The Muzzle Awards

The Phoenix's third annual dishonor roll

by Dan Kennedy

The cilling effects of political correctness and post-Columbine jitters are at the root of this year's Muzzle Awards.

From Western Massachusetts, where a student production of West Side Story was canceled lest delicate ethnic sensibilities be offended, to Boston, where Judge Allan van Gestel banned the news media from reporting the contents of a gay sex tape, officials put feel-good intentions ahead of First Amendment rights.

From Maine, where Governor Angus King signed a law requiring that teachers be fingerprinted, to Rhode Island, where a 12-year-old was suspended for belonging to the laughably named "Scottish Mafia," repression was government's first response to fears about school violence. As Benjamin Franklin memorably observed, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

This year's round-up -- presented, as always, just before the Fourth of July, when we celebrate the freedoms that haven't been taken away from us yet -- was compiled by keeping a close eye on free-expression issues as they developed throughout the year. Several "winners" were based on stories reported by the Phoenix. Others were chosen by scanning newspaper and wire-service databases. The criteria: the person or persons being singled out

must have committed their misdeeds in New England, and said misdeeds must have taken place -- or come to fruition -- since July 4 of last year.

Hearing no objection from Judge van Gestel, let's roll the tape.

AMHERST REGIONAL HIGH SCHOOL
Just say no to West Side Story

The most shameless violation of free speech (not to mention artistic license) to hit New England during the past year broke out last November. Camille Sola, a 17-year-old student at Amherst Regional High School who is partly of Puerto Rican descent, presented officials with a petition signed by more than 150 students to protest a planned production of West Side Story. Sola claimed the Leonard Bernstein classic was replete with negative ethnic stereotypes. Science teacher Nick Shaw, whose wife is Puerto Rican and who supported the protest, was quoted as saying, "The portrayal of Puerto Rican men is frankly vile."

Just about everyone agreed that liberal Amherst, a "nuclear free" town where the flag of the United Nations flies over the common, had gone too far. The protest drew snickers from network television and media from coast to coast -- and overseas, too, as even the London Guardian weighed in. Critics charged that political correctness had run amok. People for the American Way spoke out against the urge to censor. Locally, more than 100 people rallied for free speech. The anti-West Side Story protest was so universally lampooned and derided that it's easy to lose sight of the overriding point:

The censors won.

Director of secondary curriculum Wendy Kohler, who had supervised the spring musicals for more than a decade, decided, in the end, to cave in to the protesters and cancel West Side Story. "We didn't make the right decision," she told the Boston Globe. "But it was the only one we could make."

Assessing blame in this instance is not easy. Sola and Shaw certainly can't be faulted for their sincerely held beliefs, nor should they be excoriated for exercising their own free-speech rights by speaking out. Kohler concluded, rightly, that it was unfair to her aspiring actors and musicians to put them through a political meat grinder. Principal Scott Goldman and superintendent Gus Sayer were both quoted as saying all the right things -- namely, that it would be wrong to cancel West Side Story, and that it presented an ideal opportunity to discuss the negative stereotypes contained therein.

Collectively, though, all of these people ended up doing precisely the wrong thing. Ultimately, the blame must rest with school officials. If Goldman, Sayer, and school-committee members had issued a strong, unambivalent statement in favor of free speech, Kohler might well have decided to stick to her convictions. School officials had an opportunity to teach their students that free speech is something worth fighting for.

Instead, these educators took the expedient way out.

GOVERNOR ANGUS KING
School reform, Maine-style: book 'em

Thanks to a law enacted in May, anyone who wishes to teach or otherwise work in the public schools of Maine must do the same thing required of someone suspected of robbery, rape, or murder: submit a complete set of fingerprints to law-enforcement authorities.

Deciding to give a coveted Muzzle to Governor Angus King was not easy. After all, there were many players involved in moving the fingerprint law from ridiculous proposal to repressive reality. A dishonorable mention goes to the state teachers' unions, whose only objection was that teachers might be forced to foot the $49 bill. Another goes to the Portland Press Herald, whose aggressive editorial support gave legislators the cover they needed.

King, though, truly distinguished himself, not just by signing the bill into law, but by vetoing an earlier version of the bill on the grounds that it wasn't sweeping enough, as it would have applied only to new employees.

