How did the issue of “gay marriage” come to the fore of social and political debate?  It is the last thing Americans want to think about, but the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in November (Goodrich v. Department of Public Health) that homosexuals have the right, under the state constitution, to marry and directed the legislature to pass laws within 180 days to accomplish that.  The Massachusetts Senate asked the court if a bill giving same-sex couples the rights and benefits of “marriage” but calling their relationships “civil unions” would be good enough.  The court, in February, ruled it would not: It is a “considered choice of language that reflects a demonstrable assigning of same sex, largely homosexual, couples to second-class status.”  President Bush called the court’s February ruling “deeply troubling.”

In late February, the President announced he would support a federal constitutional amendment banning “gay marriage” because “activist courts have left the people with one recourse.”  There is no assurance, the President added, that the “Defense of Marriage Act will not itself be struck down by activist courts.”  John Kerry said of the President: “He’s trying to divide America . . . [he] always tries to create a cultural war.”  The New York Times editorialized that the President was putting “bias in the constitution.”  He was injecting “meanspiritedness and exclusion into the document embodying our highest principles and aspirations.”  All sides seems happily headed for another nasty, divisive culture-war battle.

Is such a battle necessary?  Some on each side desire a national uniform rule either permitting or prohibiting “gay marriage.”  The majority of Americans (58 percent), however, believe the issue should be decided by the states.  Both John Kerry and President Bush have, at times, said that it is appropriate that the states decide.  What if it were possible, by a simple statute, passed by a simple majority in Congress, to assure that each state could choose for itself without fear of being overridden by a judicially imposed uniform national rule—and that no state could decide for any other?  Could we just pass the statute and forget the issue (polling data show most Americans wish they had never heard of it) and move on to something else?

The answer is Yes, but it takes a little explaining.  Last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Texas’ antisodomy law, ruling that it violated personal liberty “in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions” (Lawrence and Garner v. Texas).  The majority opined that homosexuals are “free as adults to engage in the private conduct in the exercise of their liberty under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” citing the European Court of Human Rights.  Since, as the Court conceded, antisodomy laws “do not seem to have been enforced against consenting adults acting in private,” it is unclear why the Court had decided to reach out and issue a ruling that was offensive to the majority of Americans.  Justice Antonin Scalia, in a bitter dissent, wrote that the Court was taking “sides in the culture wars.”  Apparently, the Court wanted to educate and improve the country morally—to make the public aware that homosexuals are entitled to freedom, dignity, and “respect for their private lives.”  The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court took the lesson to heart in its November and February rulings.

The Supreme Court’s effort to educate has been a total failure.  Indeed, the more Americans have been forced to think about “gay rights,” the less they have liked them.  A New York Times/CBS News poll taken in July 2003 reported that 54 percent of Americans believe that homosexual relations should be legal.  By December, that number had dropped to 41 percent.   The December poll found that Americans oppose “gay marriage” by an almost 2-to-1 margin (61 to 34 percent).  They also oppose civil unions 54 to 39 percent.

Do the wishes of a clear and large majority make any difference?  Not if the issue stays in the federal courts.  The course that “gay marriage” will follow is predictable.  Within ten years, we will have a national rule requiring “gay marriage” or something only rhetorically different.  First, a gay couple, “married” in Massachusetts, will move to South Carolina and insist that the state, pursuant to the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution, recognize their Massachusetts “marriage.”  The state, citing the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) will argue that it need not recognize the Massachusetts law.  After four or five years of litigation, the Supreme Court will find that the Full Faith and Credit Clause trumps DOMA.  If the amendment President Bush favors is adopted, the same scenario will play out with “civil unions.”  Proponents of traditional marriage will then put all their resources into urging Congress to propose a constitutional amendment for the states to ratify.  The effort will likely fail in the Senate, where it will be vetoed by a one-third negative vote.  The New York Times, a few days after it becomes clear that the amendment will not get out of Congress, will report a victory for “equal rights” establishing that “gays should be allowed to marry” (reprising their editorial of January 13, 2004).  Around 2014, the majority of Americans will realize that, once again, it has lost.  In the meantime, however, the Republican Party will have a delicious issue designed, as they say, to “energize the base.”  Would the base be “energized” if it understood that the Party, in 2004, had the power to give it a win?

