The Tucson Festival of Free Expression

On the University of Arizona campus this Saturday and Sunday, March 9th and 10th

Attend the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend and you, along with more than 100,000 of your fellow Americans, will be immersed in a sea of millions of books containing a boundless diversity of thought. And as you walk among the beautiful bounty of this gathering I would encourage you to take a moment to consider this spectacle as a profound celebration of free expression.

Celebrate that you are not in an authoritarian state, where citizens fear the state and authors fear the book banners.

Celebrate that none among you has the right to prohibit your free access to books that provoke thought. Such prohibitions are unthinkable to the sentient American.

Fascists fear free expression. Ideas can be incendiary. Authoritarian states do not produce great writers. Authoritarian states produce exiled refugees who become internationally celebrated authors, terrifying literary titans such as Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Hannah Arendt, Victor Hugo, Isabel Allende, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Salman Rushdie, Masih Alinejad, Marjane Satrapi and countless more great voices of civilization.

Soon you will be strolling among the works of such daring writers. Here you will be among the amusing, the delightful, the provocative and perhaps most importantly in this modern perilous age, the fearless. Here you will find the writings of courageous creators who throughout history and even in this present moment defy the sword with their mighty pens.

My awe of such bold authors and the American blessing of free expression was magnified every time I visited a classroom to talk to kids about political cartoonists and in particular the ones who suffered torture, death or prison for ideas transformed into mere ink on paper. I would preach on the role of a free press in our democracy, and why free speech, no matter how offensive, must be protected.

I’d prattle on about our collective faith in the fundamental notion that we Americans fear no ideas. I’d tell middle school kids it’s right there in the glorious “constipation” of the United States. Over their giggling attempts to correct my silliness I’d remind them, “Really. it’s right there in the Bill of Rats, in the First Attendant: No one in your democratic republic can outlaw the free expression of ideas.”

With cartoons I’d remind them how hard fought that freedom was. And remains. I would tell students to be proud of this inheritance. To use your freedom of expression responsibly. To be courageous.

Our revolutionary fore-readers feared no idea. Today we Americans, can enjoy a book festival on a lovely spring day knowing the overwhelming majority of us fear no idea, no image, no fiction, no truth, no book. We embrace diversity in all its manifestations. Without question. We are Americans.

An old Ukrainian-American comedian named Yakov Smirnoff tells the following joke about the repressive world he left behind. “In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.”

Here we have thousands.

Did I tell you the story from the eighties about the dissident Cuban who was arrested for accepting the gift of a typewriter from an American? The Cuban government confiscated the typewriter.

Fools. Typewriters don’t transform people. Ideas transform people. And a good book can transform the world.

Tell the censors, the muzzlers and the prohibitionists what are founders knew. The individual will always long for free expression. Always.

When the German press fell under control of the Nazis the readership and the circulation of the German major dailies plummeted. When Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was published it became a “bestseller” only because the Nazis made it mandatory reading. You vill buy zis besteller. When the Nazis attempted to control, purify and Nazify the creative arts of Germany they derided defiant nonconforming German artists as degenerates. In LA I saw The Degenerates in an LA gallery, the finest collection of art in the world

Ah, degenerates. My favorite authors at any festival of books are the degenerates!

The hundreds of authors here at the festival are the creative agents of free expression laboring in a society where free expression is a near absolute. When you see a misguided soul attempting to ban a book or silence a writer strengthen your resolve to preserve free expression by recalling the very American vow of Thomas Jefferson to swear “upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

Such views emerged out of a history of rulers and religious leaders murdering authors and burning books that contradicted their beliefs in the foolhardy belief they could vanquish the ideas held within by destroying the physical vessels of thought.

Today in America many books have been challenged, barred and banned and odds are good you will find them here in our humble town at this festival of literary freedom.

This weekend celebrate your freedom to purchase and possess as many books as your heart desires that others might consider provocative, challenging, disturbing, dangerous, threatening, harmful, pornographic, outrageous and even incendiary by the tiny fools among us who are woefully ignorant of the historic folly of banning literature.

For more than 40-years I drew political cartoons that provoked outrage, cheers and death threats. I would smugly wear such threats of violence as a patriot’s badge of civic honor.

Decades ago, after speaking on a panel about the provocative Mohammed cartoons on the University of Arizona campus, a civil young man from another corner of the planet wanted me to understand how profoundly hurt he was by the sacrilegious cartoons in question that were publised in northern Europe.

I asked the polite young student if he had ever seen an episode of “The Simpsons”. He told me he had seen an episode when he first arrived in America. He described in detail how disgusting, vulgar, coarse, troubling, pornographic, profane, and irreverent he found the program. He had just listed all the qualities this native-born American always loved about “The Simpsons”. I’m an American. It is impossible to offend me. I had a suggestion for him. If you think “The Simpsons” is vile stick around and watch "South Park” with me.

As the festival guide notes this truly amazing festival is where, “Authors across all genres, and from all different backgrounds and walks of life, have the chance to share their stories.” Many of the books at the Tucson Festival of Books are by a diverse range of writers writing about the heroic struggles of the marginalized, thrilling us by telling us the magnificent truth and truths about the endless American struggle to perfect our flawed union. The truth of America’s enduring hope.

Heather Cox Richardson, a historian worth reading, points out that such voices, choose, “ to root the United States, not in an imagined heroic past, but in the country’s real history: the constant struggle of all Americans from all races, ethnicities, genders and abilities to make the belief that we are all created equal, and that we have a right to have a say in our democracy, come true.”

Two moms from Moms Against Liberty, or is it Moms Against Libraries, I don’t know which, appeared on a TV news magazine recently. What I saw and heard were two ignorant fools, fearful of losing their diminishing political power over the marginalized, afraid of losing their misguided belief in an American myth of a pure past that never was, to a future that values and welcomes diversity.

When you hear an author speak freely at the Tucson Festival of Books about his, or her, or their book, thank our revolutionaries for the diversity of stories, the mix of ideas, the range of provocative opinions, and rainbow of enlightening interpretations you will hear.

So join us on a sunny day in March at the Tucson Festival of Books and see free expression all around you.

What greater blessing of liberty?

Links:

https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/