opinion

So central is the idea of the freedom of speech, that the Bill of Rights places it first and foremost as the primary tenet of a democratic republic. Specifically, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press[.]” Further, this potent protection providing freedom of speech presumptively applies to all forms of artistic expression: words, images, sounds, movements and more. In an era where anyone with an Internet connection and a thought can be a writer/publisher, the importance of such a right has perhaps never felt more real to “We the people.”

Personally, I like graffiti. Not the territorial gang throw ups or crudely scrawled obscenities on bus stops and public trash bins, I mean real graffiti. The colorful splashes of street art and murals where typography is taken into careful consideration and urban surroundings are worked in with the image to further enrich its message. I like silkscreened stickers pasted on telephone poles and political stencils spray painted on the sidewalks. I even enjoy the occasional poem inked in haste on the stalls of a public bathroom.

The act of censorship, like art, has become a process at once indissolubly synonymous with our lives. It has developed its own currency, has consolidated into a sociological virtue and chief cultural export, has supplanted Jacques Derrida’s différance as the intervening tendency determining all pre-linguistic expression – has, in the throng of our teeming contemporary metropolises and the intimacies of all social exchanges, become the primary means of ensuring human survival. Albeit both cavalier and indecorous of me to say, it might be justified to describe censorship as the new universal language: the pidgin of the masses, the new century’s lingua franca.