The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Norman Solomon
By Norman Solomon
No doubt 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 hed been pardoned by the
governor of New York for an obscenity conviction.
In their own time, people who are stubbornly ahead of it usually get
a lot more grief than accolades. And decades later -- in this case, 39
years after Bruces bust for a nightclub performance and 37 years after
his death -- the belated praise from on high is predictably insufferable.
The New York Times lead sentence on Dec. 24 called Bruce the
potty-mouthed wit who turned stand-up comedy into social commentary.
Actually, far from being potty-mouthed in an emblematic way, Lenny
Bruce was a Fool in the Shakespearean sense, jousting with a society
dominated by various aspiring Lears -- and quite a few Elmer Gantrys.
Most people who can remember Lenny Bruce have their favorite
moments. I think of when he took the opportunity, on a network TV 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 Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, Jerry
Falwell and, yes, George W. Bush.
Lenny 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 was not pious. The 1974
movie Lenny strayed when actor Dustin Hoffman wasnt quite able to
portray Bruces 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. For Bruce, legalistic
labyrinths culminated in August 1966 with a morphine overdose, two months
short of his 40th birthday.
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 30 years ago, while the war
was still raging, I used to air an obscure record that featured some of
Bruces final performance. He did a bit hed 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 Ive often remembered over the course of three
decades:
My defense: I was a soldier. I saw the end of a conscientious days
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, in
mass media, but the lasting power of Lenny Bruces 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 it wasnt then the propaganda mantra that it has recently
become, President Johnson referred to people violently resisting the U.S.
occupation of Vietnam as terrorists. These days, President 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, New Yorks Gov. George Pataki could not resist combining the
announcement of his pardon for Bruce with a plug for the sanctification
of present-day 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.
But the question that Lenny Bruce kept voicing from the stage,
meanwhile, 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?
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Norman Solomon is co-author of Target Iraq: What the News Media Didnt
Tell You. For an excerpt and other information, go to:
www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target