Do Not Read This Blog

When I was in junior high school a thousand years ago, we had a dance. I didn’t go to it because I lived too far from the school and my parents didn’t want to drive me the thirty some odd miles each way back to school and back home. This was undoubtedly very wise considering the state of repair of our car, and old Ford station wagon. My dad was barely able to start this car on most occasions, and driving it was no picnic either.

I distinctly remember that this car had big holes in the floor caused by rust. I used to enjoy watching the street pass under us as my dad drove up and down the mountain to Victorville whenever we had to go down the mountain for groceries because we had too high a tab to show our faces in the little market in town. Once, on the way back up the mountain, the car quit going moving, always a bad sign, but we were able to pull into a service station. Back then, service stations were really service stations. They even had mechanics on duty who were there to actually fix cars if necessary. However, these guys were off duty, being just slightly after closing for the service bay. My dad figured out that the accelerator pedal coupling had broken off, so he asked for some bailing wire, crawled under the car, and fixed it…at least well enough for us to get back home. My dad could fix anything. I wish I had inherited those genes. I always found it curious that my dad quit the job he had up in the mountains because the trucks he had to drive weren’t safe (the windshield wipers weren’t working), when he had no problem putting our lives in jeopardy every time we got into that pile of crap Ford, not to mention that he and my mom were both usually inebriated when he was driving.

Anyway, that is neither here nor there. The point is that my junior high had a dance and they had some kids from the school for the band. I never got a chance to hear them, but people said they weren’t bad, for a bunch of thirteen-year-olds. Still, the students were upset because the band had been asked to change the lyrics of one of the songs they were doing, “Let’s Spend the Night Together”, by the Rolling Stones. They were told to sing, “Let’s spend the DAY together.” Well, I guess it WAS a junior high school, after all. And Ed Sullivan had done the same thing with the real Rolling Stones, so what should we expect? Ed Sullivan had even tried to censor Jim Morrison and the Doors, but it didn’t work. So the Doors were never on Ed Sullivan again. I don’t think it hurt them much. Censorship is what knocked the Smothers Brothers off the air. They just said too much, and the network couldn’t allow it. Censorship is what killed Lenny Bruce. They couldn’t let somebody say the kind of things that he was saying. It’s nothing new.

Censorship has a long and glorious history. It was taken for granted in the Greek communities of antiquity, as well as in Rome, that citizens would be formed in accordance with the character and needs of the regime. This did not stop the emergence of strong-minded men and women, as may be seen in the stories of Homer, of Plutarch, of Tacitus, and of the Greek playwrights. Greece was notorious for its open-minded approach to literature and lifestyle in general. It was the Greeks who made the orgy a household word.

While Greece was liberal, Athens, its capital city, was even more free minded. There may be seen in the plays of an Aristophanes the kind of uninhibited discussions of politics that the Athenians were evidently accustomed to, discussions that could (in the license accorded to comedy) be couched in licentious terms not permitted in everyday discourse. And yet, even the progressive Greeks had their limits. In the trial, conviction, and execution of Socrates in 399 BCE, we see the evidence of censorship.

Socrates was executed on charges that he corrupted the youth and that he did not acknowledge the gods that the city worshipped, but other new divinities of his own. This is a clear example of the damage banning books can cause. Socrates’ works were banned from the public’s eye and Philosophy was set back about one hundred years. But this was not done behind closed doors. In Plato’s Republic, there is a clear account of a system of censorship, particularly of the arts. Not only was the worship of different Gods forbidden, but certain political issues were NOT to be discussed under any circumstances. These Greeks, they meant business.

In England, once upon a time, when a more liberal regime came to power, many things were proposed and rejected. Thomas Becket had brought much of the civilization from Europe to England. One of the most controversial and important was the English translation of the Bible by John Wycliffe. This was banned by Kind Edward II in the late 14^th century and would not return until the reign of Henry VIII when the country turned to Protestantism so Henry could remarry. During those days, anything having to do with the Vatican or the pope was declared illegal. In fact, one of the charges against his second wife, Anne Boleyn, was that she was in possession of a book Henry had banned.

In the long and colorful history of censorship, many of what we today call classics have been the subjects of burnings or bannings. The Nazis were notorious for their book burnings, provoking Heinrich Heine to pronouce famously, “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” And he was right. How a man could predict the terrifying ovens of Auchwitz in 1933 is unknown, but this quote shows one thing: censorship is not so much about the books as it is about control. The Nazis may have thought that they were only burning books, but it went further than that: they were burning freedom of thought.

