No More 'Wretched Refuse'

[David Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

>Date:         Thu, 6 Jul 95 19:17:08 EDT
>From:         "Tom McSloy 770-984-9807" <mcgrumpo@VNET.IBM.COM>
>Subject:      No More 'Wretched Refuse'
>
>In light of the recent flap over the Exon censorship bill, I thought you
>might like to read this Op-Ed piece about resistance to censorship as a
>natural for liberal-conservative co-operation.
>
>--Tom
>
>No More 'Wretched Refuse'
>-------------------------
>   (The language police edit Emma Lazarus)
>        by Stephen Jay Gould
>           The New York Times, Op-Ed Page, June 7, 1995
>
>CAMBRIDGE MASS.
>Arriving home from Europe, I noticed a large granite plaque in the
>International Arrivals Building of John F. Kennedy Airport.  As a
>welcome testimony to continuity between older and modern means of
>immigration, the plaque carries, in large gold letters, the words of
>Emma Lazarus's famous poem, "The New Colossus," inscribed in the Statue
>of Liberty:
>
>   Give me your tired, your poor,
>   Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ...
>   Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
>   I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
>
>Now I am a member of the last generation of New York City children
>schooled in the discipline of rote memorization.  We all learned
>Lazarus' poem -- and who can forget a drill engraved into the brain at
>age 9 or 10?
>
>So I knew that something was missing -- as the three dots indicated
>honestly enough.  I scanned my mental file and came up with the missing
>material line -- not a raft of words excusably omitted for lack of space
>but one single line, with all the room in the world for it: The wretched
>refuse of your teeming shore.
>
>Reinsert the absent line, and the poem has balance; only now does it
>rhyme and scan properly.  More vitally, it now represents what Lazarus
>wrote -- for posterity.
>
>The language police triumph, and integrity bleeds.  We may call people
>"homeless" and "tempest-tost," but they may not be, even with poetic
>license, "wretched refuse."
>
>Did these particular police ever hear of metaphor?  Did they consider
>that Lazarus might have been describing the attitudes of ruling classes
>in foreign lands toward their potential emigrants?  Play it safe and
>destroy poetry.
>
>At LaGuardia Airport, in the wonderful Art Deco Marine Air Terminal,
>which now houses the Delta shuttle but was once the home of Pan
>American's fabled flying boats, a stunning mural stretches a full 360
>degrees around the inner wall of the rotunda.
>
>Titled "Flight," and painted in the early 1940's by James Brooks, under
>the auspices of the New York City W.P.A.  Art Project, this mural treats
>the history of human aviation -- from the early failure of Icarus,
>through the unworkable dreams and schemes of Leonardo, to modern
>aircraft.  The mural is quite apolitical (beyond its message of
>progressive technology triumphant), but many of the figures are depicted
>as strong and muscular workers, following a tradition of the time, and
>admittedly in tune with a genre that usually carried leftist political
>messages.
>
>In 1952, in the midst of the McCarthyite hysteria, the thought police
>decided that Brooks's mural was "socialist."  Ironically, they were
>most offended by a large figure of a man with his head in the clouds.
>But the figure is a priest, or at least friendly to religion.
>
>The description, currently posted in the terminal, reads:  "The large
>central figure, who stands contemplating the heavens through a circular
>cut in the ceiling, swings in one hand a censer, indicating the
>religious origin of man's early thoughts of flight."  With the other
>hand, he draws designs of flying machines.  Nevertheless, the mural was
>once obliterated with a layer of plain gray wall paint.
>
>This tale has a happy ending.  In 1977, De Witt Wallace and Laurence
>Rockefeller put up funds, with the support of the Port Authority, to
>uncover the mural, which had been sealed before overpainting.  James
>Brooks, in his 80's, rejoiced in the restoration -- and we may all enjoy
>his fine work today.
>
>Two tales, two airports.  The best of times and stories -- and the
>worst.  A happy restoration and a silly censoring.  The real
>McCarthyism, in its brutality, ruined lives and careers.  Modern
>"political correctness,": in its puerility, feels like the farce after
>the tragedy (as Marx defined the path of history in contrasting Napoleon
>III with the original).
>
>Perhaps, then, we should only laugh at the harmless nonsense of a line
>censored, while we rejoice in the restoration of art both cruelly and
>mindlessly defaced.  But we should respect arguments about thin edges of
>wedges.
>
>If any issue should unite liberals and conservatives, anyone who cares
>about the integrity of human achievement or respect for human
>accomplishment, may we not all pledge to avoid the silly censoring that
>can lead to a codification of Orwell's Newspeak?  Consider John Milton's
>reasons for why good arguments are often lost:  "For want of words, no
>doubt, or lack of breath!"
>


Bernard A. Galler
E-mail:  galler@umich.edu
Fax: 313-668-9998