Are the Supreme Court’s decisions the last word?  What can the majority do if it believes the Court is seriously out of line—or likely to be?  Most people believe there are three choices: They can grumble but accept the decision, take the easy way, decide to live with it even though they do not like it; they can try to change the composition of the Supreme Court (an approach that is indirect, takes a long time, and, if history is any guide, does not work); or they can try to amend the Constitution.

The third choice, at first glance, sounds like a reasonable approach.  If the proposed change is really popular, why not amend the Constitution?  Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, after the Lawrence decision, proposed an amendment banning homosexual marriage.  President Bush, last July, said he did not support an amendment at the moment because he was not sure it was “necessary.”  And, while the December New York Times/CBS News poll found strong support for such an amendment, it will never materialize.

The trouble with the amendment process is that Congress is the gatekeeper.  Since World War II, seven amendments got out of Congress, and five were ratified.  The two losers in the states were the Equal Rights Amendment and District of Columbia voting.  Since the ratification of the Constitution, 10,000 amendments have been introduced, 33 have been passed out of Congress, and 27 have been ratified by the states.  The casualty rate is so high because, before an amendment can be proposed to the states, it must pass two thirds of both houses of Congress.  The House of Representatives, whose members are elected every two years, will approve any popular proposed amendment.  One third of the Senate, by contrast, need not face the electorate for six years.  Consequently, one third of the Senate can defeat any proposed amendment with a minimal risk of political retribution.  If a proposed amendment gets out of the Senate, it needs to be ratified by three fourths of the states to become part of the Constitution.  Three fourths of the states would almost certainly approve the amendment barring “gay marriage,” but they will never get the chance, because Congress is institutionally hostile to limiting the power of any of the federal branches—which is exactly what most amendments seek to do.  An amendment reversing a Supreme Court decision would, of course, be considered a sharp attack on the authority of that branch.

In recent decades, the ERA failed in the states, but most proposed amendments fail in the Senate.  One-third minorities in the Senate have killed proposed amendments concerning term limits, school prayer, flag burning, busing, and a balanced budget.  The states, quite likely, would have adopted those amendments if they had gotten out of Congress.  The amendments may or may not be brilliant, but if three fourths of the states want to add them to the Constitution, it is hard to see why they cannot.  That, however, is the nature of our amendment process.  The process is so difficult that it is really a trap, wasting time and resources and, ultimately, frustrating those seeking the new amendment.

The big surprise is that the Constitution gives the majority a fourth choice.  Previously known only to a few scholars, this fourth choice is a lot easier than the amendment process.  Congress, by a simple statute, passed by majority vote, can effectively overturn any Supreme Court ruling.  The decision itself, of course, binds the parties forever.  The future impact of the case, however, is what people are worried about.  Congress, under the Constitution, controls the Court’s jurisdiction, and, if it believes a uniform national rule is not desirable, it can restore it to state authority.  Congress could, for example, reenact the Defense of Marriage Act, restricting marriage to men and women, but adding one sentence: “This law is not subject to review by the lower federal courts or the U.S. Supreme Court.”  The issue would then return to the states, which is where President Bush and John Kerry, at times, have said it should be.

Article III of our Constitution provides that Congress determines the jurisdiction of the federal courts.  Congress has the power to establish or abolish all federal courts except the Supreme Court, and the power to abolish includes the power to limit jurisdiction.  Congress can also limit the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to “cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers, and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be a party.”  The Supreme Court has jurisdiction in all other cases only if Congress grants it by statute.  Congress can remove, as it often has, any class of case from the lower federal courts and from the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction.  Congress can even, as it did in the Reconstruction McCardle case, remove the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over a case that has already been argued.

