Freedom From Speech

Pranks, punk'd, hijinks. It's all good. Sorry to belabor the point, again, but I think this time it's justified, if for no other reason than to see the trees instead of the forest.

I prefer oranges to apples. They're more delicious and better for you, you could argue.

When I was in undergrad, a buddy and I were enjoying a lovely early evening stroll around campus when we decided to conduct a sociological experiment. We spotted a campus security rent-a-cop, all 5'4"/300lbs. of him, before he spotted us, and we started running away from him. Mind you, we'd done nothing wrong, nothing at all, which means by virtue solely of our running he gave chase.

4 hours and 7 junior pigs later, they never found us, and to this day are probably still wondering just exactly what it was that we didn't do that caused us to flee the scene. Good times. The virtue of a well-spent youth, I suppose.

But let me see if I've got this right.

Some asshole with a camera gets grabbed, restrained, hauled away, restrained some more, held down, cuffed, tasered (I prefer the extra syllable), held down some more, tasered again, hauled away, arrested, booked, put in jail, and arraigned because he exercised bad manners and poor etiquette?

It's my understanding that he was grabbed, restrained, hauled away, restrained some more, held down, cuffed, tasered (see above), held down some more, tasered again, hauled away, arrested, booked, put in jail, and arraigned because he was attempting to incite a riot.

Well I gotta say: That's some really terrible riot inciting attempts. Here's a tip: If everyone in the room hates you because you're an annoying dickhead with delusions of grandeur, then there's a pretty good chance that none of them will have your back when the campus gestapo decides to "sweep the leg Johnny". You're welcome.

Let's see: Kent State, Chicago's 1968 DNC, Birmingham's summer of 1965-ish, no taxation without representation... Hmm. Those were the days.

Sacha Baron Cohen's a genius and he's funny, 2 things our young Meyers isn't. Some of the stunts Borat pulled nearly got him killed. And the only reason he's not dead or in jail is because during filming, Larry Charles, the director, had an army of young lawyers in minivans making sure he was well within his rights to be doing what it was that he was doing. Meyers didn't have that luxury.

The cavalier attitude some of you hold with regard to your civil liberties scares the shit out of me. I guess I care a little bit more about my freedom to speak my mind. I never do it in a theater, though. But I love going to horror movies with a cinaplex full of black people because they'll have conversations with the characters on the screen -- heated, extended exchanges -- and it's usually more entertaining than the movie. Is that racist?

Anyways, those of you balking at the severity of personal infringement Meyer's stunt provoked leads me to believe you got exactly the political administration you deserve. Enjoy it, by all means. I guess we can thank the baby-booming hippies for all their hard work getting hippies elected mayor and paying for sandwiches with songs.*

I will say this: When it comes to outsourcing democracy to countries we've accidentally invaded again, would it be too much to ask if, every once in awhile, we went ahead and practiced a little democracy here on our own shores? Practice it till we get good at it, you see.

Meyer's real crime was taking an ideal opportunity to be brutally funny and squandering it for the sake of misplaced disobedience. For that? Yeah, lock him up and throw away the key. His exposing our illusion of freedom and security may have been accidental, but that's just because the means really do justify the ends.

(Man. This water I'm sitting in in this giant frying pan is starting to get uncomfortably warm, by the way.)

*Patton Oswalt