Court Opinion

ID: 9726317
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 12:43:50.239172+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:26.004171
License: Public Domain

Bronson, J.,
(dissenting). I am unable to agree with the decision reached by my colleagues. In deciding whether the article in question is “obscene in the constitutional sense”, this Court is obliged to make a judgment independent of the jury’s verdict. Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), 378 US 184 (84 S Ct 1676, 12 L Ed 2d 793); People v. Billingsley (1969), 20 Mich App 10; Bloss v. Dykema (1970), 398 US 278 (90 S Ct 1727, 26 L Ed 2d 230), reversing Grand Rapids City Attorney v. Bloss (1969), 17 Mich App 318.
It is a dangerous precedent for this Court to give its judicial stamp of approval to this prosecution *22and conviction. Doing so, I fear, takes us a dangerous step in the direction of thought control.1 People, college students among them, ought to be protected from the overeager use of prosecutorial machinery such as was here implemented.
Although certain words appearing in the article in question may have been used for their shock value, it is not obscene in the constitutional sense. Redrup v. New York (1967), 386 US 767, 769 (87 S Ct 1414, 18 L Ed 2d 515); Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966), 383 US 413, 418 (86 S Ct 975, 16 L Ed 2d 1); People v. Billingsley, supra. See, generally, Roth v. United States (1957), 354 US 476 (77 S Ct 1304, 1 L Ed 2d 1498).
The article, “A Typical Day in the Life of J. Oswald Jones”, is not without literary merit. Indeed, such was the testimony of English professors who were called upon to testify as expert witnesses for and on behalf of defendant. The article tells a story and tells it graphically.2
The author’s choice of language may not appeal to the prosecutor, the jury, or this appellate tribunal. The objected-to words are, however, in common use. The author is constitutionally at liberty to use the three- and four-letter words which mean buttocks, vulva, coitus, urine, and excrement to tell the story of J. Oswald Jones, a man full of years who fears his life is behind.
“The fact that considerably more profanity is used * * * to convey the same fundamental ideas, thoughts, and images, cannot be the basis of a meaningful, workable, constitutional distinction. The constitutional right to communicate ideas would *23be unduly limited if the State could take upon itself the right to prohibit the use of certain words, however offensive and odious they may be, to communicate those ideas. The State cannot constitutionally differentiate between one [literary work] and another, both communicating the same thoughts and images, according to the delicacy of the words chosen to convey those thoughts and images. The exercise of the constitutional right does not depend on the author’s euphemistic skill.” People v. Billingsley (1969), 20 Mich App 10, 17, 18.
I would reverse the conviction.
APPENDIX
J. Oswald Jones: An Autobiography
By James Wasserman

