Opinion/Harold: Sticks and stones, free speech and writing under the threat of death – Cape Cod Times

Brent Harold| Columnist

I've stood on the very stage in Chautauqua, New York,where Salman Rushdie was stabbed multiple times last month.

When I was young my grandparents used to take me and my sister to Chautauqua, a 150-year-old summer resort emphasizing lectures, music and other cultural recreation, for a few weeks in the summer. I've always owed them hugely for those memorable, influential seasons.

Along with other kids I would hang out at the Amphitheatre, where famous people would be invited to speak or otherwise perform, hoping for autographs. Perhaps there were kids hoping to score Rushdie's autograph last month.

Chautauqua defined and defines itself as in the world but not of it. During my first, idyllic visit World War II raged. The attack on Rushdie feels like an attack on the very meaning of that Brigadoon-like venue.

One of the instructive sayings I learned when young didn't all middle-class children? was: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. That is: develop a thicker skin before resorting to physical retaliation. For most of my life, that seemed axiomatic.

But the distinction between words and physical actions is a nave one, a false dichotomy. As those murdered in 2015 at the magazine Charlie Hebdo for drawing satirical cartoons of the prophet Mohammed discovered, names words, art can hurt enough that those who don't have a witty comeback in kind may resort to sticks and stones.

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Salman Rushdie learned the same thing when his words provoked thefatwadeath sentence. (I've always wondered if he has wondered if he could have put the offensive part of his novel in a gentler way without hurting the book but avoiding the life-transforming reaction.)

The freedom of speech issue is more complicated than sticks and stones suggests.

I've written this column for almost 30 years now, very much in the same innocent spirit as sticks and stones, of Chautauqua, or Charlie Hebdo. Greatly appreciative that I get to have my say, and also sort oftaking it for granted because this is a free speech democracy.

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Many years ago, in my first few years as a columnist, as rarely happened, I got a phone call in reaction to a column. I had written about angry men. I suggested that we might be a less violent nation if we didn't as a culture tend to glamorize violent men as sexy in a macho sort of way ("Go ahead, make my day!"). We should instead begin seeing such men as we had come to see smokers, a category that had formerly included the sexiest of celebs, as self-destructive unfortunates with yellow-stained fingers.

When I picked up the phone I was assaulted by one of those violent men, calling to object, as far as I could make out through the abuse, to my call for de-glamorizing his kind. Since it was a phone call it was just words, But the words sputtered obscenities suggested that if we were in person, it would be sticks and stones I'd have to worry about. It was sobering. Since Trump I've received many a sputtering, hateful email, a less aggressive medium than a phone.

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I think about that when I read about the Charlie Hebdo massacre, or all the murders of Mexican journalists (from 2000 to 2017, 104 killed). I realize that if I lived in Mexico, as painful as it would be as a writer not to have my say about cartel and government abuse I doubt I would be writing a column like this. As much as I admire their courage, as far as I'm concerned, being a Mexican journalist is above and beyond the call of writerly duty. Mexico as it is constituted doesn't deserve journalists. But of course a huge majority of Mexicans, poor, vulnerable, more endangered by government than helped by it, need all the help they can get.

Mexican journalists know how misleading it is to dichotomize words and actions. Talking the talk is walking the walk. Words are actions.

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Journalists and other practitioners of free speech in the U.S. have had hard going given the dominance of social media and the politics of fake news. But still, in crucial contrast with Mexico or Putin's Russia, we are, to my knowledge, not afraid for our lives. But there's no reason to think that will continue to be true if Trumpism is ratified in coming elections. If, as many think, a free press is essential to the maintenance of democracy, it would be the next to go.

I wonder: how would it go? How would we (will we?) get from our current situation to the plight of the press in Mexico or Russia? And at what point in that trajectory would I prudently stop practicing freedom of speech, it having become less free if practitioners have to pay with their lives.

Brent Harold, a Cape Cod Times columnist and former English professor, lives in Wellfleet. Email him atkinnacum@gmail.com.

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Opinion/Harold: Sticks and stones, free speech and writing under the threat of death - Cape Cod Times