Many First Amendment cases that come before the Supreme Court involve the F word. "Fuck," to be exact. According to my research, the word "fuck" appears in exactly nine cases, including the famous dispute over George Carlin's "seven dirty words you can't say on television" and a case arising from Long Island in the early 1980's involving library censorship.

The most famous case arising from "fuck" is Cohen v. California, a Vietnam War era case where a guy walked through a local courthouse with a jacket that read "Fuck the Draft." Cohen was arrested for violating decency laws, but the Supreme Court declared the arrest unlawful because Cohen had a constitutional right to express himself this way. In Cohen v. California and other cases, the Supreme Court was not afraid to use the F-word when appropriate to outline the issues in the dispute. So in the library censorship case, Island Trees School District v. Pico, Justice Powell, a courtly southerner, appended to his dissenting opinion excerpts from the offending books. Justice Powell did not like the Court's result in the case (which held that local school boards cannot remove books from the shelves out of disagreement with the books' content), but he had no problem at all with broadcasting in a Supreme Court opinion the offending language.

This year, the Supreme Court heard another case involving "fuck," a dispute over the FCC's punishment against TV stations for the "fleeting expletive," where toilet-tounged celebrities slip in a few curse words in telling the world on live television how honored they are to win the Golden Globe Award. But that decision does not cite any of the curse words. And the lawyers arguing the case did not use that language either, even though that language was at the heart of the case. This was unusual. In the "fuck the draft" case back in 1971, Cohen's lawyer went out of his way to say "fuck" even though Chief Justice Burger (a stuffy Nixonite) made it clear that this language was not necessary; the attorney thought that self-censorship would hurt his argument that "fuck the draft" is free speech even at the courthouse. Cohen's lawyer won the case, and that story is now a well-known example of why lawyers should give it their all in court.

Now we know why the lawyers in the "fleeting expletives" case did not use the F-word. They were told watch their mouths. Last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told a group of federal judges in New York that "the lawyers were alerted that some of the justices might find that unseemly, so only the letters 'f' and 's' were used in our court." I doubt that Ginsburg was behind this gag-rule; she used to work for the ACLU. One journalist thinks the order came from Chief Justice Roberts, a clean-cut fellow who voted with the majority which sided with the FCC in that case.

I guess we are afraid of F-word. Even I don't like typing the word "fuck" all that often. We should not be afraid of the F-word in court if the F-word is a major part of the case. Words like this are spoken in court all the time in sexual harassment and police cases, I can tell you that. I doubt the judges and juries even flinch after hearing that language over the course of a trial. But watch your mouth in the Supreme Court, the bastion of free speech.

Let's face it. At least for some of you, your phone calls and emails are being reviewed by government officials who have significant leeway to spy on American citizens without any probable cause. Government spying on innocent Americans is an old story, as anyone familiar with the cold-war abuses can attest, but in the post-9/11 world, anything goes because ... it's a post 9/11 world.

The New York Times reported on June 17 that "The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said."

These concerns over widespread government surveillance have prompted some members of Congress to investigate. They may want to look into a new revelation from an unnamed government employee, according to the Times, "a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation."

Well, that is interesting. How come we didn't know this sooner? The story adds:

The agency appears to have tolerated significant collection and examination of domestic e-mail messages without warrants, according to the former analyst, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

He said he and other analysts were trained to use a secret database, code-named Pinwale, in 2005 that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages. He said Pinwale allowed N.S.A. analysts to read large volumes of e-mail messages to and from Americans as long as they fell within certain limits — no more than 30 percent of any database search, he recalled being told — and Americans were not explicitly singled out in the searches.

The former analyst added that his instructors had warned against committing any abuses, telling his class that another analyst had been investigated because he had improperly accessed the personal e-mail of former President Bill Clinton.

Other intelligence officials confirmed the existence of the Pinwale e-mail database, but declined to provide further details.

All of this started under George W. Bush. But it's President Obama's problem now. Obama's adoption of some of George W's abhorrent policies confirms my theory that the office of the presidency corrupts the president, no matter who he is. Bureaucratic inerta and fear of the unknown will moderate even the most liberal presidents, who known damned well that the business of American is, literally, business, and that pure self-rule, public health and safety will always be subordinated to profits and military concerns. BIll Clinton probably knew that he was acting against his better judgment in furthering the policies of George H.W. Bush, and Obama is in the same boat.

This is no excuse, of course. We can clampdown civil liberties and privacy or we can honor civil liberties and privacy notwithstanding worst-case scenarios. There will always be people who say that some intrusions on privacy and freedom of speech are necessary to prevent a greater evil, but if I knew the government was reading my emails and listening to my phone calls, I'd be pretty pissed off. And you should be, too.

Many years ago in high school, when I was reading a lot of rock criticism, a common theme among the more politically-oriented writers was that corporate American was killing music. The idea was that corporate-types at the record companies and radio stations were too conservative and afraid to try anything new in the way of innovative music.

While these writers were correct, they overlooked another music-killer: the celebrity and rock and roll lifestyle. Many great rock and rollers are dead because of the lifestyle, either from drugs or wild living. The real cause of Michael Jackson's death may be debated for a long time, but I know that he was a victim of the lifestyle that only rock stars get to experience. He may not have used hard drugs, but you know that the freak show that his life had become could not have happened without the millions of dollars that Michael Jackson squandered.

Michael Jackson became a mega-star in the early 1980's, a decade that gave us other mega-stars, like Prince and Bruce Springsteen. At the time, it was fashionable for rock fans to dismiss Michael Jackson's music as crap. I remember hanging around during lunch hour in high school when one guy said that he liked the Jackson Five but that Michael Jackson had become some kind of a fag. Except that some rock fans had to admit that Beat It was a pretty good song, mostly because of Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo. But I also remember reading Creem or some other rock magazine and an anonymous heavy metal singer who played in a bar band published a letter to the editor. He admitted that he absolutely loved the Thriller album and that, unbeknownst to his heavy metal friends, he played the album all the time.

MJ sold millions and millions of albums, but for many of us he was a guilty pleasure. Nothing that he did after Thriller made any sense to me, and once he decided to become freak it was all over. But Thriller has its moments. The title track was not bad, though it sounded like a re-write of some of his better songs, like Don't Stop Till You Get Enough. Beat It wasn't bad, though it seemed like MJ was trying too hard to write a straightforward rock song.

But his greatest songs, for me, were Billie Jean and Wanna Be Startin' Something. Billie Jean had a haunting melody and genuinely good lyrics. Wanna Be Startin' Something is one of the great grooves of all time. For MJ, it was his Mount Everest, reaching heights which he would never see again. A friend of mine once said that all he wanted out of life was to write two great songs. These two, then, put Michael Jackson in rarified air. Dig 'em now, and don't be ashamed to admit it. These are great songs.