"Freedom of Speech" by Norman Rockwell‘Ex-Freedom of Speech’ and Other Poetry by Russel Winick The Society March 19, 2023 Culture, Poetry, Satire 36 Comments . Ex-Freedom of Speech In fact, most liberals don’t support free speech today, And often see a need for censorship instead. They claim “misinformation” causes broad decay, So free speech ends if they dislike what’s being said. . . Listeners Good listeners seem hard to find these days. More people, when you’re talking, in effect, Aren’t truly listening to what you say, But looking for a place to interject. . . Criticisms Which criticisms Do the most To bother you? Those false and spiteful Or the ones Which might be true? . . Apple Tree Such lovely people—sweet and kind they are, And thus our friendship dates back rather far. But I have noticed they have every “ism,” And always view through quite a far left prism. At college age their daughter came out gay; My friends supported her in every way. Then recently she said that she was trans, Took “they, them” pronouns, a name more like a man’s. The parents fast adjusted to the name, But longtime plural words weren’t quite the same, For sometimes, always accidentally, From habit they would utter “her” or “she.” Their kid took that as massive disrespect, Necessitating total disconnect, And so between them all communication, Immediately was put in cessation. This made, of course, the parents very sad. They wondered what they’d done that was so bad. I mull if left wing notions introduced, Have brought some kind of chicken home to roost. . . Russel Winick recently started writing poetry at nearly age 65, after ending a long legal career. He resides in Naperville, Illinois. NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets. The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary. CODEC Stories:Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) 36 Responses Joseph S. Salemi March 19, 2023 Richard Weaver wrote a seminal book back in 1948, titled “Ideas Have Consequences.” It was truly prescient for what is happening today. The ideological ground for the collapse of liberal support for free speech was set in the 1980s, when the notion that certain expressions of opinion were “acts” (rather than mere verbal utterances) began to be pushed by leftist theorists. From this utterly false idea came the notion of “hate speech” and “disinformation.” Since the First Amendment protects only speech and not actions, the ground was prepared for left-wing fascism. Today, “hate speech” simply means any speech that anyone in a governmentally certified minority group finds offensive; and “disinformation” means whatever is said by your non-leftist opponent in an argument. Both are now recognized as “crimes,” and liberals (who generally aren’t too bright) very easily slid into being defenders of controlled and policed speech and thought, without a qualm. Ah, Voltaire! Reply Patricia March 31, 2023 Joseph, a most auspicious comment. People are tone deaf to any talk about our cilvil rights! I have never seen the world so oblivious and uncaring about our freedom! Seems, being aware is quickly snuffed out, as elected and unethical,elected WOKE maggots crawl everywhere. Their message carried as the best escargot of pure lies via the evil media. Thank you, Joseph. Patricia Reply Sally Cook March 19, 2023 Dear Russel – I see that you and I are on the same side. How can any art form exist in such a de-oxygenized atmosphere? Is what I just wrote an actual dictionary-certified word? Do I care? Not likely. Art? Most art is unwieldy, incomplete, even bad. We might have done without much of it.. It is those brief snippets of blazing clarity for which we wait. Those are what show what it means to be human. Truly human. The moments that make God smile. I warn you, don’t make God frown ! Thanks for what you have written here. Reply Sally Cook March 19, 2023 PS – My admonition was to the wokers, Russel, certainly not you. Reply Russel Winick March 19, 2023 Yes Sally, we are on the same side of the fence. And ironically, it is much greener on our side! Thanks! Reply Tonia Kalouria March 19, 2023 Love all of these, and find the Liseners, especially, such a succinct truth. Reply Russel Winick March 19, 2023 Thanks Tonia. Yes, it’s a common experience. Reply Diana Sheldrick March 19, 2023 It seems to me that freedom of speech is seen to be a whole lot of talk with no responsibility Reply C.B. Anderson March 19, 2023 Then, Diana, feel free to shut your mouth. Reply Paul Freeman March 19, 2023 My apologies for the troll-like reception you received, Diana. Reply C.B. Anderson March 20, 2023 But will you ever apologize for your own spinelessness? Russel