PARTING SHOT LIFE, LIBERTY, AND FOUR-LETTER WORDS

This year is the 200th since the Bill of Rights was ratified. This fall, teachers all over the country will engage in a national “Teach-About” on the Bill of Rights, and this month brings Constitution Week, September 17-23. This is cause for reflection and quiet pride, if not the ticker tape blizzards of Desert Storm: the Return. The rhetoric will glow, but it’s fitting, since the first 10 amendments to the Constitution guarantee individual liberty, and personal freedom is the secular religion of America.

The Bill of Rights is not frozen under glass somewhere in the National Archives. It’s out there in the arena, the referee in the ongoing struggle we’re having with ourselves about individual freedom and the means to express that freedom. Step outside your door, and you’re in the middle of it.

Case #1: I’m driving past White Rock Lake a few days after the NBA playoffs when I find myself staring at a message soaped across a car’s back window: “Lakers are bull-.” (True, I didn’t have to look, but I was afraid I’d wind up in the middle of the lake if I closed my eyes.)

Case #2: On Ross Avenue one sizzling July day, I see an otherwise nondescript man of about 35 strolling along in a T-shirt that reads: “F- you if you don’t like it.” As I pull away the guy is approaching a knot of burly fellows waiting for a bus. I don’t know if they liked it or not.

Case #3: A week or so later I go to North-Park for stuff. A sweet-looking teenage girl and her boyfriend are window-shopping. She turns around to reveal, on the back of a light green sweat shirt, this message in foot-high letters: “Get In The Ring, Mother—.”

Case #4: My wife is eating lunch at the Crescent City Cafe in Deep Ellum. Throughout the meal, she stares at the back of a man’s shirt bearing this appetizing phrase: “F- You! I’m From Texas!”

Well, I’m from Texas, too. Like most of us, I knew the choice Anglo-Saxonisms by the age of 12 or so, though it took me a few years more to figure out just which were nouns and which verbs, and which ones could switch-hit depending on context. I don’t pour these words around, but I do sprinkle them once in a while, and I’ve known and liked many people who were heavy users. Still, it seems to me that certain words should be reserved for those moments when hammer meets thumb or the ballpark announcer informs you that your doors are locked and your engine is running. Use the four-letter lexicon too casually, and it loses its power to shock and scald. Besides, it’s one thing to let fly with f-words among friends who at least have chosen your company. Taking it to the streets is another matter.

Faced with such examples of free minds at work, my man-in-the-street response is firmly, unequivocally equivocal. First, the honeyed voice of liberalism whispers in my head: Gee, I wonder what they’re trying to say with this? What nuance of self-expression, what manifestation of human and perhaps even artistic freedom (for who is to say what is art?) will I behold as these pioneers push back the limits of my cramped sensibilities?

After the sweetly reasonable voice comes another, angrier voice-rasping, reptilian, red of neck: The message is the message. They’re saying f- you and that’s it.

This freedom business is not easy. Given a choice of bad choices, I know I’d rather live in a society in which noxious cretins wear “F- you” shirts than a society in which government nannies pass out lists of forbidden words. Yet conservatives have a valid point when they ask just which “ideas” are being expressed by such flouting of the formerly taboo. Do these messages contain concepts the Founding Fathers would have put their John Hancock on? And another question: Does the public have any rights at all, or have they all been reserved for the individual?

Today we hear endless talk about the gay “community,” black “community,” higher education “community.” and even the homeless “community,” but scenes like these show how little sense of real community we possess, if that term has anything to do with shared values and a shared sense of restraint. The feeling seems to be; I don’t know any of those people; they mean nothing to me, so the hell with them. I’ll wear whatever I want.

Just as an exercise, I called the district attorney’s office and the city attorney’s office. There are no state laws or city ordinances against any of these T-shirt displays, of course. It’s hard to imagine any such statute passing constitutional muster. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.

Remember the old saw about democracy-’Your right to swing your arm ends just short of my nose”? Today, the communal nose is taking quite a pounding. A better metaphor for our society might be a battleship on which kamikaze individualists hurl themselves in fiery protest.

Strange, but it’s possible to do the right thing constitutionally and not feel very good about it. I don’t want to see the folks mentioned above, or the shock-rappers of 2 Live Crew, jailed for improper use of the mother tongue. But these excesses-like some films and books found in the deepest sewers of pornography-are hard for even the staunchest liberal to defend. I wouldn’t want to be the one assigned to wake up Madison or Jefferson with these proofs of what their revolution achieved. Luckily, we’d have so much more to show them.

As we celebrate Constitution Week, we should remember that the many glories of free expression far outweigh its abuses. John Stuart Mill was right. A free society must always be an open marketplace of ideas; if we start closing off avenues into that marketplace, saying no truth could ever come down this or that road, we may cut ourselves off from something we need to hear.

So, seeing the T-shirt brigade, or a chanting mob outside an abortion clinic, or anobnoxious pamphleteer in an airport. I gritmy teeth and recall that the Bill of Rightsnever promised to solve all our problems andmake us love one another. It merely tellsgovernment to leave us alone, that we mayseek our happiness in the fruitful chaos of freedom.