“The only valid censorship is the right of people not to listen.” — Tommy Smothers
Even with much weightier matters grabbing the headlines these days, the issue of censorship pops up regularly in the way of redactions, retractions, warning labels or an attempted book banning. While the objective of censorship is to curtail the dissemination of thoughts, that end is accomplished through the curtailment of words — sometimes spoken words but usually written ones.
The definition of censorship is “to remove or change any part of a publication considered offensive or a threat to security.” The word itself comes from the office of censor, which was established in Rome in 443 B.C. and employed two elected officials who conducted the census, controlled aspects of finance and oversaw public morals.
One early practitioner of censorship was Thomas Bowdler, who in 1812 published an edition of Shakespeare that omitted the scenes he considered unsuitable, and whose name gives us the word “bowdlerize.”
More recently, George Orwell brought the matter to the public’s attention in 1949 with the publication of his classic novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” in which the “thought police” of Oceania seek to root out and punish those guilty of “thoughtcrime,” which is any personal or political thought not approved by the government.
Interestingly, Orwell’s book does contain the words “newspeak” and “doublethink,” but not the more popular “doublespeak.”
In 1964, the Supreme Court ruled that the Louis Malle movie “The Lovers” was not obscene because, wrote Justice Potter Stewart, the Constitution protected all obscenity except “hard-core pornography.” While Justice Stewart admitted that he couldn’t define hard-core pornography, he famously maintained, “I know when I see it.”
Later that same year, a three-judge panel in Manhattan found “sick comedian” Lenny Bruce guilty of the “corruption of morals of youth and others” because of the increasing amount of profanity that had been finding its way into his caustic social commentary. Bruce would die from an overdose two years later and was pardoned by New York Gov. George Pataki in 2003. (He who laughs last . . . ?)
This would soon be followed by a five-year battle between a radio station and the Federal Communications Commission over the station’s airing of comedian George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” In 1978, the Supreme Court would rule 5-4 to uphold the FCC’s power to “determine language guidelines and limitations.”
And so it goes. As writer Laurie Halse Anderson put it, “Censorship is the child of fear, the father of ignorance, and the desperate weapon of fascists everywhere.” But the worst thing about censorship is (redacted).
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.”
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