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