Winick March 20, 2023 I always liked this famous opinion from liberal Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in the case of Whitney v. California (1927): “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” Reply Cynthia Erlandson March 19, 2023 Russel, it seems to me that you have done a tricky thing here, and done it well: these poems are both entertaining, and insightful expressions of very serious topics. I especially like “Listeners”. Reply Russel Winick March 19, 2023 Thanks Cynthia. Yes, the poor listening situation is frustrating. But I’m certainly guilty of it too at times. Reply Cheryl Corey March 19, 2023 Russel, I’m accustomed to seeing your terse and acerbic witticisms, so I was pleasantly surprised to see your longer ‘”Apple Tree”. But if I may ask, what prompted the title? Thanks. Reply Russel Winick March 19, 2023 Thanks Cheryl. That title came from wondering if this was somehow another case of an apple not falling far from the tree. Reply Cheryl Corey March 19, 2023 And a rotten one at that. Joshua C. Frank March 22, 2023 I thought it was a reference to the sin of Adam—perhaps the parents had eaten the forbidden fruit of liberalism and were forced to deal with the consequences, just as the whole world is still living with the consequences of Adam’s sin and will until the end. C.B. Anderson March 19, 2023 Nice work, Russel. Reply Russel Winick March 19, 2023 Thank you Sir. Reply Joshua C. Frank March 19, 2023 “Apple Tree” is my favorite of these! It shows just how liberalism comes back to bite its adherents. By being so liberal, they let even worse influences corrupt their daughter beyond what they could deal with, and she found it intolerable that they couldn’t go that far, so she disowned them. That’s one of the problems with liberalism: it grows the more it’s accepted. “Progressive” has a double meaning here. Reply Russel Winick March 19, 2023 Thanks for your analysis Joshua – much obliged. Reply Joseph S. Salemi March 19, 2023 It seems to me that the daughter described in “Apple Tree” was simply looking for a convenient excuse to disown and break with her parents. They happily accepted her coming out as gay, they freely accepted her decision to become a trannie, and they had no trouble with her name change or her pronoun switches. All that occurred to precipitate the daughter’s alienation was a minor slip in pronoun usage — comparable to calling a newly married girl by her maiden name, or mispronouncing someone’s surname because of a memory lapse, or mistakenly referring to a Monsignor as “Father.” Something as trivial and forgivable as this made the daughter “totally disconnect” from her parents? Really? Is that believable? What one actually sees here is a manifestation of deep hatred and revulsion on the part of the daughter. She had a festering resentment of her parents, and it’s very likely that her decision to be a lesbian, and her subsequent decision to become a trannie, were preliminary stabs at hurting them. When neither thing worked, she seized upon an error in pronoun usage to lash out at them and cut them out of her life. Hatred always looks for an excuse to pick a fight. Reply Russel Winick March 20, 2023 Interesting conjecture. And it’s possible – I don’t know. I just listened, and the poem covers the full extent of what I was told. Thanks for this analysis. Joshua C. Frank March 20, 2023 If she wanted to hurt her liberal parents, she would have become a conservative Christian, married a like-minded man, and become a homemaker and mother of many children. Nothing offends those people like even one of those, let alone all! (I’ve got a poem on that coming up in a month.) Young people these days have extreme contempt for their parents. There are many reasons (such as a general cultural Marxism where every hierarchy has to be inverted or at least overthrown, technology making a new world every generation, and the casting off of religion), but I think one reason not talked about much is that they’re taught evolution. To me, my parents are one step closer to when the Apostles and other saints brought Jesus to our European ancestors and to when God made Adam. To the young woman in the poem, her parents are one step closer to being chimpanzees and other lower animals. Joseph S. Salemi March 20, 2023 The daughter wouldn’t have done those things you mention, Joshua, because they are unfashionable, non-trendy, and out of sync with what her peer group would approve of. Becoming a dyke and a trannie is actually cool and with-it, and gives you social-status credit in the left-liberal in-group. The real point of the poem is that liberal parents produce radical