Today—March 3rd, 2013—is
the one-year anniversary of the first arrests in the Pussy Riot case. For those
who aren’t familiar with the band, information can be found here, and a timeline of the
events surrounding their arrests and convictions can be found here.
Because the band members were jailed as the result of an artistic, religio-political
protest, most American media outlets have castigated the Russian government for
their censorship, and criticized the majority of Russia’s citizens for supporting
the same anti-art rhetoric.
The latest
of these is Gordy
Grundy’s blog for The Huffington Post,
which makes several very good points about the shelf-life of artistic
revolution. He argues that “going to jail is glamorous,” but “sitting in jail
just isn’t newsworthy,’ which is why we haven’t heard much about Pussy Riot
since last August.
There was
always a glaring deficiency in the American media’s take on the whole
situation, however, and Grundy reproduced this quite perfectly almost a year
after the fact.
At the time of this Anniversary, we Americans might take a moment to celebrate our artistic liberties. To create. To exhibit. To speak. How lucky we are. A lot of solid thinking went into these rights and freedoms. It is a shame when government can be used to punish five wild girls singing a song that might lambast the President.
There it is. The “how lucky we are”
speech. The reminder that American superiority is ever-provable by our
uninhibited access to First Amendment rights. The implicit discrimination
between freedom of speech as a tool for political protest and freedom of speech
on a local, individual level.
Let’s talk about “American artistic
liberties” for a moment. In December of last year, a 16 year-old boy in New
Jersey was removed from class and had
his house searched by police because a teacher saw him doodling a flaming
glove in his notebook. In November, Alan Moore’s award-winning graphic novel Neonomicon was banned from the shelves
at a South
Carolina public library. In May, a children’s book called In Our Mothers’ House was placed on
restricted, parental permission-only access at a school
library in Utah because it featured a lesbian couple raising an interracial
family. In February of 2010, a comic book collector was sentenced to six months
in prison and five years probation following that for simply owning manga—an act the U.S. government
deemed a form of “sexual deviancy.” He is only one among many artists,
collectors, store owners, and writers who have been arrested for similar
charges in the last fifteen years.
I’m all in favor of celebrating
American humanistic expression and the freedom we have to criticize our leaders
without real fear of reprisals more dramatic than shouting matches over the
dinner table. Americans draw from a vast array of cultural backgrounds and have
an enormous capacity for art-making, and we should definitely feel lucky to
have access to it all. But the next time we want to make an argument about how
America is better than other countries because we have First Amendment rights,
maybe we should stop to think about how censorship on a local level in this
country is alarmingly widespread. Maybe we should stop to question how much
American art is indebted to a nationalistic idea that doesn’t hold up to close
scrutiny. Maybe we should expand our model of humanistic expression to include instances
that aren’t predicated on one side of a binary relationship to government or the other.
P.S. Remember the Dixie
Chicks? In 2003, they were pulled from multiple radio stations for criticizing
then-President Bush’s push toward war in Iraq. Turns out we censor that, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment