To the editors:
“Authorities who step forward to suppress the uncivil works and ideas of others in the name of public dignity may indeed bask briefly in the glow of general esteem,” wrote Michael Miner in “Memories of Repression” (Hot Type, Sept. 22), a piece the reader isn’t likely to find duplicated on the 10:00 PM News. “But very soon these moralists belong to history, which remembers them as clowns, demagogues, and poltroons.”
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We should be so lucky. Unfortunately, I’m not as optimistic. What Miner is writing about here–correctly, in its own terms–is repression by the state, a clear and ever-present danger to our liberties, “civil” or not. However, equally clear, the state does not have a monopoly on the full range of repressive potentials deriving from the structure of authority in our society, specifically, its class structure. And I’m afraid there isn’t a dust bin large enough to hold the number of clowns, demagogues, and poltroons who perform remarkable feats of intellectual repression on a daily basis (even every twenty-two minutes on some radio channels), though nowadays they call it by more polite names. No, not for this new breed of revered “moralists,” anyway–they won’t go as gently into that good night as Miner’s short list “from the annals of intellectual repression” in Illinois suggests they always have, and therefore always will.
Tyler, his exhibit, and the righteous American people, who are justly enraged over such unpatriotic claptrap as his, (the only real debate focusing on whether or not Tyler and the School of the Art Institute have the constitutional right to engage in this form of political expression, and whether or not he and the Board of Trustees should be hung from the nearest street pole).