children, or as was said in the eighteenth century, “The Revolution always eats its own.” Joshua C. Frank March 20, 2023 Yes, I agree, that’s why I was thinking it wasn’t about hurting her parents as much as about following their teaching to the natural conclusion of what they believed. Just as their teaching her evolution leads to her contempt for them, their general liberalism leads to her extreme leftism. Historically, cultures that become sexually permissive have lasted two to three generations afterward. Assuming ours stays true to this law, it doesn’t have long. Joseph S. Salemi March 20, 2023 In connection with that, the brilliant literary and social critic Camille Paglia, who is not a Catholic, has pointed out that effeminacy, homosexuality, and gender uncertainty are the late symptoms of civilizational decline. She mentions Ptolemaic Egypt, imperial Rome, the Mauve Decade of the 1890s, Weimar Germany, and our situation today. These are periods where perversion is not just rampant, but celebrated and preferred by the elite classes. Roy Eugene Peterson March 20, 2023 The war on free speech certainly has been amplified by disinformation passing as truth in the news media and the evil spawned by the term and use of “hate speech.” Stalin and Hitler would approve! Reply Brian A Yapko March 20, 2023 Great poems, Russel — observant and with strong messages. I too liked The Apple Tree best — what it says to me is that no matter how much you lower your standards, compromise and appease certain people (leftist zealots come to mind), you’re still going to get burned in the end. As Churchill famously said, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile = hoping it will eat him last.” Reply Russel Winick March 20, 2023 Thanks Brian, for this interesting feedback. Reply Norma Pain March 21, 2023 Thank you for these poems Russel. I enjoyed them all, especially Apple Tree. This new disease of oversensitivity is making life very difficult and causing much withdrawal of connection with each other on a daily basis. If we are afraid to voice our opinions because we are stepping on eggshells, how can we grow. It is all so very silly. Reply Susan Jarvis Bryant March 21, 2023 Russel, as always I love the wit and wisdom of your poetry – poetry that always carries with it a serious message. For me, ‘Apple Tree’ is a message all parents should heed. Perhaps it’s time for us all to reassess our values before we lose every last vestige of our humanity… we have now reached a point in South Texas where conservative mothers and grandmothers are taking their children/grandchildren to highly sexualized drag shows in Dallas… it’s gone way beyond political preferences… we’re entering ancient territory here. That’s why our history books are so important. Russel, thank you! Reply Joshua C. Frank March 22, 2023 Susan, I had no idea that conservatives even in South Texas were driving 6 or more hours to Dallas to take their children and grandchildren to see that kind of drag show! How horrible. It just shows that conservative means nothing anymore. What is going through their minds as they do this? It’s as if we’re living in one of those zombie movies, or most of the world has been assimilated by Star Trek’s Borg. Reply Joseph S. Salemi March 22, 2023 People tend to do what is trendy and popular. This is why left-liberals are so fanatically concerned about getting control of the schools and mass media. Joshua C. Frank March 22, 2023 I think the left-liberals have gotten their wish… but as we see with “Apple Tree,” it’s ended up being a Faustian bargain. Leave a Reply to Russel Winick Cancel ReplyYour email address will not be published.CommentName* Email* Website Captcha loading...In order to pass the CAPTCHA please enable JavaScript. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Δ This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Joseph S. Salemi March 19, 2023 Richard Weaver wrote a seminal book back in 1948, titled “Ideas Have Consequences.” It was truly prescient for what is happening today. The ideological ground for the collapse of liberal support for free speech was set in the 1980s, when the notion that certain expressions of opinion were “acts” (rather than mere verbal utterances) began to be pushed by leftist theorists. From this utterly false idea came the notion of “hate speech” and “disinformation.” Since the First Amendment protects only speech and not actions, the ground was prepared for left-wing fascism. Today, “hate speech” simply means any speech that anyone in a governmentally certified minority group finds offensive; and “disinformation” means whatever is said by your non-leftist opponent in an argument. Both are now recognized as “crimes,” and liberals (who generally aren’t too bright) very easily slid into being defenders of controlled and policed speech and thought, without a qualm. Ah, Voltaire! Reply
