More importantly, fundamental principles of American democratic theory, of which the First Amendment is an outgrowth, rebel at the notion that an agent of the government -- whether it be the judiciary, the legislature, or an administrative censorship board -- may usurp the individual's right to decide what speech is valuable and what arguments are persuasive.

. . . [B]ecause a censorial approach to the First Amendment rejects the basic notion of individual intellectual integrity, any attempt by a governmental unit to gradate First Amendment protection on the basis of wholly subjective judgments concerning intellectual quality and merit runs directly counter to the essence of the First Amendment.

• Can Redish fairly be characterized (in Alexander Bickel's words) as "a First Amendment voluptuary"?

• Is Redish's viewpoint vulnerable to the criticism that he fixates on the Orwellian fears of governmental tyranny in a way that blinds him to the Huxleyan threats to traditional First Amendment values?

• Recall that Redish is the advocate of the "self-realization" rationale for protection of free expression. Does Redish forthrightly confront the authors' attack that his First Amendment theory does not distinguish self-realization from self-gratification, and disempowers government and society from promoting the former and policing the latter in any meaningful way?

• Would Redish be comfortable with the authors' suggestion that "individual self-realization" may have become "individual self-gratification" in the commercial television culture? Would Redish and other modernists be willing to abase their elevated theory of First Amendment value to correspond with the trivializing realities of commercial television discourse?

Query: Professor Edward Rubin largely accepts the authors' description of television's role in American culture as an unending flow of trivial, mindless entertainment. (See Rubin at Page 49). Yet, Rubin sees no fundamental need for First Amendment jurisprudence to take into account the Huxleyan dilemma of America's entertainment phenomenon.

• In what senses does Rubin share the modernist bent of Martin Redish? Does he not see participation as merely instrumental to achieving the basic normative value of liberty of individual choice?
   

• In what senses does Rubin deviate from Redish's First Amendment perspective? Does he not suggest that the television deserves First Amendment protection in part because it promotes our fundamental concepts of citizenship and participation?
   

• If Rubin claims that the essence of First Amendment political action in the commercial television culture is to elect to watch television together, has Rubin succeeded in revamping the traditional First Amendment to promote individual self-gratification as its highest normative value?
   

• If the modernist First Amendment treats self-gratification and self-amusement as its norm, what other forms of expression that have not traditionally received First Amendment recognition should now do so?

Query: Professor Herbert Schiller, a communications theorist from UC-San Diego, reacted to the "paratroopers' paradox" in the following manner at Pages 62 -- 63:

Who then threatens public expression in America in the 1990s? Is it the individual's weakness and self-indulgence? Or is it an insatiable systemic need to envelop audiences with marketing messages, machined to smooth out all critical thought? If it is the latter, how may the problem be addressed? Must government destroy the First Amendment to prohibit a commercially sponsored tidal flow of triviality? Perhaps the question can be redefined to mandate a review of the role of the corporation in national existence?

Included in such a redefinition would be the reconsideration of several questions. Should huge private aggregations of assets continue to be regarded as persons? Should these persons possess first-amendment rights? Would the revocation of these rights threaten the rights of individual citizens? Is it possible that there is no Orwellian ogre in our future after all, unless we create one?

* * *

Television, as a medium, is not responsible for the enfeeblement of national public discourse. Neither is the weakness of the human species. It is the corporate capture of the total social organism -- its political, economic, and cultural elements (especially the informational component) -- that constitutes the core and urgent contemporary political problem.

• Consider Schiller's characterization of the article's thesis as portraying the public's "insatiable appetite for amusement" to be the central source of the Huxleyan dilemma. Is Schiller's characterization accurate? By refusing to give any serious attention to "the self-indulgent bent of a mass entertainment culture," does Schiller endanger his own perspective and proposals?

• Clearly, Herbert Schiller's regulatory proposals place him in the camp of the reformists. He would define concentrated corporate ownership of the electronic mass media and commercial advertising marketing strategies as the enemies of the traditional First Amendment. He would conform First and Fourteenth Amendment doctrines to deny corporate legal status as "persons" and to empower government to deprive media conglomerates of their First and Fourteenth Amendment speech and property rights. Is Schiller's perspective a feasible one? Is Schiller's proposal a reform of First Amendment doctrine or a political program for the fundamental redesign of American society?

Query: Professor David O'Brien of the Political Science Department at the University of Virginia reacted to the "paratroopers' paradox" in the following manner at Pages 51 -- 52:

The First Amendment's guaranties of free speech . . . effectively relegated all political . . . "truths" to matters of private opinion. The persistent problem for liberalism, as Professor Walter Berns observes [in his book The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy], is simply that:

Liberalism knows nothing about happiness; [hence] there can be no official answer to the most important question: How shall I live? The role of the properly constituted government is therefore confined to guaranteeing the conditions that allow each man to pursue his privately defined happiness. Liberalism preserves the private sphere and fosters the self-defined private life.

What [Ron and David] ultimately invite us to consider is how the crisis of contemporary liberalism is no longer over the age-old concerns of preserving what liberalism cannot itself generate or command from the people. Liberalism must now defend the noble dream of the First Amendment and our capacity for public discourse and self-government against the new threats posed by the emergence of a "commercial and technological culture." Is the business of America really business? Are "We the People" really capable of deliberative choices and self-governance? Is liberal legalism capable of responding and reforming itself? Is there even an audience any longer interested in debates over the crisis of liberalism and public discourse -- is anybody still really reading and thinking? These are some of the larger political questions provoked by the paratroopers' paradox.

• Is O'Brien suggesting that the Huxleyan dilemma is the inevitable result of America's advanced state of capitalism protected politically by its constitutional design?
   

• Do you agree with O'Brien? If so, is there any realistic hope for escaping the paratroopers' paradox within the confines of the traditional First Amendment?