I don't know what the inside of your mind looks like, but mine does NOT bear inspection.
As a college student, I read a book. Well, more than one, actually.
William something White, was the author; it's been awhile. The Corporation Man was the name. White described what it was like to work in a corporation. Corporations wanted you to conform to their values. If your wife, for example, didn't fit the mold, you were supposed to dump her and get one that did. The book was written for husbands, as wives in those days didn't have corporate careers, as far as I ever heard.
Well, that was pretty lousy, I thought, making me get rid of my wife. It takes a lot of trouble to get a wife. My boss might want me to get rid of my wife? What's wrong with this picture, I wondered.
The other thing was that you were expected in some corporations to take a lie detector test to see whether you were okay or not.
I was definitely not okay.
I thought about things I'd be ashamed to tell you about.
If the lie detector ever asked me about those and caught me lying, why, I might as well not ever have applied for a job in a corporation. That book cost me a lot of money.
Now that I know a bit more about the world, I probably could've passed the corporate lie detector test. My lurid thoughts weren't half as bad as a lot of others. My abnormal thoughts were within normal limits (WNL) as the doctors like to say in the medical reports.
So I missed out on a corporate career because I didn't trust corporations.
C'est la guerre, I guess.
There's always someone trying to get inside your head, or trying to prevent you from putting something inside it.
When I was a kid, the very big deal was Communism. We lived in two worlds, East and West. East was the Commie Pinkos who we would gladly kill at any time, and often did, as in Korea, Vietnam, etc.
The West was us, the good guys, who would gladly kill bad guys all day long if given the chance, which we often had.
Well, one of the things about being the good guys, us, was that we had freedom to say anything we wanted, which means we had to think it first, in order to say it. So if we wanted to say the president was an idiot we could. But the kids living under Hitler in Germany or Stalin in Russia couldn't do that. But we could. That made us different, and free, and we knew it.
So if someone tried to tell us what to think, or believe, or what to read, or what not to look at, or listen to, we knew, even as kids, that this was bad because it limited our freedom, and that's what set us apart from the bad guys, along with a few other things.
As a result of that, I enjoy it when I read about someone from one of those poor benighted lands where people are not allowed to think and read whatever they like. How are you supposed to know what is good and what is bad if you can't even read about it, I wondered.
Okay, obscenity is bad, I heard that; only the cops are allowed to see that, which may be why they became cops for all I knew.
Well, what about the lawyers, judges, jurors, and Supreme Court justices who had to pass on what was obscene and what was not? To some folks, a cover girl was porn. It's a wonder the soldiers were allowed pin-up girls in WWII. I always thought that the pin-ups gave them something worth fighting for, but there you go, that was just me. Maybe they were fighting for democracy.
How were you supposed to judge what was obscene and what was not if you didn't know what you were talking about. I guess special people got passes to watch the stuff. They could watch porn and tell the rest of us how bad it was. A terrible job, I know, but someone had to do it.
Now a lot of time has gone by and I know something about sex. Maybe not a lot, but enough to get me into a lot of trouble if I want.
One of the things I know is that I think about sex.
Oh boy, you should see what I think about; if only I were a cinematographer, you'd see a movie! Starring me, of course, and ol' whatsername from Hollywood!
But I didn't get this from reading a book or seeing a film, although I did see those.
Most of it just popped into my head on its own. I'd see this girl in high school, and there went the reel. No book or film corrupted my mind. More likely my mind was likely to corrupt the latest Kim Novak movie. Between my mind and the movie, it was my mind that needed the police to clamp down more than the movie did. The movie was tame.
Nowadays they suppress obscenity (I almost said 'porn' but there's a big Con Law difference, as it turns out: all obscenity is porn, but not all porn is obscenity; see Miller v. California for the difference) because it has no idea content and is universally condemned except in the minds of certain cops, judges, and law professors who have to discuss it in public and therefore have a license to look at it in the line of duty, of course.
How'm I supposed to know what other people enjoy doing unless I see them doing it? Maybe someone out there knows of something really interesting that I haven't experienced yet, or lately. I want to keep my eyes peeled. I'll figure out for myself whether this is good or bad, legal or illegal. I don't need you, your maiden aunt, or The Censor to tell me, thank you.
The way I figure it, telling me what I can read or watch is telling me what I can think, which is the first way to get on my bad side, no matter who you are. What I think is my business, not anyone else's. If you don't like what I think, well, that's just hard cheese for you, isn't it.
I was reading in the New York Times today, because the Times can usually be counted on to say a thing or two about the freedoms that are threatened here or don't exist elsewhere.
If you'd like to see the effect of the suppression of books, and how much it means to be able to discuss a work of creative writing, see Reading Lolita in Teheran. It's currently in the bookstores in paperback, and you can do a quick Google, so forgive the lack of further cite.
In the meantime, you might like to see this NYT article by Sabrina Tavernise, captioned "Amid the Turmoil, Iraqis Who Seek Historical Perspective, Skills and Solace Turn to Books, below:
Amid the Turmoil, Iraqis Who Seek Historical Perspective, Skills and Solace Turn to Books
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 26 - In a narrow alley off Mutanabi Street, Baghdad's main book market, the Dar al-Bayan bookshop is full of dust and classics. Old men sip tea in the back and talk of times past, before dictatorship, when poets and intellectuals made life here bright.
On the street outside, the new Iraq presses in. Card tables covered with computer manuals, cellphone booklets and how-to guides compete for space on the sidewalk. A vast array of religious books, banned under Saddam Hussein, pack the stalls.
