The Past. It's Always the Past.

"The past," Faulkner famously said, is never dead.  It's not even past."

So when this blawg returned two days ago from what certainly seemed the dead, it was a Faulknerian return hearkening to and including (resurrecting, if you will - and I will even if you won't) it's own past as well as . . . . Feh, you get the point.

But it wasn't just here, not just me.  For my blawg's resurrection reminded Greenfield of what this blawgging world used to be.  It was fun and lively and, frankly (I really do believe this) important.  We wrote because we had things to say, things to get off our collective and individual chests.  We challenged, squabbled, supported, disagreed.  And it was worth it.  Day after day.

And posting, and then Greenfield, made me remember, made me feel the loss.  And so, maybe I'm back.  Just maybe.

As it happens (and that was all kind of a digression, so really you could have skipped over it), in my more-or-less retirement out here in Phoenix where the sun don't seem ever to stop shining, I'm in a couple of book groups.  This month, the discussion for one of them will be about David Enrich's new book: Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.  

Enrich details how folks with a lot of money (and some without a whole lot who are often bankrolled by folks who do), want to and try with some success to undermine the First Amendment's protections of free inquiry and reporting.

Look, the basic idea, as the folks at One First Street in DC (that's the Supreme  Court) have made clear over the decades, the First Amendment protects even falsehoods about public figures as long as they're not reported with actual malice.  And actual malice doesn't mean that the speakers/writers doesn't like the person about whom the falsehood is offered but, rather, that they either knew it wasn't so and said it anyway or were recklessly indifferent to the question, that they didn't exercise even minimal care to try and get it right.

That's the standard SCOTUS adopted some 61 years ago in New York Times v. Sullivan.  And despite some grumbling by Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch who think it should be jettisoned, it remains the standard for libel.  

Though he does, like so many, get the claim Holmes asserted wrong,* Enrich generally gets stuff right.  And his book serves as a powerful reminder of just why Sullivan is so damn important, why, therefore, so many folks on the right and on the left would like to junk it, and how essential it is that we the people fight back.

Anyway, as I was reading the book, I realized that I'm almost certainly (and here we go again, because the past is never dead) the only person in the book group who's ever been sued for libel.  Rakofsky v. the Internet (or, as it's technically named, Rakofsky v. the Washington Post, et al. I, of course, am one of the 73 in that "et al" or as we sometimes referred to ourselves collectively, "The Rakofsky 74."

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* Enrich claims the rule Holmes set forth is that "you can't say fire in a crowded theater."  Tim Walz, among countless others, repeated that rule in his VP debate with J.D.  What Holmes actually said in Schenck v. United States was far more nuanced (and is still not the law today - if it ever was):  “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic” “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic”