Not long ago, I was haunting the alleys downtown and noting all the infrastructure you don’t see from the storefronts. The utility poles and power lines and electric meters reminded me of the work of R. Crumb, the underground cartoonist most famous for the anthropomorphic, sexually charged “Fritz the Cat” comics. It wasn’t an oversexed feline I was thinking about but Crumb’s urban drawings, especially “The History of America,” that render in painful detail the things we have trained ourselves not to see, such as the web of power lines strung from utility poles overhead.
One alley in the center of Emporia is packed with such infrastructure, including “One Way” and “Do Not Enter” signs and Dumpsters and pooled rainwater and about a billion feathers from the pigeons that make their homes in the nooks of the surrounding multi-story buildings. I don’t know why, but I find the feathers particularly repulsive. It’s not that there’s a particular problem in my hometown with the birds, not more than any other downtown, or that the alley is filthy or otherwise unclean. The feathers just get to me like some things get to others — like knife on glass or listening to the president trying to pronounce “acetaminophen.”
We all have something that makes us cringe.
I was thinking about these things that drive us individually or collectively to distraction, and it occurred to me the alley was a metaphor for our current political landscape. Behind the marquees of either party, past the storefronts jammed with tired slogans, past the back rooms where the real work is done, either with cigar-smoke influence or cold hard cash, there’s the alley of American political life. This is where the absurd and the unpredictable occur, the place where drunken shouting matches take place, the band smokes reefer and you notice all the hidden things that keep the whole show powered, except it isn’t electricity moving through those lines overhead.
The power that moves through our political high-tension wires is made of money and attention. The money is like volts and the attention is like current. You can’t have one without the other, at least not when there’s flow in the line. There’s nearly an unlimited supply of volts available, thanks to Citizens United, but the amperage is driven by how many eyeballs and ears are on a particular post or podcast or television program.
Right now, an incredible amount of wattage flows through our political infrastructure, enough to make your hair stand on end if you get too close to one of those lines. Say the wrong thing — which in some cases is simply stating a truth — and you might get zapped with a billion watts of blind outrage. Here in Kansas, MAGA toadies have called for the firings of state employees over social media posts. The First Amendment insulation has frayed under the stress to the point where a reasonable citizen might question how much, if any, speech is safe.
We’ve experienced strain on the system before, most recently in the 1960s, and we eventually strengthened the political infrastructure. Some of that super-duty equipment included the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both were pillars of the modern civil rights movement. The former outlaws discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The latter prohibits racial discrimination in voting, including racial gerrymandering, but it has been gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court through the past 12 years.
We are now in territory that would have been unrecognizable to most Americans just a few years ago. Even though some of us could see it on the horizon, we have arrived in a new country with unexpected urgency, accompanied by political violence. The latest to die, of course, was a 31-year-old MAGA ally, shot Sept. 10 in Utah. Other political assassinations include a former Minnesota speaker of the house, a Democrat, and her husband, in June. These deaths are tragic. I will not attempt to describe the political beliefs of either Charlie Kirk or Melissa Hortman. No postmortem commentary should add or detract a whit of what they had to say in life.
When bullets silence speech, democracy is in grave peril. It was already in trouble, considering the rush to authoritarianism and the repeated stumbles of Democrats, but on this month an American tradition was made new again. Political violence is a habit we must break, or it will surely break us.
My earliest media memories are television coverage of assassinations in the 1960s. I felt the fear radiating from my parents and other adults as television beamed into our living rooms news of the assassinations of a president, a civil rights leader, and a presidential nominee. John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy. There were more. The killing of revolutionary Black separatist Malcolm X, the attempted assassination of presidential hopeful and white segregationist George Wallace, the executions of Mississippi Freedom Riders Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner.
We are at another turning point in American history at which we must ask: What now? How much more can we endure? Where is the country we once knew?
No matter our discomfort, we must not surrender to whatever heated inclination to mayhem may surge through us. No matter where you sit on the political spectrum, a violent response would power more violence. There’s been a lot of talk in the wake of the shooting earlier this month that political violence is never the answer. That, of course, is the only proper reaction. What also needs to be said is that retaliation for political violence is not the answer, either.
While the manhunt was still ongoing for the Kirk shooter, the president was quick to blame political enemies for the shooting. He declared Kirk a martyr and promised a national crackdown on political violence, including nonprofits and others he accuses of funding organizations that support it. Since that declaration, Trump suggested some broadcasters should have their licenses revoked for engaging in speech critical of his administration.
A TV talk show host, Jimmy Kimmel, was suspended by Disney-owned ABC for his remarks on the Kirk killing. The Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, had said Kimmel should be suspended and “we could do it the easy way or the hard way.” The threat of regulatory action was clear. Kimmel has since been reinstated by ABC to a surge in ratings, although the program was still boycotted by the Nexstar and Sinclair station groups, effectively removing Kimmel from about 20% of markets. In his returning monologue, Kimmel called the censorship threat by the FCC chair “un-American” while tearfully mourning the loss of Kirk as someone whose life was cut short.