Constitutional litigation would still take place—but in the state courts.  The state supreme courts would have the last word.  The state courts naturally would consider any prior U.S. Supreme Court decisions with respect.  But they would not, according to Article VI of the Constitution, be bound by them.  They are bound by the Constitution, not by the decisions of the Supreme Court.  Moreover, new cases would always present somewhat different facts and issues than those previously decided by the Supreme Court.  Congress could always, if state-court decisions go off the tracks, restore federal court jurisdiction.

Change by the statutory route is straightforward.  If the opponents of a Supreme Court ruling can get Congress to enact a law removing federal-court jurisdiction and Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction, they can—by moving future constitutional litigation to the state courts—possibly change the outcome.  They have at least changed the forum to one closer to home.  If the opponents of a Supreme Court ruling cannot get a law passed to limit the Court’s jurisdiction, they should relax, realize they are a minority, and attempt to persuade others to join them.

All sides should benefit from the availability of a democratic forum for debate.  The Supreme Court would benefit, since it could no longer be accused of taking “sides in the culture war.”  Traditionally, abortion in the United States was a state issue.  In 1970, New York, by a close vote, legalized abortion.  By 1973, when the Supreme Court intervened in Roe v. Wade, 21 states had repealed or limited their criminal laws against abortion.  The democratic progress toward consensus, however, stopped when the Court made the issue legal rather than political.  Subsequently, because of the judicial setting, the positions of both sides stiffened into nonresolution.  The travail that has followed could have been avoided if both sides had understood that the debate could be shifted from the courts to the Congress.  Congress today could restore the issue to the states, which the enemies of Roe—such as the Republican Party—say they want.  That raises an interesting question: Since the Republicans have a majority in both houses, and a President ready to sign the act, why do they not do it?

The Antifederalists, in our great 1787-88 constitutional debates, believed that a federal court would slowly, but steadily, enhance the powers of the national government of which it was a part.  The other two federal branches, they also believed, having benefitted from the Court’s centralizing rulings, would give the Supreme Court such a free rein that it might, in time, believe itself (in the words of the Antifederalist Brutus) “independent of Heaven itself.”  That all happened, as predicted.

As time went by, the representative branches discovered a new use for the Court.  The hot-button cultural issues—so hazardous to a representative’s reelection—could be shifted to the Court, which did not have to stand for reelection.  Political-cultural issues are easily turned into legal issues.  By this arrangement of convenience, the Court gains a lot of power as well as celebrity status.  Public outrage, to them, is just water off a duck’s back.  The shift also worked very well for the representatives who, for practical purposes, are reelected for as long as they want the job.  This, however, largely drains the political process of purpose and has brought the country into its present comical situation—where, if a political issue is at all controversial (campaign finance, school vouchers, status of foreigners captured in battle, etc.), the political branches may propose, but the last word, to approve or disapprove, is given by the unelected Court.  This is not the constitutional system the Framers created for us.

We do not need to let the Supreme Court decide another issue in the culture war.  The Constitution provides an easy, democratic check on the Court.  The statutory check, as it becomes better known to the people, can act as a safety valve to relieve pressure on the Court and on society as a whole.  The majority, as it begins to understand the fourth choice, can ask their representatives to start deciding hard issues again.  Social change in a democracy, after all, should come through the give and take of the political process rather than through the decisions of nine wise people.

This article first appeared in the June 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Honest Journalist
by Thomas Fleming

A modest proposal.

VIEWS

Independent Media Tribes
by Jesse Walker
Bypassing the old gatekeepers.

Reality TV News
by Justin Raimondo
Scripted by the Bush administration.

NEWS

The Fall of Lord Blackadder and Lady Manolo (of Blahnik)
by Kevin Michael Grace
Conrad Black (and blue).

The Fourth Choice
by William J. Quirk
Ending the reign of activist judges.