A Typical Day in the Life of J. Oswald Jones

There was no wind, it was warm, unusually warm for October. A full harvest moon hung like a pregnant basketball against the backboard of a cloudless sky, its orange light grinding sharp shadows into the dead cement of an East Side street.
No — no, that would not do for an opening. There was no moon, it was December, and it was cold. Moving to his window J. Oswald Jones looked down at the Christmas crowd — a tangled mass of humanity moving like wind-blown garbage. Although it was not yet 7:00 Eva was already on her corner, but the sight of Eva did not arouse him anymore. There is something too capitalistic — too mechanical about prostitutes. Eva was a machine. Ladies and gentlemen, put a dime in the slot and watch Eva go! He was a machine too, a tired machine that needed oil. Ladies and gentlemen, put a dime in the slot and get juiced up by Little Eva! Only her juice didn’t turn him on like it used to. The layers of crud were too thick and he knew Eva too well. Perhaps no woman could really juice him up again. At any rate Eva couldn’t, perhaps never really had. Eva was no longer beautiful and he desired only beautiful women. Only they could start the sludge pump in his groin.
Now it was Joannie the social worker. Joannie of the swollen breasts. Joannie of the flaming cunt. Joannie of the silky — no, that was too weak an adjective — Joannie of the meaty thighs. In fact Joannie was meaty all over. Grade A, Choice Cut, Lean Red Meat. Government inspected and stamped. But not J. Oswald Jones stamped and this rankled him.
“O let me pluck thy rose, sweet, sweet, Joan of Arc.”
“Oswald you devil you.”
*24“Let me taste of tliy liquid cunt.”
“Oh Oswald you’re so arty. That’s what I . . .”
“Aw for Chrissake give me a piece!”
“Get your filthy hands off of me.”
“Stop it! Stop it!”
He had — dammit!
A windowed reflection of his own face leered back at J. Oswald Jones. He was not beautiful, even with a beard which covered up his weak chin and disguised his too thin lips. He was balding rapidly and the wrinkles etched in his face made his small eyes look even worse. He wasn’t ugly, though, just — just mediocre. Mediocre in everything he was or did.
He had had many women. Ambitious women who made love to J. Oswald Jones the writer, not J. Oswald Jones the man. Hydroelectric generators, they could turn themselves on and off at will, and rip out his guts with their turbined crotches. He didn’t turn them on, he couldn’t, no man could and somehow none of them were really beautiful.
Funny, he felt sorry for beautiful women. Other women hated them for what they were. Men treated them as mere sexual objects, nothing more. They could never afford to lose their cool. And now the tide was turning against them. What with the Shrimp, Twiggy, and Julie Christie, the Anti-Godess. Why not the Anti-Godess? — in a way it was long overdue. No godess for the anti-hero.
The neon lights flickered fitfully above O’Malley’s bar. He noticed that the M was out.
“The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.”
Sam McGee was a masochist. How often he had been disseeted, roasted, eaten and regurgitated whole again. Ever since the days of that Bald Wonder — -Wee Willie Shakespeare. And yet he still sucked it up. Old Sam had a craving for the crap. Yet it never really affected him. Maybe that made Sam McGee a sadist. Sam knew who held the aces and it wasn’t J. Oswald Jones. Sam ran — rather Sam was the show. Society Sam paid for the books, sat his ass down in front of his suburban fireplace and laughed.
Laughed at J. Oswald Jones, the satirist who thought he could cremate Society Sam. Sam kept him alive for amusement, just as medieval monarehs kept fools, dwarves, eunuchs and other freaks. After 500 years of the Bald Wonder, Sam was shockproof, unerematable, snug within his asbestos skin. All the túne J. Oswald Jones thought that he had been spitting on Sam’s boots and here he had been licking them.
After two beers J. Oswald Jones had to piss. He was getting old. He couldn’t hold it in the way he used to, and so there he was sitting on the shit can of the universe watching the ebb and flow of the tide in the john bowl, King Oswald I sitting on his golden throne. Scribbled into the brown walls were the symbols of his kingdom. Coats of Arms in the shape of huge disemboweled genitals. Even a motto — ‘If you can’t drink it, drive it, or screw it; forget it!’ He would have to remember that one. But above all there was the WORD and the WORD was F-U-C-K. The universal language of his kingdom. What motivated men to write that one lone rvord? Fuck what? O’Malley? Life? God? Country? Motherhood? Apple pie? The *25girl next door? Puck them all, but what the scribes really were saying was fuck Sam, for the rest were one in Sam. He wondered if Sam knew what the scribes had written. Sam would be pleased if he did. J. Oswald Jones would lick Sam’s boots once more.
The light reflected dimly off the gray cement floor as a man in the next stall lit a cigarette. “And the Lord said let there be light.” J. Oswald Jones was not impressed, he felt that he could top the Creator. He looked around his universe and found it not lacking. His universe was complete, a world unto itself. The phrase sounded good, a little too good. It was not his own. It smacked too much of the Biblical. He must begin again.
The Alienation theme — how often it had been milked. Could it be milked again, it would have to be. It was old, but it was not shopworn. Ño — not yet, not ever.
J. Oswald Jones wondered why he did not kill himself.
What a finish would that be. Tragic endings were always the best, were there any other kind? Who would write it though? Why, let everyman write J. Oswald’s epitaph. Out of the dusty loins of J. Oswald Jones a new cult would emerge. Marilyn had her eult, Papa had his, so Lennie and Bogey too. But one had to be dead first, and J. Oswald Jones feared death. What was it like on the other side? Did one just get moldied up while trading quips with the maggots? “The worms go in, the worms go out, the worms play pinochle on your snout. But one littl worm who’s not so shy goes in your ear and comes out your eye.”
That would be alright. But had God really kicked the can? If so, why? Did he contact some fatal disease? Rabies? Gout? Syphilis? Or maybe he was scratched by the Holy Ghost in a super terrestial gang war?
J. Oswald hated to admit it, but it was even possible that the ball belonged to the Billy Graham’s with their Halleluiah’s and their traveling clip joints. I say unto you my children, that whatsoever you do unto Billy’s belly you do unto my belly. He imagined that both Billy and God had fat bellies. Yes, one had to have pull to make the scene at the pearly gates. But no man can serve two masters, and if one was going to prostitute himself he might as well get paid for his services. Death was an enigma, an extremely popular enigma. No one yet had found a way to beat the death rap. Same old shit. Generation after generation, one wave of humanity hitting the shore, sucked back to give way to another wave, and the shore never flinched, did it?
The cold night air slowed, rather than revived his senses. The rust was building up inside. J. Oswald Jones craved oil badly. He was on his way to Eva’s — Sam would like that.

 For an excellent discussion in the area of student publications see C. Michael Abbott, The Student Press: Some First Impressions, 16 Wayne L Rev 1 (1969).

 For those whose curiosity is piqued, the article that became the cause célebre at Grand Valley State College is reprinted on pp 23-25.