April 4, 1974, 'Why Should Jurors Sit as Art Critics?'

This was my introduction to the great American art of writing letters to the editor. Before this, I only wrote infrequent letters to friends and family and did so  most casual manner.    I really didn’t think I had much to say and began most of  my letters saying just that. "Hi, not much news…" and finished with "well I got to go now."

But back home and out of the Army and after a year spent as a writer in Vietnam I had grown pretty comfortable seeing my words in print and more importantly, I felt I had something to say. So in the tradition of Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine, on April 4, 1974 I jotted down and sent off my first, “Dear Editor” letter. 

I was living back in Rochester in the spring of 1974.  A movie was showing in town entitled, The Devil in Miss Jones, and there was a lot of controversy about whether the movie was art, pornography or just bad.

In the 50’s and 60’s there were many monumental court cases that dealt with serious issues and resulting in groundbreaking policy changes.  In the early 70’s we were entering a different era—one of frivolous trials where someone uses the courts to deal with very trivial issues resulting in no changes whatsoever.

In 1974, the nation was just a few months away from the presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter who would run on a heavily moral evangelical-based campaign to combat the evil doings of the recently passed Watergate scandal.

For whatever reasons, The Devil in Miss Jones found itself in court where 12 jurors had to decide if it was art or porn.  What I found most interesting was that these 12 people could not decide.  What I found ludicrous was that the prosecutor was going to have a second trial.

The prosecutor could have concluded that the film must be art—since art is in the eyes of the beholder and there were numerous interpretations by the jury and could not have been porn—since everyone knows that while you cannot define pornography everyone knows it when they see it. Instead the prosecutor decided to give it one more shot.  This is when I decided to write the paper.

The essence of my letter to the Rochester Times Union was that no one was forced to watch the movie except the jury and now the courts were going to force 12 more people to watch it.  I don’t even know how the second trial turned out but I did learn that people actually do read the letters to the editor.

Just a few days after my letter appeared I received a letter with a lot of propaganda stickers stuck to it.  I remember thinking at the time that it looked like something either a terrorist or religious freak might do.  Of course, today, we know that those two often come in the same package.

Inside were half dozen religious or patriotic pamphlets.  They seemed to imply that because I thought it foolish for the courts to try and make judgments that individuals could and should be rightfully making themselves that I must be unpatriotic, unsaved and in need of urgent spiritual guidance which could only come to me from reading the Bible and listening to Chicago Cubs pitcher Phil Regan.

Maybe they had a point. One of the accompanying letters was speaking out against capital punishment and the other against abortion. I was the only one asking to give pornography a break.

It’s quite possible that the person that sent me the literature was in the grass roots of a movement that today has religious fervor and political activism riding side by side. 

About the only thing that I can conclude looking back at the last thirty years is that religion has gotten worse, government has gotten worse and movies have gotten worse.