The Idea Killers

The American Civil Liberties Union, of which I am an ardent supporter, has suggested that I may be the most censored writer in America. I only wish that my parents had lived to hear that said of me. My father's dying words were, "You will never amount to a hill of beans." He didn't really say that. I am making what we call a joke. Jokes are protected by the First Amendment to our Constitution. Even jokes about God Almighty.

Teachers and librarians have been unbelievably brave and honorable and patriotic, and also intelligent, during all the recent attacks on the First Amendment, which says, among other things, that all Americans are free to read or publish whatever they please. Slander and libel, of course, are excepted from the law's protection.

If I have been censored a lot, then teachers and librarians have had to defend my books a lot. I do not imagine for a microsecond that they have done that because what I write is so true and beautiful. Many of them may hate what I write, even though I am, at my worst, no more dangerous than a banana split. They defend my books, and anybody else's, because they are law-abiding and because they understand, as did our founding fathers, that it is vital in a democracy that voters have access to every sort of opinion and information.

Thanks to our founding fathers, it is the law in this country that, once any idea is expressed here, no matter how repugnant it may be to some persons or, simply, to everybody, it must never be erased by the Government. Even if the overwhelming majority of our people voted to have this or that idea killed, the killing would be illegal because of the First Amendment, which says:

Article I--Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I am mainly concerned with freedom of speech here, but that right is surely intertwined, as it is in the First Amendment, with the separation of church and state and the right to have our complaints heard by our Government.

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Is there now a war about the First Amendment going on in this usually serene democracy of ours? Well--an earlier draft of this essay was full of warlike images. I am, after all, a war hero. I allowed myself to be captured by the Germans during World War Two in order to save lives.

In the warlike version--which, if read aloud, would sound a lot like the 1812 Overture--I had the teachers and the librarians draped (continued on page 260)Idea Killers(continued from page 122) over barbed wire, drowning in water-filled shell holes, and so on.

Concerned citizens such as you and I were in an officers' club in a bomb shelter 200 miles behind the lines. Up at the front, the censors and the book burners were wearing spiked helmets and using dumdums and mustard gas. They were yelling at the teachers and the librarians to surrender the First Amendment. The teachers and the librarians were yelling what General Anthony C. McAuliffe said to the Germans when they told him his situation was hopeless during the Battle of the Bulge. They were yelling, "Nuts! Nuts! Nuts!"

But the book burners and the censors are not, in fact, subhuman, maniacal enemies. They are ordinary, usually likable, usually honorable neighbors of yours and mine. There is trouble between them and people like us, which often reaches courtrooms, because they believe, honestly, that they fully understand two sorts of laws that are superior to the Constitution: the laws of nature--and, above those, the laws of God.

To them, the hierarchy of laws is like a deck of playing cards. Laws made by God are aces. Laws made by nature are kings. Laws made by men are queens. The law against double parking would be the deuce of clubs, I suppose.

So when a censor sees or hears an idea that is being freely circulated in this democracy, an idea that tremendously offends him and probably a lot of other people, too, he tries to get rid of whatever is carrying that idea--a book, a magazine, a movie or whatever--by means of vigilante action or with the help of the Government.

When somebody opposes him, saying that he is behaving in an unconstitutional manner, he replies that constitutional law is only a queen. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out four kings, natural laws that say that no real man will allow unpopular ideas to be expressed while he's around, and so on.

He lets that sink in, and then he pulls out four aces, which are God's laws. God Almighty Himself hates the idea that he wants squashed.

Does he win his case? Not in America. Maybe in Iran he could, but he had better know his Koran.

In this country, we do not play with a full deck of cards, which is what the censors find so hard to accept. We have agreed with one another, through the instrument of our Constitution, that we will not, when engaged in public business, behave as though the laws of God and nature were fully understood.

This agreement is not some newfangled contraption that came in with rock 'n' roll and frontal nudity. Censors commonly talk about getting back to good old American fundamentals. How can they disagree with us that, when we and they respect the First Amendment, no matter how troubling that amendment can be from time to time, we are being as fundamentally American as we can get?

Perhaps the censors will agree with us, too, that the most disgraceful episodes in our treatment of human beings within our borders have taken place when some people's ideas of God's law or natural law have been allowed to supersede our Constitution. I refer to human slavery, which so many Americans believed to be natural and even ordained by God only the day before yesterday, in my great-grandfather's time. It was finally the enforcement of mere man's law that made slavery illegal.

During the first half of my own lifetime, lynchings were shockingly common and always had been. Not many people said that lynchings were in accordance with God's law, but it seems likely that a majority felt them to be in harmony with natural law. What could be more natural, after all, than that a community came to hate somebody so much that its members strung him up or burned him alive? (Castrating the offenders, incidentally, was a natural preliminary to those natural rites. What better way to protect the family?)

Fifty years ago, then, we might have been protesting the lynchings of human beings. How much less we have to complain of today--the lynchings of mere ideas, which cannot scream in pain.

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Still, the issue remains the same: Can the Constitution of the United States be made a scrap of paper by appeals to what sincere persons believe the laws of God and nature to be? If we let that happen, I see no reason why we can't get back to the good old American practices of lynchings and even slavery again. What better way to fight crime?

If we did get back to slavery, then ideas might become truly dangerous, which they are not now. Just imagine what slaves might do if they got hold of a copy of the Constitution, for instance, and learned that all people, regardless of their opinions or their color or whatever, should be allowed to say whatever they like and to be otherwise free and equal.

I have alluded to the pain, the screams emitted by a lynched person. I will mention pain yet again. It is very often real pain that censors feel when they see this idea or that one, this image or that one, freely circulated for all to contemplate. I myself often feel that pain. New York's 42nd Street makes me want to die. There can't be many thoughtful Americans who were not sickened by the beliefs that the American Nazi party proposed to celebrate in Skokie, Illinois, a few years ago. We endured that Skokie pain in order that we ourselves might have the right to speak our minds, no matter how unpopular some of our views might be.

Our founding fathers never promised us that this would be a painless form of Government, that adhering to the Bill of Rights would invariably be delightful. Nor are Americans proud of avoiding pain at all costs. On patriotic holidays, in fact, we boast of how much pain Americans have stood in order to protect their freedoms--draped over barbed wire, drowning in water-filled shell holes, and so on.

So it is not too much to ask of Americans that they not be censors, that they run the risk of being deeply wounded by ideas so that we may all be free. If we are wounded by an ugly idea, we must count it as part of the cost of freedom and, like American heroes in days gone by, bravely carry on.