Interesting tidbits around lately regarding censorship. Today, the Times celebrates "Howl" and examines Pacifica Radio's online broadcast of the poem on the 50th anniversary of the court decision that it was not, in fact, obscene and instead carried "redeeming social importance." Thing is, it wasn't broadcast on the radio because they were afraid of running up against our oh-so-modern FCC regulations. Wow.
This week is also the American Library Association's "Banned Books Week," with events taking place around the country to celebrate words that someone didn't want us to read. The site has many interesting lists featuring the most-challenged authors and books from a variety of time periods and subject positions.
As a side note, it always makes me smile to see "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," "The Color Purple," and "Beloved" at the top of all those lists. I can't imagine them as anything less than required reading, and the fantastic African-American women who wrote those novels deserve endless respect, praise, and thanks for bringing their particular form of danger to the reading masses the way they did.
But back to "Howl," the Times article spotlights a San Francisco bookstore owner whose business was targeted during the obscenity claims around the poem so long ago. Mr. Ferlinghetti, 88, offers:
"[It] 'wasn’t really the four-letter words. It was that it was a direct attack on American society and the American way of life.'"
How interesting to ponder that concept now, in a time when those who've professed outrage over negative influences and called for new forms of censorship primarily stick with the four-letter words and glimpses of skin as their targets. Those pesky societal-destruction claims are trickier and do involve a lot of reading and thinking to make the connection, after all. I mean, someone had to actually read all of "Howl" to know enough to protest it. Am I the only one not seeing that happening today?
Of course, since righteousness is blind, our modern censorship proponents are often the very same figures so outlandishly bent on destroying other societies and ways of life out of an obscene view that they are protecting what it is we call American.
If only they understood irony.
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