Roseanne Barr’s horribly racist Twitter tirade was politicized, naturally, with conservatives complaining about her First Amendment rights. With social media granting everyone the power to say awful, regretful things without thinking through possible consequences this is now a regular feature in our society.
The underappreciated reality of the Constitution is that it’s about limiting government, however, not delineating every right you have in our society. Unless it has some very compelling reason, government can’t stop you from speaking and it can’t jail you for what you do say. That ends where private property begins, whether that is physical or our entertainment commons.
This is where consequence begins. If you share your opinions publicly, a private employer that thinks that its association with you hurts its best interests is entirely within its rights to cut ties. ABC didn’t make a political statement in canceling her show; it made a decision that in the long run its interests were not served by associating with her.
The fact that so many people think otherwise speaks to a very poor collective political literacy. In response, conservatives have vowed to get even by getting Bill Maher’s show pulled off the air.
As a result, our politics is demeaned but so is entertainment and the arts. It reduces it all to what can only be described as the Chicago Way from “The Untouchables,” the late-’80s film about Elliott Ness and Al Capone. You boycott one of our shows, we’ll get advertisers to pull out from one of yours. You put our entertainer put into the hospital, we’ll put one of yours into the morgue.
In general, it’s a shame to see someone fired for political expression. That is the case for a plumber, the store clerk, the bank president and, yes, the entertainer. Free speech is reduced to sharing cat pics if we’re all afraid of losing our jobs by expressing disagreeable things. That said, it is very difficult to sympathize with a public figure fired for casually comparing black women to apes while also slurring Muslims.
Still, Barr’s show was made popular on the grounds that it claimed to speak for the great middle of America. Something like that has value in speaking what is supposed to be a community’s truth. It should in general stand or fall on the merits of whether it does this successfully, not whether the person behind it harbors odious opinions.
Barr’s show is the latest in a long list of entertainment products viewed through a flat, two-dimensional partisan prism. Not so long ago, conservatives cheered when a different network picked up Tim Allen’s show, not because it’s any good but because they liked seeing a conservative stick it to liberal Hollywood. This was right after many liberals cheered the show’s demise, not because they think he is a stiflingly unfunny person, but because it was fun to watch a conservative fail.
This prism renders art into mere propaganda. It no longer says something about humanity in 2018, but turns it into a flag behind which one side rallies. People tune in not because a show’s truth speaks to them but out of blind partisan loyalty. “We can’t let the other side take this from us,” sounds the clarion call.
This is even worse, even cheaper, than our collectively awful understanding of the First Amendment. It says that the problems dividing us run much deeper than the simple civics lesson people seem to think is in order. It says that we’ve fully given ourselves over to a cultural civil war. And as anyone knows, truth — that thing art seeks to bring to us — is always the first casualty of war.
Eric Baerren is a Morning Sun columnist. He can be reached at ebaerren@gmail.com or on Twitter at @ebaerren.