If it's any comfort, Maine teachers should not feel that they've been singled out. According to the Associated Press, the vast majority of states require fingerprints, a background check, or both. The only states that do not require either are Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, and West Virginia. (Shhh -- don't give any ideas to Massachusetts governor Paul Cellucci, a two-time Muzzle Award winner who was shut out this year.)

Fingerprinting laws are motivated by a serious concern: the safety of children. The recent arrest of Christopher Reardon, the youth worker from Middleton, Massachusetts, who has been implicated in numerous instances of child molestation, is a reminder of how vulnerable kids can be. Yet a background check would not have resulted in screening out Reardon, since he had no prior record. And fingerprinting him would have accomplished precisely nothing.

Earlier this year, Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), explained the dangers of the new Maine law in an interview with the Portland Phoenix. "Fingerprints were taken originally for persons accused of crimes," he said. "Now they are coming into wide use, and everybody is being treated like a criminal. School teachers are being treated like criminal suspects."

Now King proposes to extend the fingerprinting law to include day-care workers as well. "Basically, what he's promising is to have a fingerprint check of anybody who deals with children," Bernard Huebner, a teacher in the Skowhegan area, told the Phoenix. "This is insane. This is so destructive of so many fragile qualities of society."

GUY DIBIASO
Beware of the plaid mafiosi

The horrific shootings at Columbine High School in April 1999 understandably inspired strong reactions from school officials nationwide. Some of those reactions, aimed at educating and counseling troubled students, were helpful and worthwhile. Others, which punished students for the clothes they wore or the kids they hung out with, certainly did more harm than good. And some were just plain stupid.

Without question, the actions of Guy DiBiaso, superintendent of the Bristol-Warren Regional School District, in Rhode Island, were just plain stupid. In May 1999, a 12-year-old sixth-grader at Warren's Kickemuit Middle School was suspended for 10 days for his supposed membership in a group known as the Scottish Mafia. The group's name was an apparent takeoff on Columbine's Trenchcoat Mafia, with which killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had a passing acquaintance.

The Scottish Mafia had reportedly caused some trouble and made some threats. Eight students were suspended, although about half were eventually found blameless. In the case of the 12-year-old, whose name had turned up on a list of alleged members, there was absolutely no evidence that the student had participated in any illegal activity. Nor had he ever been suspended before. Yet DiBiaso, rather than overruling his jumpy underlings at the Kickemuit School, extended the boy's suspension through the end of the year and said he would consider permanent expulsion.

In the end, sanity prevailed. Last September, the ACLU -- which had intervened -- announced that the school system had agreed not to expel the student, and to expunge its earlier actions from his records.

In December, following a trip by Hillary Rodham Clinton to Rhode Island's Cumberland High School in which she shamelessly attempted to whip up hysteria about school violence, the Providence Phoenix published a lengthy piece showing that, nationally, the problem has actually been declining in recent years. Rhode Island ACLU director Steve Brown referred to the Kickemuit incident as emblematic of the sort of "needless overreaction" that greeted the Columbine shootings. School officials, though, remain unrepentant. "I'll err on the side of caution every day of the week," Paul Canario, the school's acting principal at the time, told the Phoenix. And in an interview with the Providence Journal, DiBiaso said, "We're charged with providing a safe place for students."

DiBiaso and Canario might consider what sort of safe environment they provided to one 12-year-old whose only offense was having his name included on a list.

JUDGE ALLAN VAN GESTEL
Prior restraint rears its ugly head

On the cosmic scale of journalistic importance, broadcasting a surreptitiously made tape of kids' having their questions about gay sexuality answered hardly ranks with publishing the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the secret history of US involvement in the Vietnam War. But thanks to Suffolk Superior Court judge Allan van Gestel, the two cases share something in common: the patently unconstitutional assertion that the government may prohibit the media from reporting information it already has. It's called prior restraint, and for those who thought it was long dead, van Gestel's actions were a chilling reminder that First Amendment rights must be fought for over and over again.

