speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

Notes
Egyptian symbol of life (Ankh), and the pentagram. The stimulus was a
recent tragedy: "a four-year-old boy in a Superman outfit shot his father
dead with a .38 revolver, shouting: 'Dad, I'm Robocop. You are under
arrest.' After the incident, he declared: 'Batman shot Daddy dead.' "
Weekly Mail 5 (September 18-24, 1992).
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Los Angeles Times B6 (March 9, 1991); New York Times A10 (March 13,
1991).
Police attacked rapper Ice-T's "Cop Killer" (discussed below) as a
threat to their safety. That campaign was intensified when rapper Tupac
Amaru Shakur's "2Pacalypse Now" was found in the tape deck of a car
stolen by Ronald Ray Howard, a black 19-year-old Texan charged with
murdering Bill Davidson, a white state trooper who had pulled him over
after a high-speed chase. Howard had two prior convictions for car theft.
Shakur appeared in "Juice" and will appear in John Singleton's "Poetic
Justice." His mother was a member of the Black Panther Party and his
godfather is former Panther leader Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt. Shakur had
recently sued the City of Oakland after two policemen allegedly beat him
while arresting him for jaywalking. Shakur's record had sold 400,000
copies. Half a dozen of its songs described killing police—for instance,
"Soulja's Story":
Cops on my tail, so I bail till I dodge them,
They finally pull me over and I laugh,
Remember Rodney King
And I blast this punk ass
Now I got a murder case . . .
What the fuck would you do?
Drop them or let them drop you?
I choose droppin' the cop!
The president of the Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas
declared: "If it's illegal to produce physical pollution, it ought to be illegal
to produce mental pollution." Davidson's widow Linda has sued Shakur
and Interscope Records (a Time Warner subsidiary), declaring: "There
isn't a doubt in my mind that my husband would be alive if Tupac hadn't
written those violent, anti-police songs and the companies involved
hadn't published and put them out on the street." Her lawyer said "our
goal is to punish Time Warner and wake up the executives who run the
music business." Col. Oliver North promised the help of his Freedom
Alliance: "This case provides us with a painfully vivid example of why
this kind of music is so dangerous." Dan Quayle chimed in with a call to
withdraw the record. Howard's lawyer also plans to use the record in the
penalty phase to argue for life imprisonment instead of death. But the
president of the Recording Industry Association of America warned that
any damage award "would not only restrict free speech in the future, it
would turn the concept of what we consider to be artistic freedom
completely on its head." Los Angeles Times A1 (September 17, 1992),
A12 (September 23, 1992), F1 (October 13, 1992).
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