The Death of Klinghoffer, The Metropolitan Opera, Freedom and Wisdom

I’m a big 1^st Amendment guy. When George H.W. Bush accused Democratic Presidential nominee Michael Dukakis of being a “card carrying member of the ACLU,” I actually saw that as a compliment. But the freedom guaranteed by our Constitution doesn’t absolve us of accountability for what we say and what we publish. In fact, it demands it. And what distinguishes leadership is often not simply exercising one’s freedom, but doing so with genuine wisdom.

This tension between freedom and wisdom was never displayed in greater relief than the other night at outside the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. If you were there you might have witnessed the bizarre sight of a large collection of people in wheelchairs with signs reading “I am Leon Klinghoffer.” They were part of emotional throng gathered to protest the Met’s opening of John Adams’ opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. For those unfamiliar with the work, it depicts (through music, of course) the horrific 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship. Palestinian terrorists murdered one of the passengers, the wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, and dumped his body and wheelchair into the ocean. It is a work that has been lauded by opera critics around the world, and simultaneously decried as grossly insensitive to the victims of terrorism.

Although the opera debuted in 1991, controversy arose anew this year with the Met’s decision not only to produce the work on stage in New York but to bring to it movie theaters throughout the country (a decision the Met later retracted) in the face of a rising international tide of anti-Semitism. I don’t argue for a moment the Met has every right to mount the artistic works that it wishes, including this one. Yet while their freedom of speech should not be called into question (nor was it by protestors), the wisdom of it has to be.

Alongside the great constitutional fights in our history (the Pentagon Papers (brought to the fore again with the death of iconic Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee), greater press freedom in covering public figures, even expanded commercial speech (leaving aside Citizens United)), we have plenty of examples of battles over not the legality of speech, but the judgment used in propagating it, especially in the media business.

Sometimes publishing works considered offensive is good business, but does that make it good? Remember when Interscope, then a Time Warner -owned record label, came under heat for releasing “Gangsta Rap” in the 1990s? The raw language of this genre, including depiction of violence against women, was hugely offensive to many at the time (and still is), but the issue was never about the right of the rappers to make their music or Warner Music to release it. The company had to be evaluated on the balance they struck in not just releasing, but promoting and profiting from the often hurtful words contained in these artists’ works. Every generation has dealt with artists’ pushing the envelope, and gangsta rap was only the latest in a long line. Ironically history has dealt kindly with some of those most controversial early rappers like Snoop Doggy Dog (now almost a warm and cuddly comedic figure) and the late Tupac Shakur, whose works were recently featured in a Broadway musical.

In the 1980s and 1990s the rise of the conservative Christian right led to efforts to “defund” controversial works originally supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, including those from Karen Finely (with her body famously smothered in chocolate) and “Piss Christ” from Andres Serrano. Although I strongly supported the rights of these artists to create these works, the decision to fund or not wasn’t about rights – in that case politics on both sides was an unmistakable part of the balancing act.

We see judgment calls that have to be made all the time. In 2006 the independent British film “Death of a President” portrayed a fictional assassination of still-President George W. Bush. This film won awards at the Toronto Film Festival and abroad but was generally decried and otherwise almost entirely ignored in the U.S. Yet today we have Man Booker Prize-winner Hilary Mantel’s new book of short stories entitled “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher” (published by the venerable Macmillan), which has won almost unanimous praise and acceptance. Would the reaction to it be quite so warm if Margaret Thatcher were still alive?

In each of these and in so many similar cases, tough calls often must be made given the desires for artistic freedom, relationships between institutions and individual talent, and changing public mores. But just because the call to be made is subjective doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t bring reasonable – or harsh - judgment to bear on these decisions when not handled properly.

So is there any way to bring some objective perspective here? I’d look at a few criteria in judging the decision-makers (including the Met) in these types of cases:

Is publishing the offensive work more – or only - about money or pride rather than art or the artist? Oftentimes you’ll hear that once decisions are made to mount an offensive work that to reverse that decision would cause greater harm. I see this as a smokescreen, just like the argument that the speech is a right. If it shouldn’t be published, it shouldn’t be published – no one is forced to stick with a decision that may have looked good at one time and worse after further consideration.

Does the publication cause a specific pain? It’s one thing to provide generally offensive speech. It’s quite another when a work (like the Klinghoffer opera) is hurtful to members of a specific family, in this case the Klinghoffer children (whose opposing views the Met did permit in their program). Some voices do need to be listened to more than others, and the Met’s failure here lies at least in part in the specificity of the inflicted pain.

What does it say about you that you’re distributing this? Forget what it means immediately. What kind of a legacy do you create – or do you want to create - by providing a platform for this directly painful speech?

Do you know it when you see it? As I just discussed with my Media Studies class, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously once said in defining obscenity “I’ll know it when I see it.” Putting the legal pedagogy aside here, you know when something just doesn’t seem “right.” And for me I can’t see how, in the treacherous world we live in today, the Met can present as a glorious work of art a piece that provides a “nuanced” view of murderous terrorists. The New York Times refers today to the opera as a “searching, spiritual and humane work.” Sorry - sometimes there aren’t two sides to a story and it doesn’t take an investigative journalist to figure that out. Rather than succumbing to politics, I would have hoped that an institution like the Met (and others that will have similar challenges in the future) would have simply cut through it. It’s not about freedom; it’s about what you do with it.