The blog is “no politics, none of the time.” Acknowledged. I don’t want to get into anything politically-charged.

This particular More-evolved Thursday entry is a blathering companion piece to The Quantum Deity.

Guns and Ammo magazine just fired one of their columnists over a pro-regulation editorial he wrote. I’m not here to talk Second Amendment today. I’m here to talk about the First Amendment. I’m perfectly fine with a guy talking about either real or imagined nuances of the Second Amendment to gun guys. What pissed me of was…

BLATHER WARNING AHEAD!

People have been scratching their heads for years, asking “Where did this country go wrong?” And I’m not talking just about 2013 America. This question has been bandied about for 60 years, through all kinds of political swings and counterswings.

I know the answer to this question: 1919. Schenk V. United States.This is the case that prompted Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s famous quote, “You can’t falsely shout ‘fire!’ in crowded theater can you?”

This little nugget of concentrated dog shit, says I, is uniquely responsible for nine decades of sociological decline in this country.

1. It was the start of bumper sticker political logic. “If it’s snappy and short and makes you think, it must be true.”

2. It was the first knife into the heart of the First Amendment.

3. It wasn’t the first inroad to Constitutional revisionism (Thanks for that, Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt) but it certainly was a pile-on to progressive dismantling of the country’s core principals. This metaphor gave the Constitution cancer.

4. It triggered a slow death to the concept of personal responsibility.

5. It became a symbolic shorthand for the fallibility of the Constitution as it’s written.

6. It opened the door for a lot of further reinterpretation of the Constitution.

7. It’s a classic Reductio ad absurdum fallacy of logic to the circumstances of the court case being tried.

8. It’s from the same judicial mind that once advocated for eugenics by writing: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

8. IT IS JUST PLAIN BULLSHIT LOGIC.

A caveat: Time and retelling has eroded away the word “falsely” from modern usage. The phrase Justice Holmes used is “You can’t falsely shout ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater.”  Actually, if the theater is on fire, you cannot only shout ‘fire!’ but it’s fucking encouraged.

You can’t falsely shout fire in a crowded theater.

Bull. Shit.

Here’s the scenario: I am an asshole. I run into the Tivoli, make a hard right down the hall of knickknacks, throw open the door to Theater One, and I scream to the packed opening night crowd who came to see read Faire le Bruit d’un Cochon, “FIRE, MUTHERFUCKERS! RUN!”

You are sitting in row six. You don’t see fire. You don’t smell smoke. You don’t feel the heat of seven hells melting the gauges in your hipster ears.

And yet you turn into Curly Joe Howard and stop the old lady in front of you into blue-haired hash as you steamroll toward the exit?

That’s on you, Pedro. Yes, I’m a certified dick, and yes I’m liable for the causality of my dickosity in Civil Court. But you are responsible for what you do and I am responsible for what I do.

Period.

Because you see, Dick Metcalf, if you can falsely shout fire in a crowded theater, then you can also falsely reinterpret the Second Amendment in a crowded gun nut magazine. Do you see how that’s supposed to work now, Copernicus? It’s a bumper sticker. It’s not a Jaws-of-Life to get you through the door of every single argument on Constitutional revisionism.