Patricia March 31, 2023 Joseph, a most auspicious comment. People are tone deaf to any talk about our cilvil rights! I have never seen the world so oblivious and uncaring about our freedom! Seems, being aware is quickly snuffed out, as elected and unethical,elected WOKE maggots crawl everywhere. Their message carried as the best escargot of pure lies via the evil media. Thank you, Joseph. Patricia Reply
Sally Cook March 19, 2023 Dear Russel – I see that you and I are on the same side. How can any art form exist in such a de-oxygenized atmosphere? Is what I just wrote an actual dictionary-certified word? Do I care? Not likely. Art? Most art is unwieldy, incomplete, even bad. We might have done without much of it.. It is those brief snippets of blazing clarity for which we wait. Those are what show what it means to be human. Truly human. The moments that make God smile. I warn you, don’t make God frown ! Thanks for what you have written here. Reply
Russel Winick March 19, 2023 Yes Sally, we are on the same side of the fence. And ironically, it is much greener on our side! Thanks! Reply
Tonia Kalouria March 19, 2023 Love all of these, and find the Liseners, especially, such a succinct truth. Reply
Diana Sheldrick March 19, 2023 It seems to me that freedom of speech is seen to be a whole lot of talk with no responsibility Reply
Russel Winick March 20, 2023 I always liked this famous opinion from liberal Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in the case of Whitney v. California (1927): “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” Reply
Cynthia Erlandson March 19, 2023 Russel, it seems to me that you have done a tricky thing here, and done it well: these poems are both entertaining, and insightful expressions of very serious topics. I especially like “Listeners”. Reply
Russel Winick March 19, 2023 Thanks Cynthia. Yes, the poor listening situation is frustrating. But I’m certainly guilty of it too at times. Reply
Cheryl Corey March 19, 2023 Russel, I’m accustomed to seeing your terse and acerbic witticisms, so I was pleasantly surprised to see your longer ‘”Apple Tree”. But if I may ask, what prompted the title? Thanks. Reply
Russel Winick March 19, 2023 Thanks Cheryl. That title came from wondering if this was somehow another case of an apple not falling far from the tree. Reply
Joshua C. Frank March 22, 2023 I thought it was a reference to the sin of Adam—perhaps the parents had eaten the forbidden fruit of liberalism and were forced to deal with the consequences, just as the whole world is still living with the consequences of Adam’s sin and will until the end.
Joshua C. Frank March 19, 2023 “Apple Tree” is my favorite of these! It shows just how liberalism comes back to bite its adherents. By being so liberal, they let even worse influences corrupt their daughter beyond what they could deal with, and she found it intolerable that they couldn’t go that far, so she disowned them. That’s one of the problems with liberalism: it grows the more it’s accepted. “Progressive” has a double meaning here. Reply
Joseph S. Salemi March 19, 2023 It seems to me that the daughter described in “Apple Tree” was simply looking for a convenient excuse to disown and break with her parents. They happily accepted her coming out as gay, they freely accepted her decision to become a trannie, and they had no trouble with her name change or her pronoun switches. All that occurred to precipitate the daughter’s alienation was a minor slip in pronoun usage — comparable to calling a newly married girl by her maiden name, or mispronouncing someone’s surname because of a memory lapse, or mistakenly referring to a Monsignor as “Father.” Something as trivial and forgivable as this made the daughter “totally disconnect” from her parents? Really? Is that believable? What one actually sees here is a manifestation of deep hatred and revulsion on the part of the daughter. She had a festering resentment of her parents, and it’s very likely that her decision to be a lesbian, and her subsequent decision to become a trannie, were preliminary stabs at hurting them. When neither thing worked, she seized upon an error in pronoun usage to lash out at them and cut them out of her life. Hatred always looks for an excuse to pick a fight. Reply
Russel Winick March 20, 2023 Interesting conjecture. And it’s possible – I don’t know. I just listened, and the poem covers the full extent of what I was told. Thanks for this analysis.
