A masterpiece of American short fiction, Ring Lardner's "Haircut," is one of the finest examples in our literature of naïve or ironic narration. In it a barber cheerfully tells a story in total oblivion of its actual meaning. A recent, thoughtful exchange on these pages concerning "freedom of speech" has raised in my mind a bizarre question: Is there some fated connection between the tonsorial and the ironic?
I don't see many first-run movies, but I'll make a special effort to take in "Barbershop," a black ensemble romp about colorful folks of color in a South Side barbershop. Ethnic comedy is not my favorite thing, but I'll see "Barbershop" for the same reason that I plowed through Salman's Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" — to see why some self-appointed zealots are telling me I shouldn't. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton say that the film's brief remarks about Martin Luther King's adulteries, among other remarks, must be stricken from the record. Jackson and Sharpton are both members of the Christian clergy, in a postmodern sort of way, and their demands for censorship may be an ecumenical gesture imitative of their fellow clerics in Islam. They don't actually go so far as to say that the film's makers should be killed — as the mullahs decreed Rushdie should be — but one must creep before one walks.
One understands that Jackson might be sensitive about publicizing the promiscuity of the prominent; and of course Sharpton, the director, producer, and male lead of "The Tawana Brawley Story," which after a strong start flopped so miserably, may resent the success of a black comedy that is really funny rather than tragic. However the Constitution of the United States does not protect us from what may be discomfiting, annoying, tasteless, irreverent or offensive. We all have to tolerate some unsettling historical claims concerning such political heroes as Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, and in films like "Life of Brian" and "The Last Temptation of Christ" some possibly irreverent or alarming innuendo concerning our religious heroes. Fat black guys in gold chains and gangster hats actually have no more authority to tell me what I can look at than do skinny brown guys in bathrobes and beards or pink, balding guys in backwards collars. There is no combination of hue, haberdashery and hirsuteness that confers that right.
Naturally Jesse Jackson wants to eschew the C-word, and he calls upon inapt analogy, that lame stepchild of intellectual debility, to claim that his recommended censorship is something else. He wants the moviemakers to excise the offending dialogue in the spirit of Hollywood's supposed voluntary postponement of the release of some gruesome "disaster movies" in the aftermath of Sept. 11. But the movie industry is interested in making money, and I seriously doubt that moral principle is much in play. If the makers of "Barbershop" thought they would make more money by submitting, they probably would do so; but they are already making pots of money, and they know that being disapproved of by Mr. Yesterday is a boon that in effect doubles their advertising budget. In the good old days being "banned in Boston" was the indispensable prolegomenon to national bestsellerdom. Videocassettes stickered "Censored by Sharpton" might even go platinum.
The civil protections of our Constitution may seem annoyingly broad and consistent to people like John Ashcroft and Jesse Jackson. But sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander, the gander in this instance being the new poet laureate of the State of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka (olim LeRoy Jones). It's not every state that even has a poet laureate, but New Jersey has lots of things lesser states lack. It is, for example, the only state with a state smell (eau d'Exit 13); but the smell is unofficial and involves no gubernatorial appointment. Mr. Baraka, our "Third World Marxist-Leninist" laureate, is entirely official, having been appointed to his post by Governor James McGreevey on Aug. 28.
Almost immediately Mr. Baraka wrote some Jersey verse on the subject of Sept. 11 ("Somebody Blew Up America"), the central premise of which is the flabbergasting canard of international Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism that 4,000 Jews working at the Towers — ludicrously sanitized by Baraka to "4,000 Israeli workers" — were secretly warned in advance to stay home that day. "Why did Sharon stay away?" asks the poem. The answer to that question is probably that, what with his other job and all, he finally tired of the killer commute. But that is neither here nor there, because now the Governor wants to delaureate the poet. Baraka refuses to surrender the bays. He is "absolutely" certain that both "the Israelis" and George Bush had secret advance knowledge of the attack. He heard it on the grapevine — maybe even in the barbershop.
The return to the barbershop is a return also to irony. What are we to do about Mr. Baraka's poem? The answer to that is that we are to read it or not, as we choose, discuss it or not, as we choose, applaud it or condemn it, as we choose. Because "civil rights leaders" do have civil rights; they just don't always defend ours. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.
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