When we visited London for the first time two years ago, I did not miss Kensington Gardens and the adjacent Hyde Park. I wanted to see Kensington Gardens because James Barrie, author of Peter Pan, had frequented the gardens and ponds in your home, just north of the park. And I wanted to visit the Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park on a Sunday morning.
Throughout Christendom, there is no finer symbol of freedom of expression that the Speakers' Corner. Since the 1870s, the socialists, radical priests, Muslim extremists, and crackpots of all varieties have been coming to this patch of grass for the exercise of their lungs for the benefit of anyone who will listen.
And so, one Sunday morning May found us gawking rudely to half dozen speakers, all standing on their soap boxes telling small groups of Londoners and tourists what was wrong with the world and how to fix it. In our search of local color (or "color" as the British curiously have), we got our money's worth at Speakers' Corner.
A colleague, a tireless talker, stood on a flag of the Socialist Party, looking like a socialist should look, preaching to a dozen listeners that Britain had fallen abjectly far from true socialism. Subsequent investigations identified him as Danny Lambert, a perennial candidate for local public office.
Another man in suit colors seemed to be speaking on behalf of an Islamic group of some kind. Posed that the United States in Iraq only because Americans hate Islam and because the U.S. government is controlled by the Jews (and not "Jews", but "the Jews", if you catch the distinction).
Another speaker was easily identifiable as a professional on the left. It was enthusiastically slandering George W. Bush and the United States, while keeping up the regime of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela bully as a model for the world to follow. We knew his type, experts in the following marching orders and stick to talking points. In the seventies, when we made the time on a campus in upstate New York, the university, its leftist counterparts were giving exactly the same speeches, except that it was Castro instead of Chavez. In the sixties, it was Mao, in the eighties, it was Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas.
But why should I try to describe the Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, when you can not improve on PGDescripción Wodehouse in his story "Comrade Bingo", of Inimitable Jeeves The? The story begins, as Bertie Wooster is said,
in the park - at the end of Marble Arch - where all kinds of rare birds accumulate on Sunday afternoons and standing on soap boxes and make speeches.
At the edge of the mob away from me over a bunch of chappies hat missionary service begins outdoors, close at hand an atheist let her go with a good deal of vim, though not a bit impairment have a roof to his mouth, while in front of me was a small group of serious thinkers with a banner labeled "Heralds of the Red Dawn."
Not much has changed in the Speakers' Corner since Wodehouse published "Comrade Bingo" at The Strand in 1922.
But we still have with us the question of how to deal with highly offensive language. In Canada, as I said bitterly before, the government has installed speech police in a "human rights tribunals" with authority to punish those who offend the sensibilities of religious and ethnic groups.
Wodehouse's approach is better. In the history of Wodehouse, one of the Heralds of the Red Dawn begins to berate Bertie Wooster and his fellow aristocrat, Lord Bittlesham, with hilarious insults. But instead of complaining that there are no laws against such diatribes, Lord Bittlesham simply gives back:
"Come away, Mr. Wooster," he said. "I am the last man to oppose the right of free speech, but I refuse to listen to this vulgar abuse any longer."
Wodehouse was to politics as a eunuch is sex, but its policy on offensive hate groups and authority figures can not be improved. When not ignore (like his character Lord Bittlesham), which mocked them mercilessly. The closest Wodehouse never got to a political issue was the creation of Roderick Spode, an enemy of Bertie Wooster in several stories, most memorably in Wodehouse's masterpiece The Code of Wooster, written during World War II.
In the 1920s, Wodehouse surely ran into people like the Heralds of the Red Dawn "Comrade Bingo," infatuated with Russian socialism. In the 1930s, Wodehouse must have looked with suspicion, as many in England were attracted by Hitler's National Socialism. One person was mistaken as Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, whom Roderick Spode is modeled Wodehouse. Spode is a flamboyant figure with a Hitler mustache who loves to hear his own voice, makes his servile followers wear black pants, and dreams of becoming a dictator.
No amount of laws against fascist ideology could have damaged the cause of fascism more effectively than the kind of mockery and ridicule that Wodehouse Roderick Spode exerted. The thought police should learn a lesson from Wodehouse.
"What curse these social distinctions. Should be abolished. I remember saying that Karl Marx, and thought it might be an idea for a book on it." - PG Wodehouse, in his novel Quick Service
