FATHER BRUCE
by Andrew Williams

They helped kill Lenny Bruce. Now, after almost four decades of dirty
water under a leaky, rotting bridge, the State of New York has finally had
the chutzpah to pardon one of the 20th century's greatest social observers
and critics when they shouldn't have laid so much as a finger on him in
the first damn place. And just in time for Christmas and Chanukah, yet.

It is debatable which is the greater act of chutzpah: pardoning Lenny or
doing so under the so-called aegis of protecting the First Amendment right
to freedom of speech. It is particularly curious for Governor Pataki to be
championing free speech, since he and his minions have been doing their
level best since September 11th, 2001 to help John Ashcroft and his shills
to suppress speech. I don't have to be a psychic to imagine Lenny's
response.

To understand what Lenny did for us--as a nation-state, as a culture, as a
species--I need to quote the words of another great mind. "The comedian,"
Henry Miller wrote, "slays the censor within us." Which makes him Public
Enemy #1 only to those who have a vested interest in keeping that censor,
that infernal, internal pig, alive and well-fed. A self-censoring people
can be easily controlled. As former Village Voice reporter Sally Kempton
once observed, "It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."

That was the 'threat' Lenny presented: he was a can opener you could use
to open up your own head to assess its contents, examine them rigorously
and dispassionately, then decide to keep the essential and discard the
trash. You are all free, he was saying. All you have to do is want your
freedom.

About the same time Lenny was causing chaos and raising Hell with the
governing powers-that-wannabe, a young man was born in the South who would
also come forward to challenge American society and government by pushing
the same buttons Lenny did. His name was Bill Hicks. Like Lenny, he died
young--officially from pancreatic cancer--unlike Lenny, whose unofficial
cause of death was a broken heart, brought on by a breach of promise.

The movement to pardon Lenny has been building to its head practically
since his death in 1966. And as documented in Paul Krassner's brilliant
autobiography, CONFESSIONS OF A RAVING, UNCONFINED NUT, even the lawyers
who worked for then-Assistant State's District Attorney Richard Kuh have
acknowledged that they helped Kuh harass and chivvy Lenny to his
death--that there was no need or cause to hound him as they did with
arrest, trial and other invasions of his private life.

But as Lenny died, Bill Hicks was growing up young and strong to one day
be heralded by John Magnuson, Lenny's best friend, as Lenny's successor.
Like Lenny, Bill saw his job as being that of the censor's slayer: not
like some vainglorious St. George, but a toiler in the fields of the Lord,
a soldier fighting the good fight against physical, mental and spiritual
oppression.

I never saw Lenny Bruce in person. And, sadly, I never got to meet Bill
Hicks. Ever since I first saw him on HBO in 1991, I vowed that, if he ever
came to DC, I would go with a bunch of friends and present him with a
NORML T-shirt for his outspoken stances against the Wars on Drugs, Iraq
and other aspects of personal freedom. That I didn't get to do that will
always be one of my greatest regrets.

There is solace, however, in the hundreds of hours of audio and videotape
that exist of Bruce and Hicks. And there is further solace and strength in
the knowledge that, as I am writing this, another febrile, passionate
young mind is assuming the mantle that Lenny and Bill wore. With our
country turning almost Stepford-like to first a police state and now a
quasi-military state, it is inevitable that such an opponent--the loyal
opposition--will arise. "The comedian," Bill Hicks said to John Lahr in an
interview for a piece in The New Yorker magazine, "is the one who says
'Wait a minute' as the consensus forms." If we are serious about this
multi-partite holiday--if we are serious about peace, love and
understanding--then perhaps we could take a minute to reflect, to think,
to remember brave souls who dared us to think and dream.