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We see the final battle between the new gods and the old gods, and Kate and Daniel are trying to keep their secrets hidden, or they risk losing all their allies.
Stick with me here. This is half tongue-in-cheek, half thoughtful devil’s advocate. It’s pretty clear I think censorship is one of the most offensive things ever.
I just read the fabulous essay (apparently I’m behind the times, as it was written in 2007) on Vonnegut’s Asshole about, well, Vonnegut’s asshole. In short, it tells how a ranging censoring teacher confiscated author Eric Spitznagel’s copy of Breakfast of Champions - mainly because of the drawing of the asshole – and how that made him read the book (when his father bought him his own copy) more carefully than ever to understand just what the teacher was afraid of.
I never had such a kind teacher to push me to read so carefully.
My hometown was small enough to have one grade school. My county was small enough to have one high school. My parents used to joke that the Democrat party was an underground movement in our area. I’m from the Bible Belt. My friends and my pediatrician thought I was going to hell because I didn’t go to church.
And yet I came up against no censorship in school. None. Not even D&D.
I can’t remember how old I was, but I do remember it was before I was in the advanced English classes in high school, but we had to do a book report. None of the books on the list turned me on, and I’d found The Picture of Dorian Gray and thought it sounded interesting. A guy’s picture absorbing all of his evil? AWESOME. Homosexuality an important subplot? Deliciously subversive. Not on the suggestion list? Possible objection! This story had so much promise to make life interesting. I pictured the headlines: YOUNG GIRL CHALLENGES CENSORSHIP — No! Better: THE COUNTRY CHEERS AS PATRIOT GIRL DEFENDS THE FIRST AMENDMENT.
I defiantly told my teacher that I was going to do my report on The Picture of Dorian Gray. She nodded and said fine.
Dammit.
I read it. I enjoyed it. And it held enough of the “weird contemporary shit” that I currently love to write that apparently it influenced my writing. Thanks, Oscar. But I did not have that moment of, “Holy shit, they’re really upset. These books must be powerful. This written word thing is a weapon.”
I’m a writer. Of course I know on an academic level that books are powerful. I can tell you the books that changed my life. But I don’t know on that visceral level, of having to fight and win – or steal – that opportunity to read. The most rebellious thing I did with books was in kindergarten: my school was so small that we had a blended K, 1, and 2 class. I read through the kindergarten reader, then, because I was bored, the first grade reader. When I got caught reading the second grade reader, wedged behind a bookshelf to hide, I got in trouble and wasn’t allowed to read ahead of my grade anymore.
Ah, the days when they really encouraged learning and ambition in school…
Look at it this way- one of the base lessons of any fiction is that conflict drives a story. When things are peaceful and calm, that makes for a boring story. When things are bad, when conflict happens, that’s when people decide change is needed, and they do great things.
I’m not saying deny kids books to protect their fragile little minds and delicate sensibilities. I’m saying deny them books to make them insanely curious and want to read, learn new ideas, and change the world. If we just give them the right to read anything they want, if they have the knowledge of the ages at their fingertips, there’s no way we can build revolutionary minds.
Maybe.
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14 Responses to In Defense of Censorship
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I love it!
Now all I need is a list of books to forbid my son to read…
Spinderfly doesn’t need encouragement.
Ah, the paradox of utopia.
Good reason not to ban Twilight at my house, I guess…(aaand he ducks and runs for cover…)
I have a teenager, and I think this might be exactly what I need to do. I’ll ban Vonnegut (who is my idol), and then move on to Isabel Allende. My kid is kind of a reluctant reader, but the books I’ve said no to have somehow appeared on our shelves. Though I think I’ll steer clear of Tom Robbins. My high school English teacher had us read Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and parents came in to pray with him. That was the best reaction he got, except from his students, of course.
My elementary school had strict rules about reading above your grade. Fortunately, I was able to get special permission in 2nd grade (with signatures from teacher, parents, & librarian) & finished their entire stock by the end of that year. Then I got started on the city libraries.
Thank you for the nostalgia.
I disagree on a massive scale (even…especially about the lighthearted approach).
I grew up in the environment of censorship. And yes, it’s sorta cool to have access to four selected pieces of E.E.Cummings poetry and a softened-up Vonnegut and some really good local poetry that has managed to have something sorta revolutionary in sub-text…overall, no, it hasn’t done us much good.
FYI, censorship doesn’t really mean “if you read and discuss this, you’ll get the country-wide fame for being revolutionary”. Censorship means “if you read and discuss this, you get a good chance to be exiled to a subarctic climate, die in labor camp, and say thanks we didn’t take your toddler and your 80-year old grandma with you, and no, people won’t talk or write about you. You’ll just disappear”.
Seconded. Deny them books, give them drugs. Make the precociousness of youth work FOR you.
This is a wonderful post, Mur, but poor leva. . .
leva, “censorship” actually means “oh no — the little people are beginning to see us for the bigots we are. What to do? Oh, yes, scare the little people with threats of awful things, carry some out, and then intimidate/kill/jail enough of them to put this uprising to an end.”
Until the next time, of course, and there is always a next time. Why?
Because the little people in the death camps may have disappeared, but those little disappeared people turned into one hell of a reminder of what to do when everything points to “nothing can be done.”
Every year during Banned Book Week, me and my little boy pick a Banned or Challenged book to read. This year, my son was thrilled to find out that he already owned a challenged book, Where the Sidewalk Ends. He reread it and decided to do his Young Writer’s Program Nano filled with poems and short stories. Of course, that was before he changed the plot to Dragons, but that’s beside the point.
