“I Disapprove of What You Say, but I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It”

Written by Corey Bowen


Irony is a bitter fate. Not only do your enemies witness your failure, but it is a fine opportunity for them to find it absolutely hilarious. The fire-truck that spontaneously combusts, the cardiologist suffering a heart attack, the fisherman being eaten by a shark: few can deny the inherent humor in these morbid, tragic tales. Much to the delight of said vehicles, doctors, and sailors, irony is not unique to dramatic demises. It is found right here at home in the “Clean Up DHS” blog.

The blog made a tremendous splash among Dexter High School students on the social networking site Facebook on the evening of March 30, 2010. Their beloved school newspaper, The Squall, had come under fire, along with their First Amendment rights, their clever interpretations of classic art, and their parodies of John Lennon. That’s right, not even the Fab Four could escape the condemnation of the blog, not even in their Yellow Submarine. The blog chastised the paper for publishing “disturbing,” “lewd,” and “pathetic” content. But students did not find this to be the issue. It is the entirely irrational, laughably ironic presentation that made the blog into such a despicable site.

How so? Each of the so-called-problems with The Squall is actually a failure in proper parenting.

The blog‘s first post presents an instance of harmfully elevated sensitivity. “The paper is publishing photos of hard liquor bottles on the cover,” it proclaims. This must be from the same parent who covers her child’s eyes during Super Bowl commercials for Budweiser. And when they see real wine glasses in racks at Olive Garden. And when a friend “Sends them a Drink” on Facebook. And when, in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, characters actually, God forbid, drink the contents of the bottles. Perhaps this author has never actually lived in America and is unaware that most people are actually quite comfortable with viewing a liquor bottle. Or perhaps this author would like to suggest a new cover for the issue on drinking in Dexter. Ketchup bottles maybe? Or would mayonnaise jars work better? Something about condiments does not seem to imply an association with teenage drinking. If a picture of a liquor bottle offends a child, he or she has not been properly prepared for the real world, a victim of excessive sheltering.

Equally reasonable are the representations of classic works of art that are supposedly “pornographic.” That’s right. Some parents claim students are being fed porn by the school system. For instance, one Rostrum cover featured a recreation of the classic Rolling Stone cover on which a naked John Lennon embraces his lover Yoko Ono. The Squall, thankfully, gave their “John” pants. Yet the boy’s romantic pose and kiss remains somehow scandalous. It is not any worse, if it is not better, than the PDA that litters the DHS hallways. Later in the blog, an anonymous freshman girl complains about the ample skin displayed by a recreation of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus that adorns a school wall, even after much was covered in comparison to the original masterpiece. Any self-respecting citizen with a claim to some small fragment of a culturally, artistically tuned mind will find this laughable. One piece of advice for this tragically sheltered girl: never ever step one pinky toe into the Louvre.

The same anonymous freshmen poster also claims that the fourth graders on her bus are intrigued by The Squall, and that the material it contains is not appropriate for their young eyes. Disregarding the fact that, in the Dexter School System, fourth graders do not ride the same bus as high school students, this argument is purely ridiculous. It is equivalent to censoring the significant majority of movies and television which are also inappropriate for such young children. Movies such as 300 and The Matrix are filled with violence not suitable for preteens. This explains why they were not marketed at their age group. There were no King Leonidas toys packaged in Happy Meals or LEGO minifigures of Neo and Morpheus. Chances are, the complaining parents have watched, and enjoyed, such movies, or similar ones. Did they show them to their kids? Of course not. It is the same with The Squall. Parents should still have enough control over a fourth grade student to tell them not to read it, or at least not “learn” from it. No child is forced to read The Squall. It is an entirely independent decision, even for high school students. Parents, if The Squall not suitable for your children, don’t let them read it.

As its fourth blunder, Clean Up DHS takes The Squall to be in some way official, authoritative, or helpful. It is not The Squall’s problem that it doesn‘t meet these standards; it is the problem of the parents who wrongly expect it to be. The Squall is purely for entertainment and for students to practice and publish journalistic style pieces. “Mary” is the second poster on the blog: she complains about the poor advice given by an editorial in the most recent February edition of The Squall. She rants about the article’s “doormat-style advice” that is “truly pathetic.” The obvious fact is that Mary is under the mistaken belief that students will look to The Squall for good sound advice. No differentiation can be made between this article and articles in previous issues that encouraged the school district to give Squall editors $500,000 to attend the college of their choice, that predicted a zombie apocalypse was imminent, and proclaimed that said doomsday would be survived by a Squall editor, his eighty-some freshmen wives, their dozens of sons named Cornelius, and one son named Jamal. The truth is that no one cares about the advice given by The Squall. As Image Editor Jeff Piku put it, “if all you want is facts, go read the side of a cereal box.”

Before we examine the next, primary fault, it may be useful to give an analysis of some of the contents of daily high school conversation. Topics include:

-profanity
-threats
-detailed descriptions of how to obtain and use drugs without getting caught
-explicit/graphic sexual diaries
-encouragement to commit crimes
-personal verbal attacks (including vulgar and offensive language) against teachers, administration, students and anyone else

Admittedly, these are not the solitary contents of discussion; plenty more humane and acceptable topics make up the majority of high school conversation. This said we move onto the blog’s longest post.

