one of the first profanities I ever spoke in anger: "What is this [bovine excrement]?"
Alas, the question had less redeeming literary value in 2000 than it did in 1976. I found this out when I quoted myself verbatim last week. Sure, most people laughed, but not the lady who called to say how appalled she was. Neither did her friends.
"You, of all people, should know better, Mr. Norman" she said. "You obviously know how to use the language. We thought you had more imagination than that."
Cornered, all I could do was admit to my teeny part in the erosion of linguistic civility. I dutifully promised to watch my language the next time I spoke to a gathering at an ACLU function.
When I told my department colleagues, the Great Equivocating Gods of the Editorial Board, about the conversation, they cleared their throats knowingly. Looking down from the heights, they were quick with several observations:
Because of our ideological biases, we celebrity readers had failed to include excerpts from right-wing books in the program, a gesture that would've heightened our credibility as truly anti-censorship. Our feel-good liberal parochialism made us intellectually dishonest.
At this point, the gods began lining up with buckets of cold water.
"I'm curious, did anyone read an excerpt from 'Mein Kampf'?" one of the gods asked. "Was there a list of approved banned books you could choose from? Pick a book from Column A but not one from Column B?" SPLASH!
"That's why I can't stand those things," another of the gods remarked. "Dirty words are about the extent of their interest in censorship. They're all for that. But you'd be drummed out of the Left in a second if you introduced an ideologically impure thought or trampled on someone's sensibilities." SPLASH!
I defended the ACLU's program and even the woman who called, but the gods just laughed and doused me with more water. They made good points, though. Still, I think the sensibilities in a room should matter, even when free speech is at stake. The debate, as usual, will begin in earnest wherever one chooses to draw the line.
Tony Norman's email: tnorman@post-gazette.com