The first amendment
was created long before dueling became outlawed. The founders
respected free speech yet they also respected a man's right to defend
against common slander, defamation and so forth. They new that legal
dueling made citizens temper what they choose to say publicly because
they would be accountable for it. The broadcast media today has made
a complete farce of free speech. They are like the wild kudzu plant
that has overgrown the south as a noxious weed. Fair and balanced
broadcast verbiage cannot really be achieved unless listeners can
duel the broadcasters if they wish.
A restoration of
free speech parameters consistent with some modicum of personal honor
and integrity should be developed. Actually the most practical way
would be to deny organized crime access to broadcast wavelengths and
use new technology to give all broadcast frequencies to individual
citizens to share in some kind of fair non-preferential order. It
might be desirable to some to shoot the infected dogs (whoever they
are), yet Christian virtue must temper the will of classical virtue
to exact just retribution now and then.
The wikipedia
article below relates that dueling presented a 'quick and easy way to
settle disputes outside the courts' in the American west and south
until the civil war. The broadcast media exploitation of the first
amendment to hide behind as a tool to use abusive language or
perpetrate organized torts in a legally hard-to-charge paradigm would
have been disambiguated in the era of legal dueling.
Alexander Hamilton
was a great political theorist, yet the third V.P. of the United
States Aaron Burr ended his life in a duel in 1804. Early America
would have been littered with corpses of today's broadcast media if
they had been as they are with today's tools for tyranny in 1800.
No comments:
Post a Comment