Red Alert! Somebody Out There  Is Trying to Control Your Mind

by Kaa Byington

 Censorship: A Burning Issue

The first time I really realized how truly frightened many people were of words was when I went to Athens. Ancient Greece had fascinated me since the fourth grade. I wanted to see the place where our Western culture was born, the cradle of democracy. But there had been a military coup shortly before I arrived. There were tanks in front of the shuttered parliament buildings and the newspapers were crudely censored -- blank columns appeared where stories had been removed. One of the things I wanted to do most was see a classic play put on in the original amphitheater. But it turned out that this summer’s performance was banned. It was Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens put a stop to the twenty year-long Peloponnesian war -- the first anti-war play. The colonels running the country were afraid of it. It was written circa 415 B.C.E.

 The Greek colonels were only holding up a very long tradition. In fact, in Aristophanes' time, Socrates was condemned to death for his words which were "corrupting the youth of Athens." But Greece and republican Rome were exceptional in the ancient world, in that they had an educated class, who knew freedom of expression, and knew that without it, there was no democracy. Elsewhere, throughout history, education, literacy and even the possession of written works were the prerogative of the priestly class. When writing was invented, it was used to set in stone, often literally, the rules and the laws. It was not for expression of opinion or of creativity.

Literacy in the Common Man

Literacy in the common man was dangerous to both religion and state, which were usually the same thing. The Christians were no exception to this rule: once the Roman Empire became Christian, it was the beginning of the end of "books" and literacy in the West for a thousand years. It was the Christians, albeit abetted by the Romans, who committed the most destructive act in intellectual history, in 391 C.E., by torching the Library at Alexandria, destroying 800 years of Western literature, history and thought, much of it forever. Not long after that, sometime in the fifth century, the Church began its "Index of Prohibited Works" which lasted 1500 years -- it was only formally abolished in 1966. The Bible and what few "books" existed were in Latin, a language known only to the priestly elite. Communication control was complete. It was not for nothing that these years are known as The Dark Ages.

 With the Renaissance came the invention of the printing press, and an explosion of literature including the translation of the Bible into the vernacular and the possibility of universal literacy. In Europe, the powers that be, both religious and secular, fought for control of this dangerous new mode of communication with every weapon at their command. They outlawed Wycliffe’s English Bible, and Martin Luther’s writings. They forced Galileo to recant. They banished, they excommunicated. They burned books They executed or tortured millions for heresy, witchcraft and sedition -- Joan of Arc died at the stake for all three. They burned and burned and burned.

The Puritans, who had fought and won a civil war in England over freedom of religious expression, immediately imposed their own censorship -- requiring government licensing. Nothing could be printed without Parliament’s express permission. Milton’s Areopagitica, A speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England, in 1644, was a landmark plea for freedom of the press which still is relevant today. Milton, a Puritan himself, said, "Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image, but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God.

 First Amendment

 By the end of the 1700s, in the English-speaking world, anyway, the question of government censorship was pretty well settled. As Blackstone put it in his famous Commentaries On The Laws Of England,"Every free man has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public, but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous or illegal, he must take the consequences of his own temerity." Our own First Amendment, which embodies that and more, was in place.

 But for all the fine theory, the fear of words only abated a little. In America, fear of a revolt led southern states to make teaching a slave to read and write a serious crime. Books like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin were banned in many places as too inflammatory. After the Civil War, though, there was a sea change in censorship. Instead of suppression of political or religious speech, it took on a new direction.

Comstock

 Enter Anthony Comstock, a Civil War veteran who worked with the YMCA in New York City to wipe out "obscenity." He successfully lobbied for a federal statute which outlawed sending obscene material through the mails, which came into effect in 1873 and became known as the Comstock Law. For 33 years, he served without pay as a "special agent" of the Post Office. Not satisfied with just outlawing commercial pornography, his original goal, he attacked across the board: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio’s Decameron, The Arabian Nights and, yes, Aristophanes' Lysistrata were all banned as "immoral" for many years under the Comstock Law. He also banned writings on contraception (Margaret Sanger did jail time for distributing her Family Limitation), saying that "If you open the door to anything, the filth will pour in." Comstock was proud of the fact that he had burned or destroyed 160 tons of literature and pictures in his career. He hated "libertines" and is said to have boasted of the number of people he drove to suicide.

 Perhaps the most famous book to be banned by the Comstock Law was Ulysses, by James Joyce, which many consider to be one of the greatest novels ever written. But many others, including Walt Whitman’s  Leaves of Grass, and a book depicting the art treasures in the Vatican Museum (naked statues!) met the same fate. By the 1930s, however, the Supreme Court, which had previously paid little attention to the First Amendment, began consistently striking down these bans, and by the 1960s they had pretty well run their course. But the Comstock Law remains on the books to this day and was part of the basis for the 1996 Communications Decency Act, banning obscenity from the Internet. The Internet showed its grass-roots power in a web-wide organized protest, and the Act was immediately struck down by the federal courts as unconstitutional. The proud blue ribbons remain on the websites to continue the battle -- Congress has passed another Communications Act , somewhat less stringent, but probably equally unconstitutional.

