Bryan Hoffman | South End 2/20/03
One and a half hours. Three rolls of Scotch tape. One Conservative. Sixty Conservative Union Flyers across campus. Two more hours. A Handful of Anti-War flyers. About forty Conservative Union Flyers covered up by Anti-War flyers, five torn down, three defaced. Add it all up and you get a pretty efficient job of censorship.
A person has to stand in awe at such precision. In fact I stood in awe for quite a few minutes, after exiting the class room to see the flyers I put up torn, covered, and defaced (with such thoughtful observations as "War Now, Think Later"). At that moment I was no longer standing in the halls of an institution of higher learning. I was standing in a middle of a wonderful joke. I wonder if those who committed the caper understood the humor in their acts. The humor for me was obviously in their hypocritical conception of free speech. As I walked through the hall, removing the flyers that covered the ones I put up, an image quickly formed in my mind. I pictured our friendly neighborhood vandals in the passion of tearing paper flyers off the wall and writing such intelligent remarks as "conservatism sucks" all the while complaining to each other how unjust those fascists are who think it improper to yell obscenities about the war at the top of their lungs in the center of campus.
As our grandparents had told us about how things once were in the decades before, we will tell our children how it was at one time. We will tell them that once upon a time the Liberal truly stood for the right to free speech on the moral ground that all ideas have the right to be heard. Our children will hear that they aligned their selves with J. S. Mill, leaving ideas - both false and true -to battle it out in the market place of ideas. Of course they may not believe us.
After all the era of true liberalism has been displaced by the era of the left wing ideologue for some time now. By the time we get to tell the tale to our children, that old-fangled liberalism will have moved into a realm where its existence will be hard to distinguish from the myths of Washington's Cherry tree.
Despite the flaws of Mill's marketplace theory, it is at least founded upon a firm moral ground that all speech is valuable and should be given the right to be expressed. There is certainly much to be preferred in this idea from the rabid self-centered utilitarianism expressed by many on the left today.
Liberals, such as the vandals, have abandoned Mill for the simple totalitarian ethic that all ideas should be voiced and heard except of course those that are not in agreement with their ideology. All ideas are equal, it's just some are more equal than others I suspect they believe. It is based on no moral ground at all, but on a floating standard that changes as a person pleases. The advocate of such a position claims the right to speech as universal, until something is said that doesn't fall with in the accepted ideological spectrum. Once that unacceptable dissent is out the ideology of the free market is discarded and all energy is devoted to suppressing it. Pity that their energy couldn't be better spent.
I brought this little story up in a conversation with a friend of mine over lunch. He, a biology major, gave the conversation a slight biological twist commenting (just to irritate me I believe) that once an antigen enters the body the immune system rightly attacks it before it can spread.
He quickly added, of course, that it was also common for the virus to attack the cure.