Dear Kathy Griffin:
So, you think you went too far in the realm of macabre comedy stunts, huh? I’ve seen funnier than Trump’s bloody decapitated head. Yawn. But the thing about free speech imagery is it’s best not to offend tens of millions of people, well tens of millions of Americans. And that’s what you did, girlfriend! As your stunt picture was taking shape, you even conceded you and your photographer would have to leave the country. And Trump, well he has totally lost his sense of humor since becoming president. And it’s funny, for someone who relishes free speech ad nauseam, he sure is willing to release the hounds to rip the head off anyone who would dare besmirch him. [Pssst, “Frontline” did a recent report theorizing that Trump ran for president because of a comedic remark by President Obama who smugly declared Trump would never be called President.]
Famous comedians and entertainers like you whose purpose is to rebel rouse, and as you put it ‘push the envelope,’ should expect a one-time public scorning. Take Joan Rivers, your dearly departed comedic mentor. She went through an awful period in the 1980s where she could not get a job. Her situation was not really based on her loud bawdy comedy—a little too much goading of Liz Taylor for her weight, as I recall—but more of the cut-throat entertainment industry. The word was Johnny Carson had her banned or had put out a bad word on her, and she was history for a long time until she decided to step back into her high heels and take the bull by the horns. She remade herself into the comic legend we fondly revere today.
Take the Dixie Chicks and that remark in front of a London audience after 9/11 when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and later Iraq—two undeclared wars that would last longer than Vietnam, still ongoing in many respects, end in countless ruined lives and deaths and lifelong misery and suffering especially among our young men, and cost about a billion dollars a day at one point, all funded off the books. But I digress. Before singing a Texas song, Natalie Maines remarked that the Chicks were “ashamed” the President was from Texas.
Heavens to Betsy, all hell broke out! Remember? First, the Dixie Chicks, the hottest country-crossover girl band ever, were banned from country radio nationwide. Fans were tossing their CDs. Then the hate mail and death threats came a-pouring in, among the letters one that strongly advised the lady entertainers to just ‘shut up and sing.’ They posed nude on the cover of a major news magazine, their bodies painted with the hateful words and common female epithets from those irate letters. It was a scary time, especially for proponents of free speech. Anti-war speech was suddenly verboten. Lenny Bruce and George Carlin would have taken the right all the way to the Supreme Court. Nothing to fear but fear, I can hear them say from the Great Mike in the Sky. But … they were men, not women. Female entertainers face a more dangerous reality when it comes to personal safety.
And let’s not forget the most important comedian blackballed from late night TV: Bill Maher—again, his ordeal having to do with post 9/11 puffed-up patriotism. During his political comedy show’s roundtable discussion, he talked about the terrorists being called ‘cowards’ by the president. He thought aloud that anyone who would drive a plane into a building could be called many things but not a coward—not that the terrorists were brave but that as humans universally fear death, men who would knowingly commit suicide to attack America and Americans were not cowards, in Maher’s mind meaning afraid of death.
Snap. Oh how our national outrage hit the fan! Maher was out on his can within hours. His show was funny, thought provoking and cutting edge. But our nation at the time was sorely wounded and humiliated and was not about to let some so-called comic slander America or our President’s use of wordery like referring to terrorists as cowards. The good news is Bill Maher returned in full form where he belongs … on cable TV, where he can say whatever the ef he wants. And I believe he never apologized for trying to correct the adjective used by President Bush when describing suicidal terrorists. Did anyone ever get the point that Maher was not taking up for the terrorists or praising them or calling them brave? No, no one ever considered his thought on the subject of word use and meaning. The network suits and political pressure cut off his head, so to speak.
I know what you were probably thinking when you participated in that gruesome photo stunt. Surely you and your photographer saw the cover of Der Spiegel shortly after Trump took over as president? The image on the German political magazine was of an animated Trump holding the bloody head cut off the Statue of Liberty. It was a political statement, perhaps not satirical but a realistic European view of the new U.S. President, their concerns that his leadership may threaten democracy in America and abroad. Very little uproar came from that image, one that surely went viral.
You were thinking along those lines, right? Maybe trying to say something about Trump has gone so far in his agenda that he’s setting himself up for assassination, or that a lot of people worldwide would like to see him dead? So you used the image of a beheading because that’s what the terrorists have been doing for years now, uploading each one online? That our free speech rights and guaranteed freedoms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are being jeopardized by the Trump agenda? Am I getting anything close to the intent of your editorial photo, not unlike an editorial cartoon?
Well, most people took one look at your picture holding a fake bloody Trump head and immediately freaked out. It was too real, especially in these dangerous times. It’s a real possibility that many people the world over have envisioned: Trump’s assassination, his death perhaps in the hope and manner of the Middle East terrorists. Americans can take a good joke, bawdy, brazen, truthful, politically honest and culturally insightful. Perhaps your political imagery should have included a short comment so everyone would have understood your point in such a photo. Instead, you just shocked the hell ought of everyone, well mostly Americans.
There is a price to pay for free speech, isn’t there? Everyone isn’t going to like everything you say and do. But you still have the right to make a political statement, violently bloody or not, just like Der Spiegel does every week over there in Germany, several knocking Trumpian philosophy. For now, take a break from the comedy circuit. Lay low, just for a little while, like many of your fellow comedians of the past. [Oh, I forgot all about Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem all off key and crudely at a televised major league baseball game.] When it comes to entertainers, the American public is fickle and in time always forgiving (if not forgetting).