The case was set in motion on March 25, at a seminar at Tufts University organized by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) titled "What They Didn't Tell You About Queer Sex and Sexuality in Health Class." The 14-to-21-year-old participants were given assurances of strict confidentiality. What they didn't know was that Scott Whiteman, of the right-wing Parents' Rights Coalition of Massachusetts, was in the room, secretly taping the proceedings.

After the contents of the tape made their way onto the talk-radio station WTKK (96.9 FM) and the Web site of the hatemongering Massachusetts News, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) took the Parents' Rights Coalition to court, hoping to prevent wider distribution. GLAD also named as defendants "Does 1-1000," in an attempt to place the same restrictions on anyone else, known or unknown, who might have a copy.

On May 17, Judge van Gestel went along with GLAD to an extent that can only be described as startling. First, he restrained Whiteman and the coalition's president, Brian Camenker, "from any action of any kind that would disclose the contents of the workshop." Next, he broadened his order to include "defendants' officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys." Finally, he threw in "any and all persons who presently possess a copy of the tape and attempt to disclose or use such tape in any forum." In other words, the first time WTKK talk-show host Jeanine Graf broadcast the tape, she was guilty only of sensationalism and of pandering to her homophobic listeners. After van Gestel's order, she would be guilty of breaking the law.

The free-speech implications of van Gestel's order were immediately seized upon by the Parents' Rights Coalition's lawyer, Chester Darling, who has a distinguished record of defending the free-speech rights of unpopular groups. (Though Darling is best known for representing a South Boston veterans' organization that sought to ban gay and lesbian marchers from its St. Patrick's Day parade, he also threatened to sue the city of Lawrence in 1998 if it refused to grant a permit for that city's first gay-pride march.) Most notably, Darling invoked the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the government could not prevent the New York Times from publishing purloined documents. That case, Darling wrote, "spoke clearly against prior restraint of speech, even when the written speech was a confidential document illegally stolen from the Department of Defense." The Fox News Network also filed a brief protesting van Gestel's "unconstitutional prior restraint," arguing, "Simply put, this court has restrained Fox News and all media from reporting on or discussing aspects of a significant news story."

The arguments had an effect. On May 25, van Gestel issued a new injunction, this one applying only to Whiteman, Camenker, their organization, "and any persons in active concert or participation therewith." Van Gestel added: "Nothing in this preliminary injunction shall be deemed to apply in any way to the print or electronic news media."

To be sure, van Gestel was not the only participant who showed poor judgment. First there was the Parents' Rights Coalition, for grotesquely violating the confidentiality that had been promised to the kids who attended the workshop. There were WTKK hosts Graf and Jay Severin, who attacked the workshop educators as, essentially, advocates of perversion. And there was state education commissioner David Driscoll, who responded to the controversy by firing one staffer who'd been involved in the workshop, forcing another to resign, and eliminating a consultant. Granted, even a GLSEN spokesman said he was "surprised and troubled" by some of the frank talk that took place at the workshop, which included such topics as oral sex and fisting. But a partial transcript also shows that the facilitators were attempting to respond honestly to the kids' legitimate questions.

Only van Gestel, though, subverted anyone's constitutional rights. Fortunately the harm he caused was undone, at least in part. But what on earth was he thinking?

WEYMOUTH POLICE
Keeping the streets Mumia-free

Protester Nick Giannone and two high-school students learned an important lesson last September. If you put up handmade posters to advertise an upcoming yard sale, the local police will leave you alone. But if you put up handmade posters letting the public know about an upcoming rally for convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, you'll get arrested and charged with violating the state's anti-tagging law.

As reported by the Boston Phoenix, the three were arrested for posting fliers urging a walkout at Weymouth High School on behalf of Abu-Jamal, who has become a cause célèbre in radical-left and anti-death-penalty circles. Despite overwhelming evidence that the outspoken and articulate Abu-Jamal is guilty as charged in the 1982 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, serious questions remain as to whether he received a fair trial.

The case against Abu-Jamal may remain in doubt, but the case against the Giannone Three is pretty clear-cut. If the First Amendment stands for anything, it must stand for the right of citizens to get their message out to the public. Posting information about an upcoming political rally is about as basic to constitutional rights as you can get -- the equivalent of climbing on a soapbox in a public park and declaiming on the issues of the day. The actions of the Weymouth Police sent a chilling message that, for those who lack access to a printing press or a TV or radio station, free-speech rights can be mighty limited indeed.

