The Revenge of the Smut-Bot : Is Freedom of Speech a Dirty Word in Altoona, PA?

There was a time when there were only “7 Dirty Words” (Well, maybe only 7 worth knowing) at least according to the late cultural hero and iconoclast, George Carlin. George actually managed to turn his mockery of verbal hypocrisy in the 1960’s and 1970’s into a very successful full time career. But Carlin came up with that routine when things were still done manually. You had to, more or less, sort through dictionaries by hand to discover the dirty words (and dictionaries actually made that more difficult, since they had already laundered the list by removing all the really good dirty words in advance.) That meant that you had to become the equivalent of a modern “dumpster diver” to actually discover really dirty words in the 1960’s. You had to go into those slimy, smelly public restroom stalls in movie theaters and check one wall after another for whatever dirty word might still have escaped erasure by the manager. Or, if that kind of anthropological field work turned your stomach, you had to dig through the few available literary works that might actually contain dirty words. Like the collected works of Lenny Bruce. Or maybe the poetry of Alan Ginsberg. The side benefit to that being that you got yourself a truly eclectic and progressive education. The bad side (at least in my home town ) was that you had to hang out endlessly in equally filthy hole-in-the-wall places like Whitey’s News (No, my home town was neither Watts, nor Harlem) reading books on the sly that, as a kid, you never had enough money to buy (and certainly couldn‘t ask your parents to finance). But it was a hobby with its own rewards. At least until Whitey himself noticed your side interest in the endless racks of girly magazines in the rear of the store, and not so diplomatically suggested it was time for you to move on. Or failing all that, you could just ask Robby Flynn. Now there was a kid designed for a career in linguistics, with a minor in advanced theoretical rhetorical filth.


But still, the limits of available source materials usable in the scholastic pursuit of the linguistic appreciation of smut were, for the most part, constrained to the acquisition of information primarily through the oral tradition. I mean you were pretty much limited to screaming and recieving variations on the “Your Mother…” paradigm. And while that model served well for much of the later twentieth century -- helping resolve some of the most pressing cultural and social conflicts of the time (at least for those of us in the 12 to 18 year age bracket), it was not until the coming of the information age that the dissemination of verbal filth saw a rebirth, not unlike that experienced in the 18th century age of enlightenment after Guttenberg introduced the printing press, with its astonishing unleashing of ideas that led to an exponential growth in the availability of trivial information about which literally “everyman” could argue both pointlessly and endlessly. In short, it was a good time to be alive!


It is said (probably far more often than necessary) that history repeats itself. In fact, that quotation, arguably, has repeated itself far more often than history ever will. But, more to the point, one would be remiss not to draw parallels between the introduction of Guttenberg’s movable type and Bill Gates’ personal “movable feast” which made “type” itself -- the written word -- available to all, immediately, indiscriminately and ubiquitously. And, of course, once again, it resulted in a new epiphany of knowledge of all sorts; not the least of which was that in the continuing tradition of the pursuit of a new vocabulary of filth.


One almost expects to see a fly in the ointment, in the oil that greases the wheels of progress, no matter in what age technical and social evolution make their great advances. And so, it is no surprise that there are those out there, lurking silently, working by night, unknown faces, cunning and unnamed digital artisans under the employ of some evil and nefarious supervision seeking to thwart the pace of progress. And so it is with our beloved home town paper, the Altoona “Rear View” Mirror -- an institution that has spanned both the 18th and 21st century in one superhuman leap, publishing both by morning in movable type and around the clock through the marvel of the internet -- that the ugly and Orwellian face of censorship of the press has revealed itself. And it has done this in the form of the ugly Altoona Mirror “Smut-Bot”.


The purpose of this evil contraption, this Smut-Bot, is to digitally search and destroy any and all words that might even in the slightest way violate the covenant of political correctness. And it takes no enemies. Collateral damage be damned. With full tolerance for Friendly Fire. It takes the good words out along with the bad. The first and the foremost along with the filth.