Even today, in our enlightened times and in our free society, we see censorship at work. The right wing organization ironically named Free Republic has done everything in their power to destroy The Dixie Chicks. For three years now, ever since Natalie Maines’ comment in England about the war and George W. Bush, the band has been banned from country music stations, their traditional fan base. It gave me a great deal of satisfaction to see they won five Grammies the other night, especially the one for Best Country Album.

The religious right in our country has tried hard to get the Harry Potter books banned from public and school libraries around the country claiming that it promotes Satan by glorifying magic and witchcraft. But censorship is not just the darling of the right wing. The left wing can be just as bad. Numerous parent groups have attempted to ban Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” because it contains the word, “nigger”. In fact, liberals everywhere are doing their best to have that word officially banned in cities all over the United States since Michael Richard’s comments at the Laugh Factory. And as the Nazis knew, it’s not about banning books, it’s about banning ideas, but you can’t stop an idea any more than you can unsay something.

Various groups have tried to ban a book, a Newbery Award winner, “The Higher Power of Lucky”, by Susan Patron, because of one word. That word is “scrotum”. On the first page of the book, the protagonist, an orphan by the name of Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum. “Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.” What is sad is that they are succeeding. How can we allow students to watch programs like, South Park, but NOT allow them to read a book because it contains the word, “scrotum”. I mean, it doesn’t even say what a scrotum IS!!! We will allow children to see the incredible violence in 24, but they can’t read a book that contains a word, a clinical, scientific word for a part of the human anatomy.

I don’t believe in censorship for anyone, even children, especially children. There is no idea, no word, so dangerous that we cannot be allowed to even see it or hear it. We need to see these things and hear these things, and then we need to talk about them. We make our society worse by hiding good ideas; we make our society worse by giving evil ideas more power by forbidding them. We need to have faith in the ability of humankind to separate the wheat from the chaff. The more we talk about things in an open society, the more we arrive at truth, the more evil is seen for what it is, evil. The important word here is “talk”. We have to talk to our kids about what they see. Yes, that’s right. We can’t just leave our kids in front of the TV and forget about them. We need to watch what they watch, and then talk about it. We have to read what they read, and then talk about it. Yes, I know it’s hard. It’s called being a parent. That’s what parents do, if they want their kids to grow up to be responsible intelligent adults.

I guarantee that if the media were showing pictures of the coffins arriving from Iraq and Afghanistan there would be an even greater noise from the population demanding an end to this illegal war. I know why school librarians are scared of the book. They are afraid of the backlash from religious right parents who want to hide any thought of science from their children. How long are we going to allow these people who live somewhere in the 19^th century to dictate what we see and hear? The first amendment of the constitution gives me the right to buy triple X rated pornography. It should also guarantee that children have the right to know what a scrotum is. It’s up to us as parents to make certain that little piece of knowledge doesn’t warp their little minds. So I suggest we all go out and buy a copy or two of “The Higher Power of Lucky”. Keep freedom alive.

And below, please note the titles of some books which have been banned in the past:

Lady Chatterly’s Lover

To Kill A Mockingbird

The Satanic Verses

Of Mice and Men

Anne Frank’s Diary

Huck Finn

The Grapes of Wrath

The Harry Potter series

An Ideal Husband

The Canterbury Tales

Catcher in the Rye

The Bell Jar …

and all of Shakespeare’s, Marlowe’s, Wilde’s and even Blake’s verse.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *EDIT* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I have just finished reading “The Higher Power of Lucky” this weekend and I can tell you that it is an excellant book, and I highly recommend it for any child between the ages of 9 and 12 (the ages for whom it was intended).  It is, in fact, enjoyable for any adult who wants to read it.  It’s only 134 pages and makes a very easy couple of hours of reading.  The story is interesting and the characters are quite interesting.

It is the story of a girl, Lucky, 10 1/2, whose mother has died two years earlier.  Her father doesn’t like kids, so he asks his first wife, a French woman, to take care of the child for him.  She comes to live with the child in the tiny town of Hard Pan, California (Pop. 43).  Lucky becomes convinced that her guardian is going to abandon her and return to France.  That is the basic premise of the story.  I’ll let you find out how it all ends.

The inclusion of the word “scrotum” is really inoffensive in all possible ways, and I think necessary for character development.  In fact, there is a paragraph about how Lucky needs to pee in the desert which is much more questionable if you ask me, but even that is not so bad.   There is no good reason to ban this book from libraries.  I’d pick it up and read it if I were you.  It’s pretty good.