Giannone -- who had previously had some minor scrapes with the law -- works with Refuse and Resist, a pro-Mumia group based in New York. Speaking of his arrest for "tagging," he told the Phoenix, "I think it has to do with the message more than anything, the message that youth in this town support a new trial for someone framed for killing a police officer." Added his lawyer, Damon Borrelli: "The issues that Mr. Giannone is raising are obviously issues of freedom of speech."

According to the Quincy Patriot Ledger, Giannone's co-defendants, who were minors at the time of their arrests, received probation. But Giannone chose to serve a short jail sentence for violating a probation he was already serving rather than be sentenced to additional probation.

Thus, for Giannone, the price of free speech was 10 days in the can.

MARIA GARCIA-AARONSON
Horror story elicits horrifying response

One day in early April, Shital Shah, an English teacher at Boston Latin Academy, gave her students an assignment: write a horror story. Charles Carithers, a junior, went about his task with imagination and enthusiasm, telling the tale of a 17-year-old athlete who cuts off his teacher's hand with a chain saw, picks it up, and slaps her with it. It was a horror story Shah had asked for, and it was a horror story Shah got. She might have awarded Carithers an A. Instead, she went to the headmaster, Maria Garcia-Aaronson, and told her she was terrified to the point that she could no longer abide having Carithers in her classroom.

Garcia-Aaronson, needless to say, should have pointed out to Shah the absurdity of punishing a student for carrying out his assignment too skillfully. She should have ordered her to go back to work. But no. Instead, Garcia-Aaronson pandered to her skittish employee and suspended Carithers for three days. "She [Shah] wanted us to write a vivid horror story. I assumed she wanted something real scary," Carithers told the Boston Globe. "I expected her to think it was sick but not to take it as a personal threat." Responded school-system spokeswoman Tracey Lynch: "The school believed the essay was a threat for a couple of reasons, including that the characteristics of the characters in the story resembled both the teacher and the student, that it was somewhat more personal. Also, the images in the story were extremely violent and extremely specific."

Post-Columbine, Carithers's suspension was hardly the only overreaction to perceived threats of student violence. There was the matter of the previously discussed Scottish Mafia, in Rhode Island. There was a special-needs student in Leominster who was expelled for drawing a picture in which his school was surrounded by bombs. There were three eighth-graders in Scituate who were suspended for posting a threatening Web page about one of their classmates. There were four eighth-grade boys in Quincy who were suspended for writing a sexually explicit takeoff of the Constitution that included the initials of three female classmates, a case written about by the Boston Phoenix. Carithers, though, may be unique in being suspended for carrying out an assignment too well.

As is usually the case in such situations, school officials backed down. In a written statement, Massachusetts ACLU executive director John Roberts charged that Carithers's suspension "violated the principles of free expression which the school should be jealously guarding." Carithers's mother appealed her son's suspension, and a hearing officer ruled in the student's favor.

Still, the unspoken message was clear. If a student says or writes something that is perceived as dangerous, he may end up fighting for his academic life. But if a teacher or administrator punishes a student for exercising his right of free expression, then she risks nothing worse than the slight embarrassment of having that punishment overturned.

JUDGE EDWARD HARRINGTON
Censoring anti-censorship activists

Cyber Patrol, the most popular of the so-called Internet filtering programs, is not without its legitimate uses. Designed to prevent Web surfers from accessing sites that contain pornography, violent images, hate speech, and other offensive material, it can be a sensible way to protect young children who go online. For the past several years, it has been installed on computers in the children's room of the Boston Public Library.

But as critics have always been quick to note, Cyber Patrol's filtering guidelines are so broad that they block legitimate sites too, such as those aimed at providing teenagers with information about pregnancy and sexuality. Across the country, library and school officials, afraid of tangling with religious-right activists, have installed Cyber Patrol or similar software on computers used by older students and even adults. Needless to say, such censorship is a serious abridgment of First Amendment rights, and, in the case of public libraries, a violation of open-access guidelines drafted by the American Library Association.