Mirror readers are invited to join their community in the fullest sense by inputing their digital comments to many of the articles and editorials appearing daily in the Mirror. And they do. At a furious pace. But they do this only to find that many of their words are deleted without warning by the Smut-Bot. With the speed of the hand of god, it transforms its readers’ words into simple strings of asterisks. Not just obviously “dirty” words. Not just the “f” word. Nor just the word for excrement. Even silly comments like “You might be a redneck… if” turn instantly into cryptic strings of the sort that read: “You may be a ******* if…” And you might expect even that much. But the Smut-Bot is not content with the obvious. It’s mission is to seek out and destroy. But in finding and destroying obvious offenders its sense of power grows. It begins to remove all words that could be potentially construed to be offensive to any group in any way. So, you begin to notice other kinds of words being removed. Words like “Jew”. (Making an ongoing discussion of ,say, the Holocaust all but impossible. Words like “Hell” automatically become transformed into “****”, making the frequently discussed topics of creationism, evolution, religion and the invariable and urgent human need for an expletive, simply unattainable. Even the word “heroin” disappears into a string of asterisks, becoming “ ****** ”, distracting from discussions of community drug problems. No one knows the length of the list of forbidden words, nor of how many new ones are added daily. No one has a copy of the “dictionary of the deleted”. Except that new-age scribe pulling his levers and turning his knobs in the digital dungeon somewhere in lost halls of the Altoona “Rear View” Mirror. Oddly enough, there is still one questionable word that can slip through the Smut-Bot unnoticed: "Transvestite "! I wonder -- does that tell us something about the mysterious keeper of the butt, er, the “Bot”?


So, where are the Tea Parties, the Candle Light Vigils, the angry commentary of talking media heads and talk show hosts to protest this intrusion into free speech? Where are the defenders of words. Of all words. Even dirty words? Where have you gone, George Carlin?
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The Revenge of the Smut-Bot : Is Freedom of Speech a Dirty Word in Altoona, PA? by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://malarkyspond.blogspot.com/.

The Invisible Hand of the Market and The Illusion of a Capitalist Utopia

Adam Smith, long before Marx, understood the notion of “class struggle“. In fact, it was Smith who first gave us the phrase, the “laboring poor” so often used to describe those who struggle the hardest in our country today, in its variant form, the “working poor”. Smith understood that whatever gains were derived from the new system of “capitalism” (a word not yet in use in his own time) were extracted from the never ending toil of the many to the benefit of the relative few. The irony in all of this is the fact that while Adam Smith today is seen as an icon of neo-conservative ideology, his “Wealth of Nations” was never intended to be an economics text, but rather a moral and social commentary. It sought not to provide an entrepreneurial formula for success, but rather an understanding of the rapid transformation of social and political structure that was giving birth in the 18th century to the new and previously untried notion of capitalism.


Another phrase he gave us was the “invisible hand” of the market. It’s what conservative talk show hosts, republican want-to-be political candidates and ball cap wearing neo-cons everywhere so passionately evoke in their fervent defense of everything capitalistic. And somehow that’s fitting. Because they are the exact group that Smith had in mind when he invented that phrase: those who were a little too dim-witted to read and pick up on the meaning of the original arguments in his text. Smith used the analogy of the invisible hand because he knew that some coffee-house readers in the age of enlightenment were (like today’s talk-radio “ditto-heads”) less than well educated and required the benefit of a simpler illustration to convey the point of his argument.


There’s no loss of irony in the use of the “invisible hand” metaphor by today’s political right -- especially the Christian right. As with religion, they are true believers. To them, the invisible hand is much more than a symbolic figure of speech. It is a reality. As real to them as the resurrection of Christ or the Second Coming. And they are just as intent on imposing it on the rest of us as they are their religious ideology. As in their determination to codify their divine directives into the law of the land, from the yearning for a public display of the ten commandments in every courthouse, to the repression of the teaching of evolution in our public schools to the full and complete overturning of Roe, the Christian right seeks to impose a complete and unrestrained version of capitalism on America. But not the capitalism of Adam Smith -- rather, the capitalism of Milton Friedman.


