The culture warriors take their aim

THE FREEING of the West Memphis Three can't be called anything but a massive victory. As Brit Schulte rightfully pointed out in her article, "The West Memphis Three are free at last": "The victory in this case, though many years to late, shows the importance of organizing and grassroots struggle in exposing the hypocrisy of the criminal justice system and saving the wrongfully convicted. Building campaigns to support those who suffer at the hands of a grossly flawed and broken system can win."

Indeed, campaigns like this are no less important today than when the West Memphis Three went behind bars. In some ways, their case was all too familiar for those who have campaigned for the exoneration of Troy Davis, the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, or to lock up Chicago's torturing top-cop Jon Burge. All the elements were there: incompetent police, confessions that were coerced or never happened, the creation of hysteria by a sensationalist media.

It also amounted to an easy victory for the right-wing Christian censorship crowd. Anyone who read Brit's article or has followed the case for the past several years will know that when Jessie Misskelly, Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were convicted of the gruesome 1993 slayings, the evidence was hardly even circumstantial. The cops and prosecution all used the young men's black clothing and taste for heavy metal music to "prove" that they were Satanists--and allege that, therefore, they alone were capable of such brutal murders.

It was the logical extension of the political and cultural atmosphere of the time; the early 1990s recession breathed some extra life into the Parental Music Resource Center and other like-minded, pro-censorship groups eager to shift the blame for all forms of social decay onto popular music. The "Satanic panic" of those years went hand-in-hand with all of this--despite the fact that there has never been a single murder in the United States successfully linked to Satanism.

Much of the scapegoating of music willfully drifted into openly racist waters. This was a time when the "thuggery" of hip-hop was blamed for violence against women by politicians who normally wouldn't give a damn about women's rights. Misguided middle-class parents would point the finger at rappers for epidemic drug use, rather than at the fact that opportunities for young people were quickly becoming non-existent.

The conviction of the West Memphis Three was simply low-hanging fruit in this context and enabled a broader witch-hunt to continue, to push through harsher law-order-type legislation, to give cops even more leeway in mistreating young people with impunity.

NOW WE stand at the near-end of a successful and high-profile defense campaign that included everyone from Natalie Maines to Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp, Margaret Cho, Ozzy Osbourne and even two of the three victims' families. The struggle for complete exoneration is by no means over (what with the weird phenomenon of the "Alford plea"), and there still exist plenty of lynch-mob-esque message boards out there on the troll-fringes of the Web.

But with Baldwin, Misskelly and Echols finally walking free after being unjustly imprisoned for their entire adult lives, it has to be seen as a massive discredit to the whole system--the courts, the cops and those who continue to blame popular culture for any social ill.

That's worth keeping in mind today; as a double-dip recession seems all but inevitable. All sorts of heated ideas, good and bad, are being reflected in our music--from militant solidarity to the worst kinds of nihilistic sexism (paging Odd Future).

There will no doubt be forces out there looking to point the blame at some of these easy targets. For these people, there's no difference between a sexist song and a song that calls out brutality and injustice; in fact, some of these "culture warriors" can trace their lineage back to the very same knuckle-draggers who deemed Elvis and Chuck Berry "jungle music."

Though they haven't crawled all the way out of the woodwork yet, they are most definitely waiting. For the time being, however, we can be confident they are biting their tongues--after all, nobody likes the taste of their own words.
Alexander Billet, Rebel Frequencies, Chicago