My Thoughts, Feelings, and Responses to the Film Lenny, about the 1950'S American Libertarian and Radical Stand-up Comedian Performer Lenny Bruce

My Thoughts, Feelings, and Responses to the Film Lenny, about the 1950'S American Libertarian and Radical Stand-up Comedian Performer Lenny Bruce, Played by Dustin Hoffman

I just watched this film about Lenny Bruce again, called Lenny, and these are my full and complete thoughts and feelings about it all.

I think we have got to have some kind of law and order, but the law is also very cruel, very barbaric, very extreme, very unjust, and very irrational and paranoiac, and the law has a lot of arbitrary power and authority, but absolutely no democratic, thorough, or overall rules for itself.

What's more, as the libertarian writer and critic of psychiatry Thomas Szasz says, that the law and psychiatry has no purpose and place coercing, threatening, terrorising, harassing, and punishing and suppressing non-violent, non-coercive, and non-discriminatory political, religious, and sexual and erotic deviations, because the law is supposed to be there to prevent and punish violence and crime, but it doesn't do this very effectively, although for sure we may all be in a very bad society and state without it in any shape or form. Also, and as Thomas Szasz says again, non-violent, non-coercive, non-discriminatory deviation is all of our basic fundamental human rights as citizens and human beings.

What about all of the religious dissenters in our society and world?, and most people who have different or radical political views?, such as born-again or fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, and even Buddhists and others? Are they regarded as deviants? They may be regarded as mad or deluded, or regarded by some people as out of touch with reality, and political dissenters may be regarded as radical and/or subversive, but no one calls them deviants.

I'm not in any way being cynical or pessimistic, but I don't think that all these things about the law can be in any way moderated, although we can in some ways make the law less extreme, but not simply by moderating it. The ways we can all make the law more effective and less extreme, are in three ways.

Firstly, we can improve the judicial and legal system, via and by radical and liberal institutional reform and change, and by individuals and people who work within the legal system simply reforming and changing themselves, and which is to do with conscience, passion, desire, and lots of other things too. This self-reform and change, is what the Nichiren Daishonin Buddhists call 'human revolution'. In order to make the law less cruel, barbaric, unjust, and extreme, we also need to as realistically and as best we can, promote and encourage democratic and free speech, and also promote and encourage individual, human, social, and civil rights in society.

For example, not all judges are very hard, very psychotic and twisted, very perverted and sadistic senile old gits, as we have some damned good individuals and people working within the judicial and legal system, such as some judges and others, who do very much think very freely as individuals, and who sometimes speak out, and whistle blow.

I don't think that Lenny Bruce himself was at all extreme, but he was pushed to some extremes, and which made him sort of self-destructive and so-called anti-social. Lenny Bruce was persecuted, oppressed and repressed, terrorised and harassed by the Police and the law, because he exposed the political, social, and sexual hypocrisy of American society and the world, but the main reason he was mistreated and abused in these ways, was because he was, or was seen as radical, and if there's one thing the Americans and British don't like, it's any kind of radicalism.

Peter H. Donnelly
2011