REVIEWS

A League of Bushes
by Ben C. Toledano

Kevin Phillips: American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush

James O. Tate on Randall Ivey’s The Shape of a Man: A Novella and Five Stories and The Mutilation Gypsy and Other Stories

Katherine Dalton on John Shelton Reed’s Minding the South

Janet Scott Barlow on Pete Rose’s and Rick Hill’s My Prison Without Bars

Fr. Michael P. Orsi on Jim Powell’s FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression

Patrick J. Walsh on Jonathan Bate’s John Clare: A Biography and “I AM”: The Selected Poetry of John Clare, edited by Jonathan Bate

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From England: The End of the Affair?
by Derek Turner

Letter From Australia: A Tale of Two Queenslanders
by R.J. Stove

VITAL SIGNS

THE MEDIA: Whose Bias?
by Leon T. Hadar

INTELLIGENCE: Who Was Watching the Watchers?
by Margie Burns

COLUMNS

SINS OF OMISSION
by Roger McGrath

PRINCIPALITIES & POWERS
by Samuel Francis

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

EUROPEAN DIARY
by Andrei Navrozov

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Return
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

RESOURCES
by Scott P. Richert

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
A Flock of Sheep and
On the Way to Inverness by Peter Hunt   

ON THE COVER

Cover and inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson and H. Ward Sterett.

The Jewish attacks on The Passion were (no pun intended) catholic in their universality—they included Jews of the political left and Jews of the political right (or the neoconservatism that nowadays is called “right-wing”), devout Jews and secular Jews, religiously liberal Jews and religiously Orthodox Jews.  One of the principal authors of the attacks was Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, which is about as close to Orwell’s Thought Police as anything that currently exists in this country.  Mr. Foxman, to whom a script of the Gibson film was leaked long before it appeared in theaters, and who actually sneaked into a showing under false pretenses, was undoubtedly the movie’s biggest enemy and played a major role in instigating other attacks.  Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, who found the film “fascistic” (as well as “anti-Semitic”; Mr. Cohen may not make the distinction, but Mussolini certainly did), assured his readers that he really did not want to see it at all, but “I went to see it only as part of my job, wishing that the Anti-Defamation League and other critics had simply ignored it.”  Apparently, Mr. Cohen believes his job includes doing what the ADL tells him to do.  He is certainly not the only one.

The level of attacks was such that Sharon Waxman, the New York Times film reporter, ran a piece with the headline, “New Film May Harm Gibson’s Career” on February 26, the day after the movie opened, and she quoted Jewish movie bigs David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks as telling her (each refused to speak for attribution), “It doesn’t matter what I do.  I will do something.  I won’t hire [Gibson].  I won’t support anything he’s part of.  Personally that’s all I can do.”  In Hollywood, of course, such modest efforts by major producers are more than enough to assist world-famous stars in making quick career transitions to working as pizza delivery boys.

Whatever the threats to Gibson’s future employment by Mr. Geffen and/or Mr. Katzenberg, the debut of the film did not help much.  Mr. Cohen was by no means the only Jewish critic who became what he called “uneasy” when he actually worked up the guts to go see it.  “Dangerous,” an editorial in the New York Daily News shuddered.  “Unambiguously contrived to vilify Jews,” Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times.  Gibson “has chosen to give millions of people the impression that Jews are culpable for the death of Jesus,” Leon Wieseltier concluded in the New Republic, while William Safire moaned about “Gibson’s medieval version of the suffering of Jesus, reveling in savagery to provoke outrage and cast blame.”  Neoconservative Charles Krauthammer shrieked about “Gibson’s Blood Libel” and found proof of the film’s demonization of Jews in the lurking presence of the figure of Satan “merging with, indeed, defining the murderous Jewish crowd.”  Of course, as anyone who has seen the film knows, Satan is also “merging” with Jesus himself in the Garden of Gethsemane during the film’s opening scenes, trying to prevent Him from going through with the crucifixion at all.  The point is that Satan does not want God’s Son to sacrifice Himself for mankind’s sins, and, when Christ dies, Satan screams in rage and agony.  In any case, who exactly would you expect Satan to be lurking among in downtown Jerusalem?  They just didn’t have too many Palestinians back then.