Freedom of speech is among the foundational principles of the American experiment in democracy. It goes all the way back to before we were a nation, to when colonial printer John Peter Zenger’s newspapers were burned by the governor of New York in 1734. But the Kimmel case may be the most high-profile modern example since police raided a small-town newspaper two years ago — here in Kansas.
The Kimmel firing also appears to be a textbook case of censorship, when a government official (in this case, the president and his FCC chair) attempt to suppress speech based on content. This is prohibited by the First Amendment. From the president all the way down to your town council and school officials, the law is meant to restrain government actors from trampling your expression.
But as troubling as the government suppression of speech is, there’s a related stifling of expression we must now talk about. It’s self-censorship. If you’ve caught yourself thinking twice before sharing your political views with others, you’re suffering the chilling effect of political violence and the government’s retaliatory crackdown on dissent. You may not be suffering immediate effects, such as the loss of a job, but there is a cumulative risk, like secondhand smoke.
Back when I was a student journalist, I once had a piece of mine challenged at the last minute because a school official thought it was obscene. In those days I briefly drew a comic strip for the campus newspaper at a public university in Kansas. I was heavily influenced by Doonesbury and other, less mainstream comics, and it was the second or third installment of the strip. It involved somebody asking where the nearest bathroom was on campus and a communication major being unable to answer the question clearly. By the end of the strip, the character doing the asking was turning into a kind of human pretzel to keep it all in.
Not great stuff. Did I mention I was still a teenager?
But when the newspaper sent the pages to the printer on campus, a question arose. Somebody thought the strip was obscene. They imagined they saw an exposed private part in the drawing. A dean was alerted and I was summoned to the print shop. I never did see what the shop supervisor thought he saw. But I remember how uncomfortable it was to stand in a group of older adults — of authority figures — and try to explain there was no penis in the cartoon.
It didn’t matter, they said, they weren’t running it unless I changed it.
I was handed a grease pencil.
I didn’t know enough then to understand that even if I had drawn something a bit naughty, it wasn’t enough to qualify as obscene. If it had been obscene — and that is quite a high bar — it wouldn’t have been protected by the First Amendment. But it wasn’t that, it was just a sketch, a silly attempt by an aspiring cartoonist. I yielded to the pressure and used the grease pencil to change the offending part of the drawing on the page composite. The bowdlerization was completed using some black tape and an X-Acto knife.
I recall how I flushed with embarrassment.
Had I been in the campus newsroom, I might have had the courage to refuse. But I was across campus in the print shop, with angry authority figures telling me they couldn’t run my strip because it was improper. Afterward, I kept the incident to myself.
I was ashamed and desperately wished I’d never tried drawing a comic strip. I vowed never to do it again for publication, and I didn’t. I abandoned drawing comics forever as soon as I put the grease pencil down.
I censored myself.
It may have been one of the reasons I so desperately fought for the rights of my journalism students when I became a college publications adviser decades later. That old cartoon strip was something I’d tried to push out of my mind. I didn’t think I was angry about the incident at the time, just ashamed. Did I have any promise as a cartoonist? Probably not. But the next Art Spiegelman or Alison Bechdel may be thinking twice about putting thought to paper or pixels because of the Trump era attacks on free speech.
There is only one Kimmel, and his suspension and reinstatement has dominated the news. We are right to be concerned about the future of free expression in America, for journalists and cartoonists and late-night talk show hosts. But we should also be concerned about the chilling effect all of this has on the rest of us.
The most effective tool to silence dissent is not force, but shame.
If your views don’t match that of the current administration or its favored political movement, you may have had an uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach. I know I’ve had. You might think your views might be offensive to some of your friends and neighbors. I know mine are. Your cheeks might sometimes become flushed when trying to explain yourself. I’ve been there too.
But the thing is that disagreeing with somebody isn’t the same as wishing them harm. Neither is refusing to act with what government officials and influential others may regard as the proper deference. If they take offense at your rational and nonviolent opinion, the fault is theirs and not yours.
You may not think your opinion counts for much, that you don’t have anything to add, or that engaging in the sober debate over the deep issues that divide us is important. You might even feel that saying what you feel is right might be disrespectful. Or you might just want to tell a joke a draw a comic with a political bent. But it is all the kind of free and unfettered exchange a functioning democracy requires.
We’ve all felt so much political cringe and stepped-up outrage that our collective hair is standing on end.
But don’t let a bullet fired in Utah make you silence yourself. Speak out against political violence, always. But don’t allow others to make you so afraid of retribution, so deferential to power and authority, or so ashamed of your own beliefs that you stifle yourself.
In other words, Keep on Truckin’.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist.