Sleepycatz

The harlequin speech of suicide

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. . .

So begins, arguably, one of the greatest American poems written in the last 100 years. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark ruling in People v. Ferlinghetti allowing the sale of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. In 1957 the local authorities in San Fransisco had charged poet, publisher, and bookseller, Laurence Ferlinghetti with obscenity over his publication and sale of Howl. On October 3rd, Judge Clayton Horn, who was a Sunday School teacher and had recently sentenced five shoplifters to read and write essays on the Ten Commandments, wrote:

Would there be any freedom of the press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid and innocuous euphemism? An author should be real in treating his subject and be allowed to express his thoughts and ideas in his own words. . . . If the material has the slightest redeeming social importance it is not obscene. . .

Fifty years after Judge Horn’s opinion New York Public Radio changed it’s mind and decided not to air the poem on the grounds that it might be deemed obscene by the FCC. With their new found power to fine stations hundreds of thousands of dollars under obscenity rulings, the FCC has created a climate of censorship which would make any authoritarian proud. How, exactly, the FCC can deem something obscene which the courts have explicitly held is not, is a leap of legal logic which boggles the mind. The great irony, of course, is that the society Ginsberg railed against in Howl is stronger today then when he wrote the poem — and that society which was able to tolerate his words fifty years ago seems unable to do so today. So what are we to say to the FCC and the puritans who would gladly sacrifice poetry, literature and art on the pyres of purity? Are we to acquiesce and accept their fatherly admonishments of what’s proper and decent, or are we to fight and cry, as William Carlos Williams did in his introduction to Howl: “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.”

This entry was posted by steve on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Signs of the End, Injustices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.