Almost all of the commentary about The Passion of the Christ’s supposed vilification of Jews was on the same sophomoric and transparently false level.  Jami Bernard, film critic for the New York Daily News, opened her review of February 24 with the line, “Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II” and, a week later, was complaining about the “week of real hatred” she had endured from all the antisemitic Christians who wrote her what she called “nasty and unprintable letters.”

If the nasty and unprintable attacks that critics such as Miss Bernard launched did not muzzle the movie, maybe the cops could do it.  By early March, the New York Post reported, the head of the NYPD’s “Hate Crimes Unit” ordered his squad to go see the film just in case, and, a few days later, a “Jewish advocacy group” calling itself the “Messiah Truth Project” asked the U.S. Department of Justice to “utilize civil, criminal, and federal hate crime laws” against the film.  And you thought I was joking about the Thought Police.

There were, of course, eminent Jewish writers and critics who defended the movie, such as Rabbi Daniel Lapin, founder of Toward Tradition, a politically conservative Jewish organization, and Orthodox Jewish film critic Michael Medved; by far, however, the overwhelming response from Jewish journalists, film critics, Hollywood powerhouses, and the leaders and spokesmen of the organized Jewish community was, to put it mildly, negative.

It is not my purpose here to discuss in any detail the merits or flaws of their attacks.  Not only Lapin and Medved but any number of Christian writers (Pat Buchanan, Joe Sobran, and Cal Thomas, among others) have already done that.  The essence of the Jewish attacks is that Gibson’s movie recapitulates the “blood libel” that “the Jews murdered Christ” and that Jews today are morally culpable, a doctrine most Jewish writers insist has led to Christian persecution of Jews for centuries and helped shaped German National Socialist views of the Jews but which the Catholic Church repudiated in 1965.

In fact, there is nothing in the Gibson movie that states or even suggests that “all Jews” were responsible for the execution of Jesus.  The film does show the Jewish priesthood of the day engineering the execution for their own doctrinal and political reasons and badgering, cajoling, and implicitly threatening Pilate to carry it out.  That is perfectly consistent with the only historical source we have about the events and with Pope Paul VI’s 1965 Nostra aetate, which explicitly stated, “The Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ.”

As for the “blood libel” itself, whatever its historical sources, it was hardly the only reason for medieval antisemitism (let alone any cause at all of the long history of anti-Jewish violence among the Greeks, Romans, and other pre-Christian nations), nor does it find any expression in Gibson’s film, the emphasis of which is explicitly on Christ’s forgiveness of His killers and the responsibility of all humans for His death.  Despite the claims of writers such as Krauthammer that Gibson “openly rejects the Vatican II teaching” that the Jews had nothing to do with the execution, there is nothing in the movie that contradicts the pope’s statement that “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”

That, of course, is the point that Safire (along with most other Jewish critics) missed.  Safire wrote in his column that

The villains at whom the audience’s outrage is directed are the actors playing bloodthirsty rabbis and their rabid Jewish followers.  This is the essence of the medieval “passion play,” preserved in pre-Hitler Germany at Oberammergau, a source of the hatred of all Jews as “Christ killers.”

Aside from the questionable claim that the audience’s “outrage” is “directed” at anyone and the dubious assumption that the Nazis were really influenced by a medieval Christian drama, Mr. Safire’s central boo-boo is his confusion of the historical role of a particular group of Jewish leaders (a role no one really denies and which there is no good reason to deny, assuming we accept even generally the New Testament account) with the supposed theological and ethical guilt that is said to have caused or shaped or influenced antisemitic violence through the ages.  Mr. Safire and most other Jewish critics are arguing that you cannot accept the one without implying or embracing the other, and that is simply false.  It is like saying that, if you note that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and several other communist spies of the 1940’s were Jews, you are accusing Jews today or all Jews of being communist spies.