Thus, the programming feat of Canadian Matthew Skala and Swede Eddy L.O. Jansson could be described as a righteous hack. The two, who call themselves anti-censorship activists, wrote a program that reverse-engineered Cyber Patrol. They then posted it for free on the Web, allowing anyone who downloaded it to see how Cyber Patrol works, examine its list of 100,000 banned sites, and bypass its filtering mechanism.

That's not how US District Court judge Edward Harrington described it. Acting on a complaint brought by Cyber Patrol's corporate parent, Mattel, alleging that its copyright had been violated, Harrington issued an injunction that essentially outlawed Skala and Jansson's program, a ruling that led the two to settle with Mattel on onerous terms. Harrington also said he would go after "mirror sites" -- Web sites around the world that had posted Skala and Jansson's code.

According to the Boston Herald, Harrington's ruling stated in part: "It raises a most profound societal issue. Namely, who is to control the educational and intellectual nourishment of young children -- the parents or the purveyors of pornography and the merchants of death and violence."

Strong language indeed -- but entirely at odds with the free-speech concerns raised by his actions. Even the cautious editorial page of the Boston Globe criticized Harrington's urge to censor, noting, "The judge needs to decide whether criticism protected by the First Amendment includes the code or whether its publication is barred by copyright law. . . . The judge should let people publish what they want until he holds a trial on the copyright question. Injunctions should not be used to stifle speech unless absolutely necessary."

Actually, speech shouldn't be stifled at all unless it violates Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s "clear and present danger" test, which he defined as the equivalent of shouting a false warning of fire in a crowded theater. Skala and Jansson's programming feat presented a clear and present danger to nothing other than Mattel's bottom line.

PETER LEVINE
Crushing dissent -- and academic freedom

At a fundraising strategy session last November, William Meyers, a respected liver surgeon who headed the surgery department at UMass Memorial Health Care in Worcester, engaged in a frank discussion with two financial donors. As reported by the Worcester Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix, Meyers talked about the tension that existed between hospital administrators and doctors, and the role of managed care in aggravating those tensions.

As it turned out, Meyers's candor would cost him his job.

Days later, he was summoned by Peter Levine, a fellow physician who is the CEO of UMass Memorial. Levine told Meyers he was firing him for making a "discrediting remark." Meyers responded that he would fight. That, in turn, led to a settlement several weeks later in which Meyers agreed to resign for what was presumably a hefty severance package.

Ordinarily, a person does not have the right to criticize his employer and remain employed. Meyers, however, occupied an unusual position at the crossroads of free speech and private employment. Like all clinical-department chairs at UMass Memorial, Meyers was also a member of the faculty at UMass Medical School. As part of the academic community, Meyers had, or should have had, the academic freedom to speak openly without fear of reprisal. Yet, because of the 1998 merger of the public UMass Medical Center, a teaching hospital, with the private Memorial Hospital, Meyers was also the employee of a semi-private institution, one that critics say has become increasingly corporate in its struggle to navigate the perilous financial waters of modern health care.

By some accounts, Meyers was a rigid, unyielding man who, in being dismissed, finally got a taste of the pain he himself had dispensed to underlings. Nevertheless, his expertise was never questioned, and his departure left a clear message to other staff members. "People are afraid," one surgeon told the Phoenix. "They worry, if someone like Meyers can be forced out, who will be next?"

Like many free-speech dilemmas, this one bears the co-signature of a powerful person who should have stood on principle and instead ended up going along to get along. In this case, the statement announcing Meyers's resignation was signed not just by Peter Levine but also by Aaron Lazare, chancellor of the UMass Medical School. As a university official, Lazare should have challenged Levine and fought for Meyers's academic freedom. Instead, he took the easy way out, locking arms with Levine "to secure our missions . . . and to initiate healing from harm."

The ugly truth is that the harm comes not from Meyers's outspoken ways, but from the administration's willingness to abandon the traditional academic commitment to free expression.

JUDGE PATRICIA ZIMMERMAN
Way too much order in this court

No one denies that Scott Huminski is litigious, difficult, and a bit of an eccentric. A resident of Bennington, Vermont, he considers himself a "citizen reporter," publishing his work on large signs that adorn his house and his van.

