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: