Waving the Red Flag

 It has always interested me that when we have lofty debates about free speech, the debate itself is often a lot loftier than the speech.

I shouldn’t review a movie I haven’t seen – and now may never see – but just on the face of it, Sony was going to release, on Christmas Day no less, a comedy involving reporters recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. That sounds like a real hoot, right?

Talk about waving red flags in front of bulls. The North Koreans, as you might expect, didn’t care for the movie plot, so it appears they hacked into Sony Pictures’ operations and then threatened some 9/11-style attack. Our own President is encouraging us to “go to the movies,” but Sony pulled the film anyway for safety reasons.

Kim’s minions probably don’t have the bandwidth – yet – to mount such an attack, but already the airwaves are full of free-speech discussions and how we shouldn’t let ourselves be intimidated. All this to preserve the right of filmmakers to produce, and the public to consume, what just might be crap. Somehow I don’t think “The Interview” was going to be quite up there with “Dr. Strangelove” or “The Great Dictator” in terms of sharp geopolitical satire.

I love free speech too, but I have always held that we are not freed from the consequences of that speech. Do we expect the powers-that-be in North Korea to be good sports and laugh along with us, or as another example, extreme Islamists to chuckle at a cartoon of The Prophet? Or do we expect satire to melt the adamance (is that a word?) of those who hold the beliefs being made fun of, or cause people under the heel of such regimes or beliefs to be laughing so hard that they  rise up and overthrow their oppressors? What exactly is the point here?

When it comes to free speech, I wish the speakers would, at least some of the time, do a better job of picking their battles.