In 1998, the editors of The Modern Library voted on the 100 best books of the 20th century, causing much discussion amongst the literati and the book lovers. It turned out that 34 of them had been banned or challenged (an attempted ban) sometime in their printed existence. Of the top ten, seven made the banned list: Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, Brave New World, Catch 22, Sons and Lovers, and Grapes of Wrath.

Censorship on the Local Level

 Since the Supreme Court has become a bulwark of the First Amendment, effectively preventing federal government interference with free speech, the censorship business has become something of a private industry on the local level. The nay-sayers are now more likely to be ordinary citizens bent on protecting their children and their neighbors from exposure to dangerous material. The targets now are local schools and public libraries. They are coming from two directions: those who would outlaw "hate speech" and those who wish to enforce "family values."

 Mark Twain’s  Huckleberry Finn, as well as Tom Sawyer, has probably taken more heat from the hate-speech crowd than any other work, chiefly for its use of the, uh, n-word.

(Ironically, when it was published, it was criticized for depicting blacks too favorably.) Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice has often been banned in high schools for its portrayal of Shylock, a Jew. Little Black Sambo and even Dr. Doolittle have come under fire, the latter for the vocabulary used by Polynesia the Parrot. At another level, some universities introduced "speech codes" forbidding the use of sexist or racially or ethnically derogatory words even in private conversations. "Political correctness" became, well, politically correct, in some small but highly visible circles. But this approach can backfire: when radical feminist Andrea Dworkin led a campaign to outlaw pornography because it was "hate speech" against women, it ran aground in the U.S. in the Supreme Court, which firmly believes that banning any single groups’ speech threatens the right of all other groups to freely express their views. The radical feminists did better in Canada, where a severe censorship law against hate speech was passed. But the first writers whose works were banned under the new law were a radical black feminist, a prominent homosexual, and . . . Andrea Dworkin.

The family-values folk, the moralists, have cut a broader swath through public libraries and schools. A very few examples:

    •     Shakespeare as a bad influence: Twelfth Night was recently yanked from the curriculum of a New Hampshire high school because it "advocated an alternative life style." Translation: among the many romantic entanglements in the play is one in which a girl disguises herself as a boy. The Savannah, Georgia schools in 1999 required written parental permission for their students to read Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, due to "adult language and violence."

    •      Darwin’s Origin of Species, and science textbooks which contain chapters on evolution have been banned so often by so many that one loses track. The Kansas Board of Education in 1999 is the latest example.

    •      A school system in California threw the Encyclopedia of Mythology out in 1986 because it "glorifies the devil and the occult."

    •      In Alabama in the 80s the school board banned Morte D’Arthur because it was, and I quote, "junk." So much for Lancelot and the Holy Grail.

    •      Fairy tale department: In 1989, two school districts in California banned Little Red Riding Hood because the heroine takes food and wine to her grandmother. The schools were concerned about "the use of alcohol in the story." Cinderella, the Disney version, was taken to court in Texas for "promoting secular humanist values." In that case, a federal judge agreed.

    •      In Cobb County, Georgia, in 1999, the school board was mightily offended by the famous picture Washington Crossing the Delaware in an American history textbook. They thought that George Washington’s watch fob might be mistaken for his, er, um, private parts. Therefore, they set their teachers to the task of painting out the offending watchfob in 2500 textbooks.

    •     Silas  Marner, a book inflicted on my entire generation in high-school English, was recently thrown out of the curriculum in Anaheim, California. (I guess we missed the dirty parts -- I may have to read that again.)

    •     And yes, they’re still literally burning books. See the link below to Bonfire of Liberties to view the flames.

 But it has been the popular contemporary children’s books that seem to upset the moralists the most. Judy Blume (Are You there, God? It’s Me, Margaret), Roald Dahl (Willie Wonka  and the Chocolate Factory), Katherine Patterson (Bridge to Terabitha) and other acclaimed children’s writers have been targeted all over the country. Sometimes it seems the highly respected Newberry Award for "best children’s book of the year" attracts the moralist’s lightning. And is there anyone who hasn’t heard of Harry Potter, boy wizard, hero of the publishing phenomenon of the decade? At last count three million copies of the first two books of a series had been sold in the United States alone to children and adults alike. No matter that Harry is a good wizard, and so enthralling that children who never opened a book before are reading these tales by flashlight under the bedcovers to the delight of their parents and teachers, the moralists are thundering about it. In a television report on this phenomenon, when some eight- and nine-year-olds who loved the Harry Potter books were told that there were people who wanted to ban them, to a child they said, "They must not have read them." From the mouths of babes . . .

Vigilance for Free Speech

 America still has the freest speech and the least censorship of any country in the world. But our speech is free not for lack of those who would censor it, but because of the vigilance of those who love it. For every ad-hoc group that tries to remove a book from the shelves of the local library or school, three others spring up to prevent it. Watchdog organizations like the ACLU, the American Librarians Association, People for the American Way, scores of them, stand in every doorway to keep the mind-controllers out and the diversity of ideas and opinion so vital to democracy alive and well. And democratic it is: thanks to the Internet everyone can get their opinion on censorship to really count.

  -- KB

 ©1999 Kaa Byington

Kaa Byington is a novelist, non-fiction writer, writing teacher and faculty member of the Wordwright critique service.