Those darn censorship crusaders

Last week’s In Theory question about the legitimacy of butchering creative work in order to sanitize it for public consumption touched off a whole series of instant recollections for me.

The first and most wonderfully mindless was the saga of the Dictionary of American Slang; it took place during the years that Orange County was finding godless communism in all sorts of unlikely places. This book, which had been gathering dust in our Newport-Mesa school libraries for a dozen years, was discovered by a group of local ladies who identified it as a catalyst for juvenile delinquency -- and quite possibly a communist plant -- and set out to deny our students free access to it.

In order to do this, the troops for decency spent many hours and days poring though dull pages of the thick dictionary in order to extract a short list of what they considered prurient definitions that should be deleted. These were then printed up in a flier that the crusaders distributed throughout the community to show what a really dirty book it was.

Kids who either wouldn’t have known what words to look up or who had been using them for years read the fliers in vast numbers to satisfy their curiosity, thus saving hours of research. I don’t have any statistics as to whether local juvenile crime went down as a result.

This determination to protect us from dangerous art is currently lodged in high places. Detergent efforts by the Bush administration on behalf of its Christian right supporters were symbolized magnificently in a photograph of former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft speaking at a news conference: He stood at a podium against a backdrop of an impressive statue of a lady signifying justice -- with a cover carefully thrown over her bare breasts. And in the private sector, we have a noncable network promoting reruns of “Sex in the City” with the sex -- which was delightfully integrated on cable TV -- carefully diluted for a broader audience.

Much of the reasoning behind this tampering with creative work at whatever level is allegedly to protect our children from exposure to what someone in authority feels, or can be convinced, is harmful.

There are three things wrong with this. First, it is a judgment call on the part of the censor, who may be supporting a dubious policy too rigidly or seeing harm where many others see creativity or beauty. Second, creative work directed to an adult audience should never be sanitized to avoid risk of exposure to children -- or anyone else. And third, only the person who created the work should ever be allowed to change it.

The only time I was sued for libel came about largely because editors at a national magazine changed my title on an investigative piece without checking with me. When I was covering Richard Nixon’s run for governor of California for the National Observer, copy editors made a gratuitous pro-Nixon change that was flat-out wrong, and when I demanded to see any future editing changes made in my copy, I was transferred to the Hollywood beat, which was a lot more fun than Nixon.

There have been a few mild scrapes with this column, where the use of language was softened by editors on the grounds that it might be seen by children. Professional editing is a noble line of work, but changing meaning is not editing. When strong words are used appropriately and not gratuitously, the meaning is changed -- and the writer sometimes appears absurd -- by softening them. “Damn” simply doesn’t translate to “darn.” Each publication must, of course, have its own set of rules, but when they aren’t elastic enough to allow a passage without a change of meaning, the writer must do it.

So must parents do it in dealing with exposure of our own children to the stimulation so easily available in today’s communication technology. I’ve been involved in raising four kids, mostly by trial and error that was finally anchored in the conviction that there is a tremendous amount of bad stuff and a tremendous amount of good stuff out there, and the only way for kids to know the difference is to be aware of them both and thereby acquire a taste for the good that will provide a curiosity for the gray while making the bad seem simply a waste of time.

This requires exposure to good reading and talk and control of both time and content before the TV set in the early years that relaxes as the child grows older and more critical of what they want to see -- and develops a healthy curiosity about what they haven’t seen. (I was always mindful of the National Geographic I kept under my mattress in my early teens with its pictures of half-nude African ladies.)

I’m not pushing this approach, but it worked in my family. And it left me very sure that I have never met anyone -- nor do I expect to -- whom I would want deciding for me or my children what we should be allowed to see or read or hear. And to be aware that the people who believe in the value of censorship tend to hold other views quite different from mine.

The best example of these differences is deciding what is obscene. Wholesale violence is seen as entertainment or somehow contributing to knowledge, while anything dealing with sex or related social problems is regarded with deep suspicion. Thus the carnage in Iraq or a TV evening of police dramas or the careful attention to detail of the lengthy torturing of Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ” is acceptable fare, while exposure of the bronzed breast of a statue isn’t.

I found one spot of progress to end on. I checked with the librarians at Newport Harbor and Corona del Mar high schools and found that the Dictionary of American Slang is available and accessible to students. It is, however, said both librarians dubiously, “a very old book.”

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column appears Thursdays.

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