Free and frivolous

Freedom of speech is a great achievement. Some would even consider it the main achievement of Western Society. The West is THE free world and the US of A is the freeist part of the West, in fact the rest of the West is history, or at least a museum of of old freaks. The Dutch, who have strong historical strings with the new world, have tried to support their Big Brother in his advocacy of free speech. And lo and behold they have a reputation, there was a time that books forbidden elsewhere in Europe were printed and distributed in the low country.
Now there have been some issues of free speech lately that require some reflexion. Some politicians and famous Dutch have started a competition in free speech. As in this degenerate times norms and values have become a faint memory, blurred by the daily tsunami of commercials with which the average human being is confronted, this contest has led to some remarkable results. And even the commercials are considered a form of free speech (unless they are about tobacco or alcohol).
The first who won the gold medal was a to capitalism converted marxist who wanted to become the drag queen of the Dutch administration. He claimed to always say what he had thought and to do what he had said. Unfortunately he was murdered only after having spoken in the media almost every minute of his waking life since his claim to fame and doing almost nothing.
The second champion was filmmaker and happy smoker Theo van Gogh. He to was sadly murdered after having called muslims goatfuckers in his weekly columns for almost a year. He did make a beautifull short movie called 'Submission', which became very important for the Maroccan selfconsciousness. Suddenly most Maroccans in Holland discovered they were very much offended and thus had something in common.
The newest star is a politician from the deep South of Holland who'se mother is from the former Dutch Indies and who bleeches his hair with peroxyde. The secret is that he is in love with himself and thinks to seduce a substantial part of the Dutch population by impersonating Batman against the aliens. He is a member of parliament and tries to shock his colleages with insults and unconventional language. He is sued for comparing the Qor'an with Hitler's dairy 'Mein Kampf'. Because of this stroke of genius he calls himself the champion of free speech.
Now what is free speech? Jezus went into the desert for fourty days and during this time he enjoyed really free speech. He could say anything that came to mind, there was nobody who had any objection, because ... there was nobody who listened.
In Holland free speech is called free utterance and that is very correct. Speech is to good a word for the kind of freedom that is at stake. Speech is not a solo game. It takes two to tango and two to speak. An utterance is just a crie de coeur and perfectly possible in the desert. Speech is directed to another person and asks a reaction.It's part of a dialogue. Now if you start a dialogue, you want to tell somebody something. If you speak an incomprehensible language or if you first make your audience deaf or otherwise not capable of understanding what you say, you're a poor speaker. If you do this on purpose you're destroying free speech. Because speach is a way to mutual understanding. Speech is in essence dialogue.
Good speech creates thourough mutual understanding. Mutual understanding enhances the quality of speech, it makes it more refined and clearer. The event of speech in a period in a community is called the discourse. Now freedom of speech depends on the quality and structure of the discourse. The better we understand each other the more we can say and the more meaningfull our speech becomes. People who try to improve the discourse, like poets, writers and philosophers are fighters for the freedom of speach. Those who on the other hand spoil the discourse by insulting, manupilating talk destroy the freedom of speech. So the socalled champions of free speech are in fact its destroyers. Wilders, Van Gogh, Fortuyn, they were all destroyers of the freedom of speech, because of their frivilous selfinterested use of language. And perhaps the most devious act was the redefinition free speech into free utterance.