Fallaciously lumping the historic guilt of specific persons 2,000 years ago with a universal moral culpability today, which is what Safire and most other Jewish critics of the Gibson movie did, leads to a further inference—perfectly logical—that the New Testament account, and therefore the heart of Christianity itself, is antisemitic and must be excised or expurgated.  In this kind of thinking, it is not just Mr. Gibson’s movie that is likely to get a visit from the Hate Crimes Squad but your local Sunday school.

That is precisely the burden of a claim made by a rabbi whom Rabbi Lapin debated over the film:

We have a responsibility as Jews, as thinking Jews, as people of theology, to respond to our Christian brothers and to engage them, be it Protestants, be it Catholics, and say, look, this is not your history, this is not your theology, this does not represent what you believe in.

It is the responsibility of Jews, in other words, to decide what Christians should believe about history and theology, and, if it offends Jews, it has to go.

The arrogance of that claim puts most of the invective heaped on Mel Gibson rather in the shade, but it is not very different from it, and it also points to a further inference about what is going on in the controversy surrounding The Passion of the Christ.  An Orthodox Jewish friend of mine spotted it immediately in a comment he made to me soon after seeing the movie himself and dismissing the charges of antisemitism as preposterous.  “It’s all a put on, isn’t it?” he remarked.  “None of the guys claiming it’s antisemitic really believes that.  It’s really just a question of power.  That’s all.”

It is indeed a question of power because entirely apart from the theological, historical, and aesthetic merits of the Gibson film is the question of controlling the public culture, the way of life that defines American society and establishes public standards by which behavior, discussion, and thought are regulated.  You probably do not have to accept Christopher Dawson’s view that “a living religion always aspires to be the centre round which the whole culture revolves” to grasp that religion is invariably a powerful force in defining a culture and that it is no coincidence that the words cult and culture both derive from the Latin cultus.  The religion a society accepts—publicly, regardless of what its members privately believe—is what defines its morals and its patterns of what is and is not legitimate.

The angry controversy about The Passion is about which cultus will define American culture, and the conflict over the movie is a struggle for cultural power, for what Antonio Gramsci called “cultural hegemony.”  Rabbi Jacob Neusner has remarked that Auschwitz has replaced Sinai in the religious sensibilities of many modern secularized Jews, and the bitter and hysterical war against Mel Gibson represents a further attempted displacement—that Auschwitz replace Calvary, that Christianity itself as Americans understand and accept it be defined and regulated by contemporary Jewish standards and those cultural hegemons who enforce them.

Mel Gibson’s answer to this demand, in effect, was To hell with you.  I’m going to offer this country and the world my own religion, and you have nothing to say about it.

And that is what everybody is angry about.  Gibson is directly challenging the Jewish claim to define—and the Jewish power to define—a Christianity and an American culture informed by it that is acceptable to Jews.

And since, by the time the Hate Crime Squads were about to show up at the theater doors, he had already raked in more than $300 million from the film and some 64 percent of the American public had already seen and very much liked his movie or said they were planning to see it, his answer appears to have been one that an immense number of Americans found compelling.

This article first appeared in the June 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

I do not know why anyone bothers to watch the show—or, rather, I do know, but the knowledge is dispiriting.  Party loyalists watch, talking over the enemy and applauding “our side.”  Listen to talk radio.  Not all of the callers can be party activists, yet most of them have memorized their party’s talking points and buzzwords.  I used to do a fair amount of talk radio, but I find the experience increasingly depressing.  When, in the Clinton years, I came on as a guest to criticize the insane and vicious foreign policy of Clinton and Albright, the Republicans could not praise me enough for my independent mind and well-researched positions.  The war in Kosovo was a monstrosity, they said, and, as soon as George W. Bush is elected, he and his crack foreign-policy team will put an end to nation-building.

Once Bush was elected, however, he chose a foreign-policy team as stupid and vicious as Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, but, if I ventured to criticize Paul Wolfowitz or to defend the lone voice of sanity, Colin Powell, the same Republicans denounced me, and, when they saw how the arguments against Kosovo could be turned against Iraq, they either changed their minds about the Kosovo war or even, in many cases, denied they had ever opposed it.