In this post, Barbara R. criticizes the public forum nature of The Squall. She is correct in her statement that, because of this nature, the First Amendment protects the following forms of speech:

“-profanity
-threats
-detailed descriptions of how to obtain and use drugs without getting caught
-explicit/graphic sexual diaries
-encouragement to commit crimes
-personal verbal attacks (including vulgar and offensive language) against teachers, administration, students and anyone else”

This list should ring a bell. Yes, some elements were excluded, but they are entirely unnecessary: viewing pornography is illegal for those under eighteen, The Squall’s target audience, and recruitment for terrorism should be right below alien abductions on a list of things to worry about in Dexter. With these extremities eliminated, all that remains bares a strikingly identical resemblance to standard high school life. Is this an acceptable fact? Not necessarily, but it does void any argument that publishing the material will corrupt young minds who live in a society indulging in it. An angry “Susan” posts, “My 13 year old is not ready for that in September!!” Tough luck, Susan. The Squall is presenting everything your child will see in high school, except with fewer expletives. Not only that, but he or she will experience it live, on site. Kids will discuss highly sexual things with an ambiguous degree of seriousness right in your child’s face. Naïve lovers will explore the limits of publicly permissible affection as your child casually walks to an American Studies class. Piles of chewing tobacco will rest distastefully in your child’s drinking fountains.

Welcome, Susan, to the modern American high school. I greet you on behalf of the popular majority of Dexter High School students. We are teenagers. We are designed to defy authority, to wrest free of our limits, to question the legitimacy of our superiors. We cuss. We swear. We hate people. We willingly offend people. We drink beer, chew tobacco, and smoke marijuana, illegally, but we do it. We dance dirty. We make out in the hallways. We have sex, and some of us end up pregnant. And beyond that, we talk about it, joke about it, and in particularly rowdy moods we scream about it, whether or not we’ve ever actually done any of it.

But we are also the future of America. We are scholars and authors, athletes and performers. We march in a perfect block “D,” we debate global controversies, and we can engineer one hundred and one uses for a mouse trap. We break records, we set standards, and we surpass expectations. We are capable of sensible thinking, and we have one sensible thought: a high school newspaper should look like, if not anything else, a high school. There are drugs and sex and alcohol at DHS. A publication that does not admit this is blind and ignorant. A newspaper is the thermometer of society’s climate. It cannot be forced to read the temperature users want without losing every ounce of utility. We are sane enough to not fall into the trap of Clean Up DHS’s poster child JagWire, a paper which fell to censorship after publishing how-to’s on oral sex. That is disgusting. Publishing answers from actual student interviews is not.

Am I implying that I support cursing, premarital intercourse, tobacco, and emulating sex on the dance floor? Certainly not. I myself have grown up sheltered at two private Christian schools with media content restrictions that peers have deemed ludicrous; I am entirely against the stated practices and would appreciate their total removal from high school society. Do the parents of Clean Up DHS concur? We have no reason to believe so. The blog never protests the illicit actions reported by The Squall. It never suggests a plan to prevent teen pregnancy or block marijuana sales. We are provided ample ranting propositions to sanitize The Squall to protect the innocence of our beloved thirteen year old children. This will only hide the real issues. It is a Band-Aid on the high school’s wounds. The freshmen will still experience the identical problem once they inevitably peel back the bandage. Without antiseptics, the wound will fester and stagnate; this wound will not scab. Because of this last and greatest folly, the parents of Clean Up DHS lose all credibility to most high school students. To them, they are ranting madmen, oblivious to their own faults.

Dexter's morals or Why I avoid the painting of Venus

Perhaps when we’re discussing the quality of the squall’s morals it deserves the question of why we even have a student paper? Isn’t it so students can express their opinion and spread news of events? Is something any less true or relevant if it’s offensive? Is the squall really even that offensive? Aren’t the issues discussed relevant to the students?

We shouldn’t forget that there is such thing as a balance. Maybe there’s nothing stopping the squall from printing porn, or suicide notes, or whatever may seem to violate the rigid moral standards of a few over-zealous parents, but isn’t the fact that high school students have the power to do that but don’t prescriptive of the fact that they have their own reasonable moral standards? Won’t legislating exactly what is said just breed resentment and rebelliousness? Are these parents really so naive to think that their passionate protest will change any students minds?

Anyway, who’s to say which moral standard is the best for the paper? Judeo-Christian morality is all fine and good, but we shouldn’t forget that the school is a public institution. There isn’t a standard for belief written on each of our hearts. Of course we can’t deny parents’ right to decide for their own family, but if you have a problem with the newspaper don’t let your student read it, if you have a problem with the dances don’t let your student go. What gives anyone the right to legislate anything for anyone else? But these parents should be warned, a totalitarian conception of your role over your child may result in short term innocence, but too often those who are kept on the shortest leashes are the ones who rebel the most. (I’m sure you’ve all heard of the kid from the good family who goes wrong; there must be a balance.)

Now I’ll grant them that that painting is horrible. Let’s look at the definition of porn, pornography: creative activity (writing or pictures or films etc.) of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate sexual desire (princeton wordnet). Clearly the painting of the birth of Venus has no virtue, it is in no way an important piece of art. Do these people really wonder why that hallway is so important? People are obviously going there to ogle the painting. I know many people—who are modest—that don’t go to that hallway for fear of embarrassing themselves. I don’t even know how it got put up in the first place, can the school really condone such classical art when so many ruffians and deviants look at it? Haven’t you noticed all those gansta’ rappers with replicas of the statue of David and the birth of Venus?