Joshua C. Frank March 20, 2023 If she wanted to hurt her liberal parents, she would have become a conservative Christian, married a like-minded man, and become a homemaker and mother of many children. Nothing offends those people like even one of those, let alone all! (I’ve got a poem on that coming up in a month.) Young people these days have extreme contempt for their parents. There are many reasons (such as a general cultural Marxism where every hierarchy has to be inverted or at least overthrown, technology making a new world every generation, and the casting off of religion), but I think one reason not talked about much is that they’re taught evolution. To me, my parents are one step closer to when the Apostles and other saints brought Jesus to our European ancestors and to when God made Adam. To the young woman in the poem, her parents are one step closer to being chimpanzees and other lower animals.
Joseph S. Salemi March 20, 2023 The daughter wouldn’t have done those things you mention, Joshua, because they are unfashionable, non-trendy, and out of sync with what her peer group would approve of. Becoming a dyke and a trannie is actually cool and with-it, and gives you social-status credit in the left-liberal in-group. The real point of the poem is that liberal parents produce radical children, or as was said in the eighteenth century, “The Revolution always eats its own.”
Joshua C. Frank March 20, 2023 Yes, I agree, that’s why I was thinking it wasn’t about hurting her parents as much as about following their teaching to the natural conclusion of what they believed. Just as their teaching her evolution leads to her contempt for them, their general liberalism leads to her extreme leftism. Historically, cultures that become sexually permissive have lasted two to three generations afterward. Assuming ours stays true to this law, it doesn’t have long.
Joseph S. Salemi March 20, 2023 In connection with that, the brilliant literary and social critic Camille Paglia, who is not a Catholic, has pointed out that effeminacy, homosexuality, and gender uncertainty are the late symptoms of civilizational decline. She mentions Ptolemaic Egypt, imperial Rome, the Mauve Decade of the 1890s, Weimar Germany, and our situation today. These are periods where perversion is not just rampant, but celebrated and preferred by the elite classes.
Roy Eugene Peterson March 20, 2023 The war on free speech certainly has been amplified by disinformation passing as truth in the news media and the evil spawned by the term and use of “hate speech.” Stalin and Hitler would approve! Reply
Brian A Yapko March 20, 2023 Great poems, Russel — observant and with strong messages. I too liked The Apple Tree best — what it says to me is that no matter how much you lower your standards, compromise and appease certain people (leftist zealots come to mind), you’re still going to get burned in the end. As Churchill famously said, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile = hoping it will eat him last.” Reply
Norma Pain March 21, 2023 Thank you for these poems Russel. I enjoyed them all, especially Apple Tree. This new disease of oversensitivity is making life very difficult and causing much withdrawal of connection with each other on a daily basis. If we are afraid to voice our opinions because we are stepping on eggshells, how can we grow. It is all so very silly. Reply
Susan Jarvis Bryant March 21, 2023 Russel, as always I love the wit and wisdom of your poetry – poetry that always carries with it a serious message. For me, ‘Apple Tree’ is a message all parents should heed. Perhaps it’s time for us all to reassess our values before we lose every last vestige of our humanity… we have now reached a point in South Texas where conservative mothers and grandmothers are taking their children/grandchildren to highly sexualized drag shows in Dallas… it’s gone way beyond political preferences… we’re entering ancient territory here. That’s why our history books are so important. Russel, thank you! Reply
Joshua C. Frank March 22, 2023 Susan, I had no idea that conservatives even in South Texas were driving 6 or more hours to Dallas to take their children and grandchildren to see that kind of drag show! How horrible. It just shows that conservative means nothing anymore. What is going through their minds as they do this? It’s as if we’re living in one of those zombie movies, or most of the world has been assimilated by Star Trek’s Borg. Reply
Joseph S. Salemi March 22, 2023 People tend to do what is trendy and popular. This is why left-liberals are so fanatically concerned about getting control of the schools and mass media.
Joshua C. Frank March 22, 2023 I think the left-liberals have gotten their wish… but as we see with “Apple Tree,” it’s ended up being a Faustian bargain.
