The Times twists and turns on Lenny Bruce pardon

Apart from Gov. Pataki’s reprehensible pardon of Lenny Bruce (and I urge all New York residents to call or write the Governor to complain), the New York Times’ article on the pardon, (“Lenny Bruce, Pardoned and Laughing,” December 29, 2003), is a most instructive artifact of the liberal mind. The writer, Bruce Weber, starts off by saying the pardon controversy is over nothing:

Bruce certainly wouldn’t have needed the governor to declare what he always knew to be true: that his words were not only legal but also well within the embrace of the American spirit. That it took the government so long to figure it out would only have reinforced his conviction that officialdom is willfully perverse, innately illogical and slow, if not plain stupid.

So, according to Weber, the public use of such expressions as “m—————r” and “c————r” is simply the historical norm, “well within the embrace of the American spirit,” as he so happily puts it. Americans, he implies, have always said these words in public. It’s no big deal. Bruce did nothing wrong, and the original conviction for obscenity was idiotic.

But then Weber strikes a different note, saying that we shouldn’t over-praise Bruce, a self-righteous drug addict who accomplished little. Shockingly, he even engages in what sounds like outright conservative cultural criticism of Bruce:

He set us on a slippery slope. It’s true you can’t read transcripts of a lot of his work in The New York Times. But turn on cable television and at just about any given moment most of the verbal taboos that Bruce railed against are being violated. Those adorable kids on “South Park” have filthier potty mouths than Bruce ever did. Cross the obscenities out of a script from “The Sopranos” and it would look like the publicly released version of a secret F.B.I. file. Even Bruce wouldn’t try to make comedy out of the taste of ejaculate, as the women on “Sex and the City” have done.

But then, having sounded these censorious notes, truly shocking to see in the Times, Weber immediately undercuts what he apparently has just said:

In retrospect, the language Bruce was arrested for using on stage at the Cafe au Go Go (multisyllabic words for an incestuous son and a practitioner of oral sex, for example) seems, if not tame, then unextraordinary. What the words no longer carry with them is an attitude of any importance. Bruce’s speech was defiant, a claim that Chris Rock or Tony Soprano could no longer make. In fact, from our vantage point, Bruce’s crime can be seen for what it was: not indecency, but gall.

Translation: What we at the New York Times really dig is transgression. Once the transgressive becomes ordinary, once it’s picked up by people who are not “our” kind of people, it loses interest to us, and even becomes unpleasant.

Weber continues:

It’s a shame, of course, but influential people can’t choose whom they influence; the untalented can be affected as easily as the talented, maybe more easily. Bruce paved the way for the unrestrained stage vocabularies of George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Chris Rock, sure. But isn’t Howard Stern his legacy, too? [

Once again, it seems that Weber has no problem at all with public obscenity as such. He just regrets it when it becomes mediocre, or is adopted by a supposed “conservative” (or at least an anti-liberal) such as Howard Stern.

Weber emerges in this article as a soft nihilist and expert practitioner of the unprincipled exception. First, in the usual New York Times mode, he is casually contemptuous of traditional standards and eager to trangress them. Then he turns around and, sounding for a moment like a conservative, condemns the very transgressions he was just excusing. Then he turns around again and drops any principled stand against the transgressions in favor of a series of ever-changing little exceptions and qualifications. Transgressions are bad, he tells us, where they have gone too far (by some undefined standard), or where they have become too low-brow for people like us (e.g. his reference to the incredible vulgarities of “Sex and the City”), or where they are just too ordinary and unimaginative and thus no longer truly transgressive.

Based on this article, liberalism could be defined as the method by which people negotiate their way through a world from which they have systematically expelled God and moral truth, but don’t want, with any finality, to admit that fact to themselves.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 29, 2003 06:17 PM | Send