On May 24, Huminski pulled into a parking space at the Rutland District Courthouse, his vehicle emblazoned with this message: JUDGE CORSONES: BUTCHER OF THE CONSTITUTION. The sign listed five cases in which he believed Nancy Corsones had acted in an unconstitutional manner.

If Huminski's sign had been an editorial in the Rutland Herald, it's not likely that court authorities would have even taken official notice of it. But because its author was powerless and acting alone, the judicial book was thrown at him. First, Corsones had him removed from court property. Then, Judge Patricia Zimmerman issued an order barring Huminski from "all lands and property under the control of the Supreme Court and the Commissioner of Buildings and General Services, including the Rutland District Court, parking areas and lands."

For life.

As Associated Press writer David Gram observed: "With that order still in place, it's unclear how Huminski would be brought to court to face charges if he violated it."

The case has attracted the attention of free-speech organizations such as the Freedom Forum and the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. "It is hard to say exactly what provoked this extreme action by the Rutland judges," wrote Paul McMasters, the Freedom Forum's First Amendment ombudsman, in an essay on the case. "Huminski had not engaged in any disruptive behavior. He had not threatened anyone. He had not engaged in picketing. He had not uttered any obscene or vulgar language or `fighting words.' He had not interfered in any way with the administration of justice. All he had done was criticize public officials, a revered tradition in our democracy and fully protected by the First Amendment."

It would appear that Huminski will win, and win easily. Robert Corn-Revere, a prominent First Amendment lawyer who has taken on Huminski's case, told McMasters, "I find the government's actions simply astonishing. I can think of no judicial authority to support it."

But even when such ludicrous orders are overturned, the winner's victory remains incomplete. If and when Huminski finally returns to the courtroom, he will do so after having been harassed and intimidated for doing nothing other than exercising his First Amendment rights. Next time, he'll think twice. Thus will Zimmerman's abusive order continue to have its effect.

TIM COONEY
Golf, profanity, rock and roll

You can't say shit in Worcester -- at least not when Tim Cooney is lining up a putt. In September 1998, then-city councilor Cooney was playing golf. Nearby, at Green Hill Park, more than 10,000 rock
fans were enjoying the annual Locobazooka Festival. Suddenly, Cooney heard a musician let out with an
uproarious, amplified "Shit!"

As reported in a Worcester Phoenix news story and a Boston Phoenix editorial, Cooney decided he wasn't going to put up with any, uh, shit. Last August, the newly formed Musicians and Friends International Organization (MAFIO) organized a 22-band festival to be held at Worcester's Cristoforo Columbo Park. As a result of Cooney's prodding, the city parks commission handed down an edict that if any band members used "profanity," the plug would be pulled -- and the following month's Locobazooka would be threatened as well. "You can still have your entertainment, but not at other people's expense," Cooney told the Phoenix. "I'm not against people enjoying themselves, but the offendee" -- that's Cooneyese for himself and his supporters -- "has certain rights too. They [the musicians] are on taxpayers' property." Cooney, who retired from the city council last November, is now running for state representative. Freedom-of-expression fans, take note.

The fact that the musicians were on public property was precisely the reason that city officials had no business telling the musicians what they could say. "Parks are traditionally places where one can exercise rights of free speech," Massachusetts ACLU legal director John Reinstein said. "In my view, it [the no-profanity edict] is a condition that's simply unconstitutional on its face." One of the bands scheduled to play the MAFIO festival, the pop/punk trio Critical Condition, was about to put out a CD called, appropriately enough, Censorship Sucks. Indeed it does. Just don't say it out loud.

Thanks to the intervention of the local ACLU, the parks commission amended its edict, stating it was "voluntary." The MAFIO festival went off without a hitch. A month later, Locobazooka drew a record 13,000 fans. It shouldn't be forgotten, though, that the music was nearly silenced by an unconstitutional order.

Following last year's tragic warehouse fire, Worcester's music community -- led by, among others, Locobazooka honcho Dan Hartwell and businessman John Carnegie -- organized a number of benefit concerts. Some of the money raised went to the families of the six firefighters who were killed. Some went to buy equipment such as thermal imaging devices, to enable firefighters to see through heavy smoke.

It was a transcendent coming-together that made Tim Cooney's obsession with four-letter words look like the juvenile sideshow that it was. And that's no shit.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.