Awaiting Utopia: A New Moses and A New Promised Land


The idea of unrestrained capitalism is akin to that of religious dogma to the neo-con mind. If only “liberals” and “socialists” -- their depreciatory designations for those of us who favor the workable pragmatism of a mixed economy, including a progressive income tax, a social safety network, class egalitarianism, and movement away from a war and weapons based economy -- would go away, we could all find total fulfillment in the Chicago School notion of a total free market economy. And this would all, of course, be flawlessly guided by the transcendent Invisible Hand of the free market.


For forty years -- from Reganomics through the tax cuts of Bush II, the invisible hand has guided us, like the hand of god for forty years guided Moses, leading his people through the desert back to the promised land, until now we finally stand upon the very edge of the precipice, awaiting the next neo-con messiah (1) who will finally part the waters and lead us, all of us -- the chosen people of god -- into the new Capitalist Utopia. A Utopia that Adam Smith would never recognize.
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(1) Who will it be? Palin? Huckabee? or some even more sinister and shadowy dark horse emerging from the (by then) freshly cremated ashes of John McCain? I don’t know. Watch for him/her. Will you know “the one” from the “666” burned into their forehead…or by the sign “HICK” pasted on their back by some scheming, underhanded liberal?
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The Invisible Hand of the Market and The Illusion of a Capitalist Utopia by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://malarkyspond.blogspot.com/.

Squandering the American Dream: Was it a Sin?

The following letter emanates from the tiny and charming town of Martinsburg, Pennsylvania -- our neighbor to the south. It was titled “Sins ‘hamstring’ us”, and appeared in the September 26, 2009 issue of the Altoona Mirror. I think it says something important about things that scare us all about America today. And it says it clearly in the sort of language that we can understand best. These are the things that real people -- not television talking heads -- worry about. I’ve reprinted it here, followed by a few thoughts of my own:


When the president talks about a "prescription" for our health care troubles, and economists talk about a "prescription" for the economy, they leave out something even more important to be dealt with and that is this nation's moral and ethical bankruptcy.
Trying to accomplish anything on the financial front is akin to putting the proverbial cart before the horse.
Our overall national health demands that we first and foremost walk back the national "sins" that actually hamstring us as it relates to, once again, becoming what God and our founding fathers envisioned for this great nation.
As a country, we will no longer be able to thumb our collective noses at God with respect to issues such as abortion, gay marriage, our advocation of the gay lifestyle in general, alcoholism and rampant drug abuse, people in positions of power abusing that power, etc., while pleading with him to restore our nation to sound financial footing.
When I hear politicians deliver stirring speeches and ask God to bless America, it really does ring hollow.
I have, and will continue to maintain, that Americans need to be as vigilant on the social and moral issues of our time as the economic ones.
Cameron L. Sprow
Martinsburg

Malarky's Reply to Mr. Sprow:

Cameron,

We do need to be even more vigilant on social and moral issues than economic ones. On that, you and I agree. I lived in Martinsburg for some years; and this is just an observation, not a criticism, but the air is clearer there than it is in Altoona. People know right from wrong and pretty much agree on which is which. But simply a few miles north, to the Hollidaysburg and Altoona areas, you begin to see god and his intentions "through a glass" just an ever smaller bit more "darkly", as St. Paul might have put it.

Maybe it’s because there are more poor people here, both socially and economically. Maybe it’s because of the lack of good Mennonites and Baptists and the multitude of churches we see on every corner of little Martinsburg. Maybe it’s because people actually build their entire lives around those churches and take what their ministers say seriously. Maybe it’s even because Martinsburg still has decent neighborhoods with people living in decent houses and working hard and saving and keeping in touch with neighbors and families. I don’t know. But something is different as you move northward in Blair county.

