Kurt Anderson has good things to say about the American impulse to suppress unpopular speech or tarnish unpopular speakers--and he says it in a way calculated to touch the nerves of people who might think they agree with him, but who have viscerally wired themselves to think like censors. First we hear about the male genitalia, in a description of a chat I really wish he had been able to have with Sean Penn:

...the opening moment of this scaredy-cat season came during a radio interview I was recording with Sean Penn. While we were discussing Into the Wild, his new movie celebrating balls-out American freedom, I asked about his recent visit to Venezuela. Penn's endorsement of Hugo Chavez's socialism is fine with me, I said, but how did he square his embrace of Chavez with the regime's depredations against liberty in Venezuela? Penn tensed up, but he seemed game to thrash it out, to explain why I was a tool of the Republican Big Lie Machine--until his personal publicist, eavesdropping from the next room, popped in to insist that we stop speaking freely about restrictions on free speech in Venezuela.

I think he's trying to get folks' backs up--or get folks to not get their backs up--about the "exclusive" image of freedom here, which is so masculine in its evocation of manly parts. He returns to the game later in the essay, balancing out the image of the ballsy American who loves freedom against the "pussy" who doesn't. Picking up on a Columbia University hockey recruitment poster that offended many last year--"Don't be a pussy" it commanded prospective Lions--Anderson commands Americans in general to accept the challenge of free speech. "When it comes to free speech, we need to let a hundred flowers bloom. We need to chill. We need to stop being pussies."

I think he's funny, and I think he's right. And I kind of like the way he's challenging a readership he knows isn't all that friendly to language that reasserts Gender Stereotypes to get over it, and enjoy the liberating pleasure of simply being able to use langauge in a zillion creative ways. We can quote Mao and the Columbia hockey team in the same breath, and make them mean the same thing. Or we can at least try--and that's worth more than we might realize.