Iqra’i

As a member of an organization that dutifully defends the dignity of its high-profile guest speakers, I find Matt Yglesias’ anti-pie commenters to be woefully off the mark. It’s just a pie. It did no lasting damage to Mr. Friedman (sadly, The Mustache remained completely untouched). To call it “thuggery” or certainly “fascist” isn’t just escalatory, it’s just plain wrong.

As someone whose two main fields of study are performance and civil society, I find the consensus in this country that the only acceptable public action is speech to be incredibly disturbing. Pieing someone in the face doesn’t meaningfully “prevent” him from speaking, and registers your disapproval (and more specifically, in this case, eagerness to show up a self-styled Man of the World for the buffoon he is) much more effectively than an op-ed in your student paper can. The public sphere is inhabited by public bodies, and the way they behave influences the thoughts we feel able to express, let alone comfortable expressing; to exclude bodily action from acceptable public expression is to resort to a dualism that I hope we’ve moved past by now. Mind and body are products of each other; just because we call them “talking heads” on television doesn’t mean you can only be a public figure from the neck up.

I’ve made this point before (including, ironically, in an op-ed in my student paper), but never for something so obviously harmless and effective as a pie to the face. Action — and especially performance — is a legitimate contribution to public discourse. Get over it.