Things get more complicated. Choices become harder. We listen less to the words that our ministers actually say from their pulpits. People struggle harder -- not work harder -- but actually “struggle” harder. They struggle for things that have nothing to do with god or morality or sin. They struggle for more junk from Wal-Mart. For more expensive tennis shoes for their kids. For more exciting vacations in places much farther away. And they don’t stop much to wonder where god really fits into the picture. They wonder what Glenn Beck thinks, or O’Riley or Hannity. But, not god.

Of course, the further north you go, the more pronounced the difference seems to become. By the time you reach State College, well, it’s like you’ve arrived in a whole other world. Not that that's bad -- but it is noticeably, maybe even a little uncomfortably, different to those of us to the south. The people not only don’t think the same -- they don’t even look the same. Many don’t even have their normal conversations in English. And openly gay people look much more at home there too. They fit in, for the most part, without raising an eyebrow. No one much thinks about homosexuality being a problem at all. Abortion (and the idea of reproductive rights) is pretty much a given too. (I guess those among us who can't afford to raise children decently are reluctant to have them at all. And perhaps that makes good sense.) There are, of course, still people and organizations there who hold meetings to protest both. And, I imagine, in the privacy of their living rooms, well all sorts of words are spoken about these things, because, you see, some of them remember too the way things were once.

Personally, I think that some of the things that are different about today's world are desirable. Like diversity of the sort that enables people different than ourselves to live happy, productive and open lives. A world where the expectation is upon us to try to understand why some among us are differently oriented in terms of gender or social preferences. One where the law, at least, insures that race is so much less a barrier to belonging to one’s community. But other aspects of today's America are clearly a step backward.

I guess that if we want to see some of the more sinister things you talk about go away, we all need to turn back the clock about 70 years. Turn it back to the era between the 1930’ and 1960’s, when ordinary Americans were growing more prosperous instead of poorer. When kids graduating from school could pretty much take for granted that they were going to be able to get decent paying jobs -- union jobs. (You see, "Union" was actually still a good word back then.) And those were jobs that would enable them to support a family on one income, so that parents (with the regrettable exception of single parents) had sufficient time to devote to raising their children. To actually teaching them right from wrong, instead of only having the time to bribe them with a pair of $100 tennis shoes before cutting out the door to work their second jobs. Without leaving them under the care of the television networks to teach them about morality. To give those kids and parents sufficient time together as a family that they weren’t bored enough to look for other things, like drugs, to keep them occupied.

When so many people are so comparatively poor and have, at the end of the day, only enough time to watch television shows that dwell on the lives of people more affluent and successful than they themselves could ever imagine becomming, they begin to think that maybe there’s something wrong with their local neck of the woods. Maybe that’s part of the crawling, noticeable difference between life in Martinsburg, Hollidaysburg, Altoona and State College.

Maybe the higher the number of McDonald’s and Wal-Marts there are, the poorer paying the jobs become, and the longer and harder we need to work to just make ends meet. And the less time we have to simply live our lives. So, maybe the problem really does have a financial solution. Maybe we need to get our economic house in order again. To turn back the clock to a time when jobs paid a living wage, and could be counted on to provide simple necessities like health care, a regular 40 hour week, union protection, vacations that people could take as families, and where those families could survive well even on one wage long enough to see that their kids grew up getting the attention they needed. And if private industry continues -- as it has for the past 40 years, since the time of Reagan -- to fail to step up to the plate, then it is time, once again, for government to do it -- as it did in the 1930’s under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Perhaps then the moral and social problems would pretty much take care of themselves. I’m just not sure that that’s going to happen. Because of that other problem you mentioned -- the “people in positions of power abusing that power.” They aren’t likely to go away. And their personal “sins” will indeed continue to “hamstring us”. The politicians, the business owners, the “community leaders”, the excessively wealthy among us -- they all have too much to loose financially to allow change to happen. No, we are just going to have to get a lot smarter -- and a lot better educated -- if we really want to get back to the kind of America you and I both obviously want so badly.

TSquandering the American Dream: Was it a Sin? by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
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