The unpardonable Lenny Bruce - Media Beat

No doubt comedian Lenny Bruce would have laughed with at least a tinge of bitterness if--like millions of Americans--he picked up a newspaper the day before Christmas 2003 and read that he'd been "pardoned" by New York Governor George Pataki for an obscenity conviction.

In their own time, people who are stubbornly ahead of it usually get a lot more grief than accolade. And decades later--in this case, thirty-nine years after Bruce's bust for a nightclub performance and thirty-seven years after his death--the belated praise from "on high" is predictably insufferable.

The New York Times lead sentence on December 24, 2003, called Bruce "the potty-mouthed wit who turned stand-up comedy into social commentary." Actually, far from being "potty-mouthed" in an emblematic way, Bruce was a fool in the Shakespearean sense, jousting with a society dominated by various aspiring King Lears--and quite a few Elmer Gantrys.

Most people who can remember Bruce have their favorite moments. I think of when he took the opportunity on a network television show to "play" a dollar bill as a percussion device, snapping it in front of the microphone. Or his bits, taped and then captured on record albums, satirizing the entrepreneurial zeal of evangelical moralists. He anticipated the unctuous likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and, yes, George W. Bush.

Bruce lampooned hypocrisy yet he avoided the earnest fervor that dulls the teeth of much would-be biting humor. Bruce may have occasionally lapsed into sermonizing but he wasn't pious. The 1974 movie Lenny strayed when actor Dustin Hoffman wasn't quite able to portray Bruce's righteousness without preceding it with the hyphenated "self."

Bruce was a consummate mimic who spent many hours fiddling with tape from his on-stage routines. As an instrument of enormous versatility, his voice was orchestral in scope.

Protracted struggles with judicial repression for saying "bad" words made him obsessed with absurdities in law books. His legalistic labyrinths culminated in August 1966 with a morphine overdose at age forty.

We ought to note that his last two years spanned from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution through a period of rapid military escalation in Vietnam, with U.S. troop deployments mounting into the hundreds of thousands. On a noncommercial radio station about thirty years ago, while the war was still raging, I used to air an obscure record that featured some of Bruce's final performance. He did a bit he'd presented many times before, reciting (with a thick German accent) a poem by the radically humanistic Trappist monk Thomas Merton--a meditation on the high-ranking Nazi official Adolf Eichmann.

Here are words I've often remembered over the course of three decades:

   My defense: I was a soldier. I saw
   the end of a conscientious day's
   effort. I watched through the
   portholes. I saw every Jew
   burned and turned into soap. Do
   you people think yourselves
   better because you burned your
   enemies at long distance with
   missiles without ever seeing what
   you had done to them?

Such questions are still too hot for mainstream media to handle. We may congratulate ourselves on how risque, the words and images are now, but the lasting power of Bruce's caustic humor has nothing to do with four-letter words. Today, naughty language and sexual images are big media sellers. The tacit taboos are in other realms of expression.

Though the term wasn't then the propaganda mantra that it bas recently become, President Lyndon Johnson referred to people violently resisting the U.S. occupation of Vietnam as terrorists. These days, Bush is fond of applying the terrorist label to people violently resisting the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Naturally, as one of the home front politicos eager to boost the latest war, Pataki couldn't resist combining the announcement of his pardon for Bruce with a plug for the sanctification of presentday militarism under the guise of combating terrorism. "Freedom of speech is one of the greatest American liberties," Pataki declared, "and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terror."

Meanwhile the question that Bruce kept voicing from the stage still hangs in the air: "Do you people think yourselves better because you burned your enemies at long distance with missiles without ever seeing what you had done to them?"

Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and coauthor of the book Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You.

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