We both love ISBW too. Thanks for the interesting read.
My mum managed to get all not-really-censorshippy on me, 20-25 years ago, which consisted of lots of eye-rolling and passive-aggression about the fantasy, horror, and RPG material I was constantly churning through, with occasional exhortations to read something non-fiction, like Ghandi’s (auto?)biography.
(This, from someone only vaguely ‘universal mind’ spiritual, in Australia, which is not exactly the religion capital of the world. The 80′s hysteria whipped up by the media over RPGs had a lot to do with it, and showed me how intelligent people can easily buy into poorly constructed, unresearched arguments, just because it ‘feels right’ or has ‘common sense’, or worst of all ‘it’s on the news’.)
I wonder if I might have read Ghandi’s book if it hadn’t been pushed on me, but I doubt it – I read non-fiction for specific purposes, and I haven’t had a need to learn about colonial India yet. Would I have continued to read all the great fiction I read without the snide parental comments? Yep, after all I started reading that sort of thing years before I got into the adult material.
Real censorship, of which Ieva speaks, I haven’t had to deal with too much, although Australia has shown an inclination to ban some materials and filter the internet, and that is somewhat shocking to me. Most of that happened since I left just under a decade ago, however I do recall some video game and movie censorship happening beforehand. At the time I pretty much thought it made sense in certain cases – that there was no need for such extremely violent imagery, and it might ‘harm people’s minds’. Since, it has occurred to me that it is very easy to fall into lame double-standards, for example the presence of a penis (gasp!) in a US movie is stunningly shocking, but tearing someone’s arms from their living body barely asks for an R rating. And the same occurs between different media versions of the same content; consider unrestricted books vs. age-limited movies.
What’s the solution? Should everything be available to everyone? My gut feeling (about as reliable as common sense) is that everything should be available to adults, but it’s reasonable to restrict any form of media from minors according to age (although the rules should be CONSISTENT, not one rule for movies, one for games, one for books, etc., etc.). Then the parents have the choice to override that restriction, either by buying the material themselves, or providing the necessary permissions. If it’s motivating for the kids to get access to restricted materials, then that’s normal. We all like to buy into taboos because it makes exploring them more fun, but even if minors do then access material that others, or even their parents, consider inappropriate, it at least lets them view it from the perspective of ‘your parents think this may be harmful’, and maybe that will cause them to think about what they experience, instead of just absorbing it mindlessly.
Why not have everything available to everyone, regardless of age? Simply put, what we experience changes us. There’s an argument to protect the children that to my mind really makes sense, but we have to have some leeway to say that parents have the right to parent their children. I just see it as best to have an opt-in system, where potentially harmful material is inaccessible by default, then parents can override that, rather than the other way around. Maybe I’m wrong though. I can certainly see how some young adult material might be restricted that would be helpful for the kids to read, so perhaps levels of restriction need to take into account clear benefits that may make certain works more accessible. I don’t know, I don’t have all the answers, just lots of words (too much!).
The last thing I would like to say is that I don’t feel I have enough evidence myself. I would like to see some scientific research about the consequences of censorship, and some time when I’m not in the middle of nano and Thanksgiving I will probably track it down. So take everything I say from that perspective: opinion that is not backed up with citations, yet
Additional note, I took a quick search on Science based parenting, but didn’t find much. I did turn up once article that talked about not evidence, but the author/parent’s perspective opining that censorship is not always necessary. As an atheist I am very much taking that approach with my children, one of which has decided he believes in god (which apparently is a man sitting on the clouds) because that is what his friends believe. Thanks America
. Inform, educate, critique, and censor only with caution and reason.
http://sciencebasedparenting.com/2009/02/09/cam-in-usborne-science-books-should-i-care/
I recall people telling me how smart I was because I was reading a grade or two above my classes when I was a kid but by the time I reached middle school people were treating it like it was a behavior disorder- first time I learned that “gifted” was used as a euphemism for students with mental disorders. I really do remember being 11 or 12 and having adults get angry at my use of “big words” as if I were caught dropping the “f” bomb in a church!
I’ve never understood how educated is so valued in the same society that seems bent on “punishing” those whose pursuits are more intellectual than the “norm”.
I have a friend who is close to getting his teaching degree, and he’s described lectures about special education, and he was telling me how bizarre it was to hear about how smart kids are being classified as “special needs”. In other words, “smart” equals “developmentally disabled” in some circles because of the “challenge” of “accommodating” those kids- smart kids are a problem because it takes extra work for the adults to dumb things down enough to discourage them.
I often wonder if what goes on in our society can actually be called censorship- we don’t have thugs in brown shirts kicking in doors or people sporting “451″ emblems on their uniforms coming to people’s homes, but people aren’t encouraged to have a passion for knowledge beyond what’s required to get by in school- no one tells kids what not to read in an overt way, but look at the anti-intellectual messages in our culture here in the US. There’s something I call “enlightened ignorance”, where someone will claim moral superiority because they aggressively avoid things they deem too “smart”.
I get making sure one’s interests are well-rounded, but it’s totally asinine when adults complain that kids don’t read enough only to turn around and treat the same kids as antisocial when they get fired up enough to read on their own.
Of all the drawings in “Breakfast of Champions” they pick on the glorified asterisk?
There’s always Spider Robinson’s mom’s approach to getting kids to read – start with comics, read them everything *UP TO* the pay off, and then go find something else that has to be done. Oh, and offer them the bonus of an extra hour before having to go to sleep – but only if they’re in bed, reading.
I kinda wish I had kids so I could inflict that technique on them.