As Iraqis struggle to make sense of the chaos and violence that have consumed their lives during the past two years, books offer some solace. "Reality now is very strange," said Mufeed Jazaery, who was Iraq's culture minister in the recently departed interim government.
"People are trying to put their feet on the ground, but they find themselves still hanging in the air," he said. "Is it quiet or will there be another storm? Is it black or is it white? Is it moving, and, if so, in which direction?"
But as well as showing a changing Iraq, books are also revealing a dividing line between those who grew up before the years of dictatorship, who are reaching for history texts to understand what has happened to their country, and younger Iraqis straining to find answers to more immediate questions about their lives in self-help and how-to books, romance and religious titles.
The Dar al-Bayan shop is steeped in the past. It opened in 1961 and used to be a salon of sorts with famous writers gathering in its few small, book-lined rooms to talk politics and literature. Its owner, Beadiee Khakhani, speaks disparagingly about the titles being sold outside.
"Now it's different," said Mr. Khakhani, 54. "It's less about culture," he said, and more about books with practical themes, like computer manuals and religious guides.
Intellectuals and writers seem particularly disoriented in the new Iraq. Many were alive in the decades before 1968, when the Baath Party took control, which was a time of cultural renaissance in Iraq. But in 1979, when Mr. Hussein became president, he began banning books, singling out writers and intellectuals, jailing them and blocking publication of their work.
The employees of the Dar al-Bayan bookstore used a small crawl space in an attic area to hide favorite books that were banned. Some writers left the country, but many stayed, surviving by meeting secretly and circulating photocopies of banned books.
Faiza Mulla, a lawyer who was educated in Cairo and lived in London for two years in the 1950's, recalled such meetings.
"To many people, it was like oxygen," she said. "This was how we survived."
When Mr. Hussein fell in 2003, Ms. Mulla was elated. She told her daughter that life would return to the way it was, when Baghdad sparkled with a lively cultural scene. Her husband, Mahmoud Uthman, kept a diary, taking down the hopes of neighbors and relatives.
Now, two years later, the entries seem naïve, Mr. Uthman said. Several of the couple's friends have been kidnapped. Some have left the country. Many who stayed have withdrawn from life outside their homes. Ms. Mulla and Mr. Uthman's daughter, who just graduated from college in Iraq with a computer science degree, spends most of her days at home, her future uncertain.
"At the very beginning, everyone was so excited," said Ms. Mulla, sitting in her art-filled house near Baghdad University. "Now I just feel like staying home." Intellectuals interviewed for this article said books about history, in particular the period from the 1920's to the present, when the Iraq state was being formed, were popular, as is a provocative critique of Islam written in the 1930's by an Iraqi nationalist poet, Marouf al-Rasafi, but available in Iraq only recently.
As far as reading about the ousted government itself, the period is still too raw for most. However, Mr. Khakhani said a book by Mr. Hussein's former doctor, Ala Bashir, called "In the Name of Terror," had been selling well.
Some abandon modern history and escape to ancient times. Suha Turaihi, an intellectual in Baghdad, said she was reading a book about Sabians, an ancient religion of Mesopotamia that dates to hundreds of years before Christ and still exists.
"I am just trying to get out of this bitter reality," she said. "To have an exit."
Homegrown novels and nonfiction are lagging. The main publishing house printed 100 titles last year, more than in past years, but nothing really resonated, said Mr. Jazaery, the former culture minister.
The violence has not helped. Beyond the daily car bombs and kidnappings, insurgents have singled out intellectuals, killing 73 professors in 2004, said Dr. Esam al-Rawi the leader of the science college in Baghdad University, according to an Iraqi media report. In April, a professor of German was gunned down in Baghdad, and in May, a bomb damaged several of the bookstores outside of the market at Mutanabi Street.
"Now there is a sleepy state in culture," said Lutfia al-Dulaimy, a writer and novelist. "People are hungry for electricity and security."
Asked who were the most interesting contemporary Iraqi writers, Ms. Dulaimy replied sardonically: "The dead ones."
Young Iraqis are making different choices. At a bookstore in Mustansiriyah University, a large public university here, students flipped through romance novels and books on astrology.
Religious books, mostly on Shiite themes, which were banned under Mr. Hussein but have streamed into Iraq since his fall, were also in abundant supply.
Though college students remain relatively secular, said Zaid Hadithy, the shop owner, young people in the broader population "are going in a religious direction" as they search for a structure for their lives in an environment where the rules have fallen away.
One student browsing in Mr. Hadithy's shop, Ragad Raisan, 19, said she was looking for a book of teachings by Imam Sadeq, a revered Shiite religious figure related to the Prophet Muhammad.
"God is the only one who guides us when we feel confused," she said.
Elsewhere on campus, a conference held by followers of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr was in progress. His pull is strong among young Shiites, who came out in the thousands last August when he called them to fight the American-led forces before he agreed to a cease-fire.
Muhammad Abdul Rudha, a student in the Arabic department, said he preferred reading religious and political books, because "the situation is critical; it requires that."
Mr. Jazaery said he worried about the power of religion among young Iraqis. Anyone who was born after 1980 grew up during Iraq's decline into war and economic sanctions. Corruption and poverty have eroded the once-strong educational system, leaving young people vulnerable to populist leaders like Mr. Sadr.
"They can read, they can write, but they can't understand," Mr. Jazaery said. "That's good for dictatorship and dangerous for democracy. It's a spare army for all hard-line elements."
Whatever the case, the generation gap seems wide. Athir Haddad, a finance professor, said he was elated when some of his students said they were skipping class to protest proposed legislation. He changed his mind when he learned that they knew little about it and were following orders from their cleric.
"For them I am from outer space," Mr. Haddad said.
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