who decides?

Last night, I watched this documentary, about political correctness (particularly on college campuses) vs. free speech, as pertains to stand-up comedy. I found it very thought-provoking. I come down pretty hard on the side of free speech. I've listened to some pretty extreme stand-up, and even if something rubbed me the wrong way, I never felt it didn't have the right to be spoken or broadcasted (and that I always had the right to turn the channel, walk out of the club, etc.). Lenny Bruce, after all, died for our sins,

Then I read this in the New York Times, about hate speech on Twitter, which was even more thought-provoking. I have to ask the question, who gets to decide what constitutes "hate speech"? This is a pretty tricky one, especially since Twitter presents itself as a free-speech medium. But Twitter also does not permit what it calls "abusive behavior" (see guidelines here). Should verbal/written abuse be set apart from "free speech"? And who gets to decide what constitutes "abusive"? If someone on Twitter attacks a person or race or viewpoint, and some number of people think it's correct or OK, and others are offended, is it permissible or not under these guidelines? And how extreme does the "attack" have to be? 

From the Times article: Just take a gander at @Bridget62945958, who published a series of anti-Semitic posts against my colleague Binyamin Appelbaum. One message showed a series of lampshades. Its caption read: “This is your family when Trump wins. Get your Israeli passport ready.”

Do I like this? Nope. Would I be upset if it were directed at me? Sure. Are there Twitter users who think it's OK? I'm sure there are, just as there are readers who think it's horrible. But should it be censored from a "free speech" medium?

And what we're talking about is censorship. One of the free speech advocates in the documentary I watched said that it is absolutely necessary to permit speech that offends any number of people in order to begin a meaningful dialogue and understanding about the issue. I can get behind this, I'm pretty sure. And I'm not certain that there's not all that much difference between a stand-up comic on a college campus or a racist demagogue on Twitter (if Twitter is indeed "free speech"). I can hate it, I can change the channel, I can walk out, I can block the poster or quit Twitter. I've unfriended quite a few people on Facebook who have repeatedly expressed views that I disagreed with or found offensive; now they can post what they want, and I don't have to read it. (I don't really use Twitter much these days, so I haven't come up against that kind of situation in that venue.)

Lenny Bruce got thrown in jail for saying "cocksucker" in a nightclub. Let me repeat that: Lenny Bruce got thrown in jail for saying "cocksucker" in a nightclub. Some people were offended by that word. Maybe some still are. Does anyone think it was OK for him to be jailed for saying it? It was considered an illegal act at that time. Do we consider it illegal now? He was convicted in 1964. He died before his conviction was overturned, in 1966. New York State pardoned him in 2003. No one since has ever been arrested for anything said in a nightclub. 

I am not OK with censorship. I am not OK with "hate speech" (as it is commonly understood, such as the above example), I am not OK with prejudice, I am not OK with soliciting terrorist activity...but those are things that offend me personally. I can change the channel. Maybe I'm being naive, but I think censorship is scarier than any words can be.

That being said...let me share my own experience of being attacked online and being accused of censorship.

Many years ago, I started a "listserv," which was an email discussion group, that eventually became an online chat group. The group was founded to bring together fans of an incredibly minor musical genre (basically defined as three specific musicians and their cohorts). It started with six people I found in a newsgroup (rec.music.folk), back in the 90s, and grew, over about ten years, to (as best I can remember) around 500. I was the founder and the moderator. 

There started to be instances where members assumed that if the others shared their musical tastes, they were sure to share other interests; what I remember specifically was a bunch of posts about astrology. I gently reminded people what the group was about, and asked them to stay on topic. Wasn't a big deal.

Then a guy joined the group - let's call him "Gene." Gene seemed to have a very short fuse and would go off on people for seemingly no reason and in very extreme way. Most of the group members were more or less love-and-peace hippies, and Gene's behavior was jarring to a lot of people. And he was scaring off newcomers, which bothered me a lot. For instance, a newcomer might post something like, "Hi, I'm new to this group. Has so-and-so played in the Chicago area recently?" And Gene would reply along these lines: "IF YOU SHUT UP AND READ THE POSTS BEFORE ASKING STUPID QUESTIONS MAYBE I WOULDN'T HAVE TO TELL YOU TO SHUT YOUR IGNORANT IDIOT MOUTH!!!" So, the newcomer would quit the group. This didn't sit too well with me. I tried asking Gene to try to play nicely with others. No dice.

