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From yesterday...

“What I Told Them, Being Pious”

One of the strongest, and longest, essays in the collection so far. A argument that censorship is pervasive, not just in Communist or Islamic dictatorships (“There’s been censorship as long as there’s been society”) but that the “angels” need to continue to push back on the “axes” despite (“We deplored, never the less”). The article is so good, touching on everything from Czar Nicholas I editing Pushkin to Marlo Thomas’ Free To Be You and Me, that I can’t do it justice in summary. Here’s a highlight reel:

Quoting an Iranian-born American novelist on reading dissident literature, “Such writers…must be read through prison bars, ‘I know that I do not read Solzhenitsyn the way I read Flaubert.”

On censorship of sex, “But the weather of censorship consists equally of sex and politics. They are variable. Put them together and it isn’t surprising to get religion or violence.”

On a story about a TV network that sends all scripts involving homosexuality to a dentist in New Jersey, a script writer comments “ ‘ …you mean there really is a Tooth Fairy?’ “ and Leonard continues, “Have I offended anyone? I hope so.” Knocking down political correctness is a central theme to the essay.

On the pervasiveness of censorship through out time, “Christ on the cross was a free speech issue.”

On the US, “And do we think of ourselves as a free country?...as if the Aliens and Sedition Act, the Smith Act and…Joe McCarthy had never happened…”

More on the US, “If we read Ronald Regan right – was there any other direction in which to read him? – the whole point of his Howdy Doody era was to regulate speech while deregulating greed.”

Good stuff…Rachel Maddow would be pleased.

New word: “deculturalization” = Leonard’s term for wiping clean “whole categories of difficult thought” as in Iran…or Texas.

New learning: At one pint Leonard writes, “Quick now: exactly why did Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner, Jr., go to jail?” I had no idea (exactly his point). Turns out both were blacklisted for failing to “name names” during the McCarthy hearings. By the way, Dalton Trumbo is a novelist who wrote Johnny Got His Gun, a great book about the personal aftermath of WW I that would apply very well to veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Good poster for the movie version: