“… can you give any plausible reason why a creature with your swinish, apish, jackal tastes should be permitted to live, infest the earth, and breathe a pestilential breath upon suffering humanity?” A rival newspaper editor wrote those words about Elwood Pleas. It was politically protected speech. Elwood wrote equally pointed words in reply.
The First Amendment protects, among other things, political speech. The English language contains more than 600,000 words that could be used to describe a politician. The tools of propaganda, including ad hominem, guilt by association, and innuendo give us many ways to attack and besmirch someone.
Elwood Pleas was founder and editor of the New Castle, Indiana, Courier newspaper. Of him, one of his rivals wrote, “Pleas is a gentle dunderhead whose mental constipation is only equaled by the diarrhea of word with which he is weekly afflicted.” Another, less kindly, wrote, “Pleas is a ‘lickspittle, off-scouring slobbering’ of the lowest depths.”
Propaganda is easy to create and use. If I call the President of the United States, “B. Hussein Obama,” I play upon the belief that he is a Muslim. If I describe the killing of a dozen Afghanis as a holocaust, I evoke the Nazi’s murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Communists. If I don’t like a person’s ideas, but lack the energy or intelligence to argue against the ideas, I attack the person, calling him a fool, a crook, or an atheist.
For the record, Elwood Please was my several-times great uncle. He was born in 1831. He was a Quaker, a soldier in the Union Army, a geologist, an entomologist, an ornithologist, and an author. I am as proud to be descended from him as from my great-great grandfather, the Presbyterian, farmer, and soldier in the Confederate Army.
Just as freedom of religion protects any sort of nonsense that calls itself a religion, so freedom of speech protects propagandists, personal attackers, and liars.
Just because it does, and we can, doesn’t mean we should.
Paul W. Lentz, Jr.
Peachtree City, Ga.