I should also disclose that Gene went after me, a lot. Example: I had read a book where one of the characters was a fictionalized version of one of our topic musicians, and I said something along the lines of "I thought the female characters were too simplistic and trivialized." The part of Gene's ensuing rant that I remember best was that he called me a "LESBIAN NAZI." (PS, Gene and I were, and are, both Jews.) 

Some of the people in the group liked Gene. (Amazingly, to me, one even married him.) Some found him offensive. Some brushed it off. Some left the group. Some thought he was funny. (Gene did have a credential relevant to the group: he owned a record label that had released one album by one of the artists.) Needless to say, I didn't care for the guy, didn't like his tone, and didn't like his presence in the group. And no one else behaved like him. 

Here's the difference: it wasn't a free speech forum. It was my wheelhouse, my playpen, my topic. The gentle nudges-back-to-topic that worked on astrology did not work on Gene. Here's what I did, which I hated having to do: I wrote guidelines. (Just like Twitter, which does represent itself as free speech.) They were pretty simple: keep on topic, don't attack other people. I was the moderator; I got to judge what "attack" meant. Among our twinkly little music fans, it wasn't hard to distinguish "Is anyone going to so-and-so's show next week?" from "UGLY LITTLE WORMS LIKE YOU SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO BREATHE THE SAME AIR AS THE REST OF US!!!" 

The guidelines further said that the first and second times I judged someone's posting inappropriate based on the above, I would email them privately. After a third time, their posts would be subject to moderation, which meant I would change a setting to read and approve their posts before forwarding them to the group.

It killed me that I had to do this, or felt I had to. It killed me that anything like this became an issue. I had never imagined such a thing would happen, that someone like Gene would join and participate in the group. I was trying to grow and enhance the group, and people were leaving because of Gene. This was not OK in my group. 

This started a lot of yelling about censorship. This started a lot of chaotic behavior within the group. This started a lot of attacks on me. This led to more and more people being moderated. I do not exaggerate when I say that I lost sleep. I do not exaggerate when I say that my husband begged me to quit the group. Although he blessedly lived in another city, Gene did show up to a club show in New York, where he waved a finger in my face and yelled, "I KNOW WHO YOU ARE, AND I'LL DEAL WITH YOU LATER!!!" 

It ended very badly. I eventually banned Gene from the group, and he started his own "rival" group (with a very slight spelling difference from mine), in which people were allowed to post anything they wanted. Gene's pals who belonged both groups started reposting his nasty rants in his group to my group. His group had about 30 members and mine was in the hundreds (and mine eventually included two of the musicians who had become sufficiently internet-savvy), but after ten years, I gave up. I turned the moderation and ownership over to someone who maybe had a more even temperament or cooler head or thicker skin than mine. 

For unrelated reasons, I broke off my friendship with one of the musicians and lost my interest in the mini-genre, lost touch with most of the group members, took my life in another direction. The lost group and friendship felt like losing a family, felt like a divorce. I have no doubt that it was the right thing to do. But I'm still scratching my head over the business of directing/limiting/controlling the discussion in the group. Was I trying to keep the group as I had created it and intended it to be, or was I just a no-good censor?

I think the group still exists, though I have no interest in looking into it. I'm still Facebook friends with a couple of the early members. One of them recently referred to me on FB by the affectionate name a lot of the members used, "Our Jen," and I was touched and happy and sad. It was nice to be "Our Jen" for a while. Bringing the scattered fans together was a good thing. It actually raised the profile of our musicians and led to real-life connections and more gigs for them. We had a member in Ireland and one in Denmark and one in Aruba; the man in Aruba met Barry and me at the airport when we traveled there for our honeymoon, and drove us to our hotel. It was actually pretty amazing. 

Did Gene wreck it, or did I?

travels in Pennsylvania

Just spent two weekends in Pennsylvania: with Joyce in Pocono Mountain, and with Jannah in Yardley. I wouldn't say I know Pennsylvania well - hard to know any state well without doing a lot of driving - but I like Pennsylvania and have some good friends there.

Joyce's house is more rural and Jannah's more suburban, but it's all very different from my little castle in Brooklyn. Lots of talk about cars and boats and homes: costs and methods of repair and maintenance, comparisons, troubles, comparisons, and so on. Pool patches. Gardens. Guns. It's all very foreign to me, and some of it is very interesting, some...less so. But it's interesting to see how much less important my city-girl concerns are to non-urban folks.