Mankind does not need to be taught to lie—Adam told his first lie in the Garden—but it is disconcerting to realize that the talk-radio listeners, in modeling themselves on Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, have learned to be as partisan and one-dimensional as their heroes.  I suppose, in defense of the American people, we should concede that the best people do not listen to talk radio or read the newspapers.  Proust suggests, somewhere in his unending novel, that we should reverse our reading habits and take a newsprint version of, say, Pascal to the breakfast table and, once a year, take down a leather-bound volume of society gossip.  If, for “society gossip,” we substitute “pop news”—the celebrity scandals, airline disasters, human-interest stories, and political propaganda that fill up the front pages of newspapers and the filler space between the advertisements on the evening news programs—we shall be well on the way to leading a fulfilling and honest life.

Was it ever any better?  Different, yes; better, probably not.  In the 1950’s and 60’s, the knee-jerk conservatives at National Review and the knee-jerk leftists at the New Republic routinely anathematized each other, while only rarely examining each other’s facts or arguments.  Now that conservatism is leftism, however, there is less to fight over.  Republicans like to say that they have facts and arguments, while the Democratic left has only emotions.  It is a pretty thought but not one that can survive an hour’s exposure to Hannity or either of the Limbaughs.

There is nothing wrong with cheerleading or partisan pamphleteering.  The press, to a large extent, owes its origins to the party pamphlets of the 17th and 18th centuries, and it is good to see that they are sticking to the traditions that made the term “honest journalist” a contradiction in terms.  The only question is, “Who pays?”  In the heroic days of journalism, dishonest editors like Bennet, Pulitzer, and Hearst paid their writers to go out and get stories that would sell papers, and the journalist guns they hired would have cheerfully sold out either employer or party in order to gain fame and fortune—though not in that order.

“Honest journalist” and “a free press” are not only contradictions in terms; they are mutually exclusive, because the nearest thing to an honest journalist is a man who will sell himself to the highest bidder.  Once a man has made enough money—that is, supposing he is a man—he can devote himself to telling the lies he really believes in.

So the question is not, as our colleague Humpty Dumpty never ceases to remind us, whether one has the right to “make words mean so many different things”—that is, to mislead and deceive the public.  “The question is which is to be master—that is all.”  In other words, since we must assume that journalists will twist and contort both fact and language in order to maintain the cause taken up by their master, the only question in American journalism worth debating (though even talking about the subject can sour the digestion of a philanthropic optimist) is who shall be the masters of the servile press—that is all.

The left generally answers, “the people,” by which they mean the government, by which they mean themselves and their leftist colleagues who end up as the cultural commissars who run the NEA, the DOE, the NEH, and every other set of unpalatable acronyms that, when reassembled, spell out the ignorance and stupidity which are the fate of the American people.  The so-called right (though there is not now and never has been a genuine American right that amounted to anything) answers, “the individual,” by which they mean media corporations, by which they mean monopolies like Disney/ABC-Time Warner, by which they mean themselves and their friends who run the monopolies that spell the doom of the American mind and American freedom.

I say, a plague on both their houses.  Television, movies, radio, books, magazines, and newspapers determine to a very large extent what sort of people we are living with.  Imagine you could choose your next-door neighbor, and the choice were between Candidate A, who eats junk food, watches snuff films as he plays video poker, and reads the New York Post, Hustler, and the Weekly Standard, and Candidate B, who cooks at home, watches old Capra and Ford movies, and divides his reading between Chronicles and the English classics.  If you are a neoconservative, you will choose A, but normal people will choose B.  Why is it impossible to choose the cultural influences that will determine what sort of people most Americans are—other than the fact that public education is set up specifically to create A and eliminate B?

One quick answer, the answer we always receive, is that the nation is too diverse to impose a uniform culture.  Then why, whenever it is a question of public money or monopoly money, are we imposing the uniform culture of Candidate A?