It happened that there was a birthday party for John A. - his 60th - when I was at Jannah's, so we went to the party. I do love going to parties out around there (John is in Bordentown, NJ), except for some excessive drunkenness...and then it depends on who the drunk parties are. John was pretty rocked by the end of the evening, but he was very sweet and sentimental. Then there was another guy who was just plain obnoxious and was passed out by the time I left. (Needless to say, the latter was the only only guy at the party who flirted with me.) Some folks I knew and some I didn't. Linda made piles of food. John and his posse played some old-timey/bluegrass stuff, calling themselves "The Clam Daddy All-Stars," and even slightly out of tune, it was a good time. Before the weekend, I had a vague fear that V. might turn up, but I don't see John inviting him for a social occasion at this point. (One of the first times I V's incredible self-centeredness was when he was invited to John's wedding. V's response: "Why should I go?" Not a clue about being there for a friend. Of course, when he learned he'd have a chance to play, he decided to go.)

Jannah's life is insanely busy, like being inside a blender. She commits herself to a lot of stuff and then runs around like crazy. For instance, she joined a boat club so he could dock her boat (they actually call it a "yacht club," but the boats are not at all what you'd think of as a yacht). Next thing you know, she's an officer of the club and knows every single person there and is organizing all kinds of events. I accompanied her to a "short" meeting she was running there, which lasted three hours. Most of her boat pals are heavy-drinking white non-Jewish blue-collar men. Not really my crowd, though I met a few nice folks.

Things around Joyce are a lot more quiet. We went to see "Raymond, the Amish Comic" near Jim Thorpe, PA (we thought he'd be laughably bad, but he was actually pretty good). We walked around Jim Thorpe before the show, which is a quaint, touristy little town, not unlike New Hope. But the buildings were more impressive. It was certainly more relaxes in the Poconos than whizzing around between Yardley, West Trenton (where Jannah's boyfriend lives), Bordentown, and wherever the yacht club and the marina are (it's called the Bristol Yacht Club but I think the town is called Easterly).

I'm kind of all over the place here, but just wanted to post something...the bottom line, I suppose, is that it's good to get away, good to be with friends, and good to be with close women friends. Joyce and I have gotten pretty thick after years of not seeing each other - and when we did see each other, she was primarily my uncle's wife and not my pal. But we always liked each other, and in fact I absolutely worshiped her: she was so attractive, talented, funny, adventurous. Still is. And I still worship her a bit. And am so enjoying the way we slipped into a very warm friendship.

All of my women friends have been having bizarre relationship problems and arrangements (except for L., who doesn't have a boyfriend or boyfriends or girlfriends or husband or some combination thereof). Joyce's seems to be the simplest - which doesn't mean it's easy. But I can understand it. With some of my friends, I simply have to step back and just watch to see what happens.

A little plug: John's daughter Ashley and her fiance Joe have a charming blog called Our Bklyn. I feel like my blog has a lot of potholes in it, but their Brooklyn blog hits all the right notes.

it's de-friendly

I posted these two things on Facebook this morning:

If someone who's around only in good times is a "fair-weather friend," is someone who's only around when you can do something for them a "fair-use friend"?

Along the same lines...if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then the friend of my enemy gets unfriended.

 This owes to the fact that occasionally, one of my Facebook friends publishes something good about V., or even posts some of his work, and I unfriend that person right away.  By this time, it shouldn't bother me, but it really does burn me up that someone who is such a user and so unfeeling is still fooling so many people.

Conversely, I had a message on Facebook from an acquaintance I hadn't seen for a while,  who said he'd never liked V. and mentioned V.'s "ego."  This guy's only ever spent a very little time with V., and he gets it.  

(Blogger has just decided to bold certain things, and refuses to unbold them.  Oh, there, finally got the bold off.  Considering that I only do very simple things with Blogger, it's often way more difficult than it ought to be.)

V. has been out of my life for well over two years, and almost entirely out of my thoughts, but I still hate hearing about him, especially anything good ...actually, I don't mind occasionally hearing someone badmouth him, because it's somewhat rare.  I've put aside a lot of people, places and things (as the expression goes) to avoid seeing or hearing about him.  Had to do it once before with a bad ex-boyfriend, because I couldn't seem to get over him if I heard about him at all.  I'm over V., but the anger still boils up.  Being fooled by someone for 30+ years will do that to a person.

Not much else going on except to report a good first week at home and the luxury of being off today for Passover.  After a week, I think the only thing that may bother me at the job is the small windowless room I work in.

One of the  things I like on Facebook is occasionally checking the mutual friends function, seeing people with whom I have friends in common.  I'm never surprised about anyone in blues, because Barry and I both have a lot of contacts in the area.  But I have a friend in common with Ellen Burstyn, which has nothing to do with Penguin (though I did see her at an awards function we both attended in connection with Penguin, which published her autobiography).  The mutual friend we have is a musician Barry used to play with, who also does some acting.

I have four friends in common with David Peel, but nine with May Pang.  Go fig.

never thought I'd see the day

Sometimes when I watch TV, especially commercials, I'm amazed at what they show, things I never thought I'd see as a kid.

There is, of course, the music on commercials. I never thought I'd see companies using the Beatles, the Stones, the Who to sell products, and Donovan is all over the place. One night, late at night, I saw a commercial for a vibrator followed by one for a penis pump.  Oh, and those Exzyte commercials, for penis enlargement.  At that stuff to enhance "female pleasure."  Tampon and condom commercials.  Commercials that say "diarrhea" and "hemorrhoids" a lot. 

But the ones that always get me, for some reason, are the Mucinex commercials with the little mucus family that moves into someone's sinuses.  People, that is talking snot right there on your TV set.  Walking and talking snot.  And this isn't South Park, which after all, featured a talking piece of shit.  This is a TV commercial you can see on primetime.  It's like something I would have giggled about as a kid:  "What if there was a commercial for cold pills and there was talking snot, like little people made of snot, and the cold pills would kill them?  HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!"  This is the kind of stuff that one of my old friends (no names, please) and I would laugh hysterically over when we were bad teenagers and indulging in herbal remedies.  Talking snot.

I wouldn't have remembered -- shouldn't have, really -- that yesterday was V's birthday, except that we share some Facebook friends and everyone was wishing him a happy birthday.  Barf.  I can't tell you how much trouble I used to go through for his birthday every year:  a selection of carefully selected gifts, cards, a couple of pints of my homemade sorbet and once I even cooked him dinner when Mrs. V was on a business trip on his birthday.  When I turned fifty, he blew off my party at the last minute, and then sent a gift, which was an unwrapped, damaged book with no card. Actually, the only time I ever got a birthday gift from him was one year that I helped him out with the internet -- he really didn't know how to use eBay, and I spotted a collectible there that he really wanted.  I told him about it, and he told me how much he wanted to bid, and I took care of it for him.  It was actually a lot of two identical items (I had a collection of the same item he did), and I announced that the second one would be his birthday present to me.  He was a really bad friend in many ways, but he had me so snowed with his wit, intelligence, and goofy charm that he got away with it for years.  He still gets away with it with a lot of people.  None of those people wishing him happy birthday have any idea that if you're not useful to him, he's not interested.  His fans, of course, are useful, to a point.  I'm not even a fan any more.  After 36 years, I gave it up.  I'm still not happy at being thrown away the way I was, of that passive-aggressive thing of pretty much ignoring me until I got upset enough to be the one to break it off.  I think I still feel hurt, and it did leave a certain empty space in my life.  But I'd rather have it empty than have him in it again.  Barry always thinks V. and I would, maybe should, reconcile; V. &  I knew each other for something like 32 of the 36 years I was a fan.  But it would never be fun again.  It would just be me, waiting for the next time my feelings would be hurt.  No more, no more.

I have a friend in Chicago I rarely see.  We actually met when he was in a band that did some gigs with V. in New York.  (I did meet a lot of worthwhile people through V, I must say.)  I'll call him Matt.  Matt and I met around 92 or 93, and had a huge and constant correspondence, all on paper, maybe four or five letters every week.  We fancied ourselves in love for a bit, but that didn't come to anything.  He was brilliant, an amazing writer, and amazing songwriter and singer.  He was also painfully shy and not very socially adept.  In other words, he was one of those brilliant and peculiar guys I tend to adore.  Anyway, about a year after I got married, he met someone and they got married.  We couldn't make it to the wedding, but i was very moved by how he wrote about her and by his obvious love and admiration for her.  Our correspondence dwindled, of course.  The last I heard from him was maybe a few years ago, and he included, rather proudly, a program from one of her roller derby games (which she did even though she was rather old and heavy for the gig).  He was really enthralled. 

He's not really an internet dude, but I had the idea the other day to look for his wife on Facebook.  We hadn't met but knew of each other, and I really thought she was cool.  I found her Facebook page and saw that she lived in Kentucky, which struck me as odd, but maybe they had moved there.  I decided to look at her blog before sending a friend request, and I found they were divorced, maybe a couple of years, and it seemed to have been her idea (a feeling-trapped, different-goals thing).  I felt very sad for him, did not friend her, and wrote him a long letter.  Some things end, I guess:  marriages, friendships.  And some of them change.  But I do hope to reconnect with Matt, who is a truly sweet and wonderful person.