See how the fates their gifts allot,
For A is happy, B is not,
But B is worthy, I dare say,
Of more prosperity than A.

But let us accept the argument—and its consequences.  The news and entertainment that would please Sean Scallon’s readers in northwestern Wisconsin would leave Jim Tate’s effete and affluent Long Islanders cold.  Then why not entrust control over the news media—radio, television, and newspapers—neither to monopoly capital nor to monopoly government?  Why not give these formative institutions to the small communities and cities that actually compose the mosaic of American life?  Imagine a Corporation for Public Broadcasting set up as a federation of independent stations, none of them with power enough to cross the county line, the city limits, or (in some cases) the neighborhood boundary.  (If we wanted competition, stations might be allowed to broadcast to two counties, so long as the other county had its own station.)

If competition is, as our classical liberal friends tell us, the prerequisite for excellence, then these thousands of independent community stations and community newspapers would be vastly more competitive than the handful of newspaper chains, major networks, and media conglomerates.  Locally produced programs would draw on existing pools of talent and local interests, but they would also stimulate the local theater and music scene.  Writers and performers would no longer have to dream of going to New York to “make it,” especially since local shows could be sold to other stations, though a majority of the programming would have to be local.

In the “Golden Days of Radio,” local stations had to be responsible for their own programming, and, although it was hardly a cultural renaissance comparable with the 14th century, it was nowhere near as bad as the entertainment programming today on cable television.  Unless you have a package that includes Turner Classic Movies, your $45 per month buys nothing but the leering prevarications of Fox News and an endless series of sitcoms and drama shows as entertaining as a skin rash.  I forgot: There is still The Simpsons, whose worst shows are better than the best episodes of other programs.  (Yes, I have held my nose and watched just enough television to make such a statement.)

Local radio and television is fine, you will tell me, if it is only a question of putting Lonesome Rhodes and his guitar in front of a microphone.  How could local stations cover international news?  That is not a difficult question.  After all, it would be better to know nothing than to know only what the networks and newspapers tell us—which is the case today.  Complete ignorance is not the worst-case scenario.  We have the worst-case scenario, and anything would be an improvement.

Under this utopian scheme, wire services could be allowed to operate, though (in my imaginary world) they would have to register a political affiliation and ideological orientation.  “This in today from the Marxist-Feminist News Service . . . ” or “According to a report in the New York Zionist, the Israeli Defense Force has killed a mad-dog terrorist.”

The orientation and policies of a local station would be determined by a large media board elected by the neighborhoods.  In larger cities, where there would be obvious conflicts, there might have to be several boards, each with its own stations and newspapers and each reflecting the ethnic, social, and religious views of its electoral community.  Who would sit on such boards?  The same opinionated, self-seeking slobs who sit on school boards today.  The difference is that there would be no outside pressures and no state or federal money.  And the voting districts would be so small that there would be no excuse for not knowing the candidates, who (like all political candidates in this imaginary democracy) would have to go door to door: No political commercials would be allowed in the media.

Imagine what would happen if Southern Baptists or black Muslims or Greens controlled even part of the media in their communities.  There might be something like a genuine debate over principles.  Americans might actually figure out what they really believed, as opposed to what they are told to believe.  New parties might spring up, and the old ones might, for the first time in decades, stand for principles instead of representing the powerful special interests who pay for their campaigns.

If you like this proposal, do not write your congressman.  My scheme has as much of a chance of being adopted in this America as the Constitution of 1787 and considerably less of a chance than John Lennon’s “Imagine,” which has become our ideological national anthem.  Obviously, no decentralized system, either in education or in the media, will ever be created in the United States.  It is useful, however, to think of how a truly American system might have been created, taking advantage of the only real American talent (now being lost): Our ability to mind our own business and take care of our own affairs within our own communities.  The very fact that such a proposal seems so utopian tells us how far we have come from the real America and the impossibility of ever having a “free and honest” press.

This article first appeared in the June 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.