Censorship in America

Welcome to America. The land of the free and the home of those all too willing to use that right to its fullest extent. The first nation truly founded on the right to speak one’s mind without consequence, America is now the most prosperous nation in the world, largely due to that very fact. We as Americans are blessed to live in a nation that is thriving both politically and socially, both as innovator and steady power, both as a community and as a collection of individuals. The marks of American society have spread far beyond the nation’s borders, with everything from the Big Mac to Steven Spielberg movies to democracy itself making it’s impact felt on this modern world. The name America has become synonymous with freedom, and through this freedom, great wealth, power, and success. And yet history has shown, through the example of democracies like Athens and Rome, that even the greatest of civilizations eventually swerve off course.

After reading Patrick Garry’s “An American Paradox: Censorship in a Nation of Free Speech”, Marjorie Heins’ “Not In Front Of The Children”, and various statements from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), I have come to believe that the unstoppable juggernaut that is America may too be in danger of losing its way. The principles of freedom and human rights that this country was founded and subsequently prospered on are often quickly abandoned in the effort to protect the general public from anything deemed even slightly dangerous. This never-ending barrage on freedom that is censorship makes its presence felt constantly, through daily protests of the latest four-letter-word-spewing rap CD, through news reports of the next teen-to-adult oriented video game to be taken off the shelves, or even through critical attacks on supposedly “offensive” movies like Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. Yet not only does censorship fail in eliminating the problems of society as it sets out to, it often creates an even more problematic issue by abandoning what should be the central focus of American society: an unwavering commitment to freedom.

The Federal Trade Commission, the government agency primarily responsible for regulating national advertising, claims that their form of censorship against the big three American entertainment industries, motion pictures, music recordings, and electronic games, is necessary in order to protect America’s youth, defined by the FTC as anyone below the age of 17. Robert Pitofsky, chairman of the FTC, examines the topic in an official statement to the Senate. “We cannot help but be concerned about the marketing of products containing violent content,” he says. “Scholars and observers generally agree that exposure to violent content alone does not cause a child to commit a violent act. But we are mindful of the question Sissela Bok raised in her book Mayhem about violence on television:
Is it alarmist or merely sensible to ask what happens to the souls of children nurtured, as in no past society, on images of rape, torture, bombings and massacre that are channeled into their homes from infancy?”

Pitovsky and Bok are hardly the first ones in history to question whether being raised on less-than-virtuous images can have an unhealthy impact on adolescents. The great Greek philosopher Plato, whose teacher Socrates was ironically killed for bringing new and dangerous ideas to the youth of Athens, offered a similar opinion in his famous work The Republic:

A young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.

This is the reasoning that the FTC provides when it establishes a rating system that takes away the right of a mature fifteen-year-old to see an R-rated movie, simply because it contains multiple curse words or of a sixteen-year-old to play an M-rated video game, because it contains futuristic soldiers using futuristic guns to kill science-fiction-based aliens. It is also the reasoning that the FTC used four years ago when it attempted to pass a bill known as the Media Marketing Accountabilities Act that, if put into effect, would levy a fine of up to $11,000 on any company that marketed profane and obscene media to underage youth.

The FTC is clearly trying to create a better America through subtle control of what its more impressionable citizens are exposed to. But how much control is too much? Having read the book “Brave New World” by Alduous Huxley I can’t help but notice that the world envisioned by Huxley in his futuristic and satirical epic, and the America the FTC is attempting to create are eerily similar, even if Huxley’s is taken to a much greater extreme. Both focus on governmental control, and in doing so take the pressure off the ordinary people to have to think for themselves. Huxley’s Utopian world takes adolescents and puts them through a molding process, installing into their heads an unflinching loyalty to their society and to their position in it, as well as a distaste and fear of all things considered even potentially dangerous to society as a whole. The FTC is actually trying to do the same thing to its citizens, molding adolescents to their liking by taking away any image that is deemed harmful to their moral growth and, more importantly, to their society as a whole. Theirs is a subtle attack on the individuality of Americans, and a slow movement towards the greater picture of one homogeneous community. Theirs is a mission to abandon the current community of individuals that has been proven to work so well in America and in democracies throughout time. And theirs is an insult to every single American who has ever enjoyed the right to make a choice based on their own feelings towards the world, and not those of a distant government agency.

Patrick Garry, writer of “An American Paradox: Censorship in a Nation of Free Speech”, doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of censorship and believes that the only way to solve this problem of censorship is to follow it to its root and to truly understand it. He then attributes this particularly American brand of censorship to a society that finds its identity in its usage of free speech. This, according to Garry, is true both on the individual level and on the broad, nation-encompassing level. All Americans whether they happen to be rich, poor, black, white, conservative, or liberal, define themselves by how they use their God-given, government-endorsed right of free speech to express themselves. Similarly, America as a whole is often defined by its most prominent voices- voices that aren’t always representative of the better parts of American society. Of particular note are those voices within the American sphere of entertainment, which with its ever-expanding boundaries and desire to shock has become the main victim of modern censorship. This emphasis on free speech as “our depiction of reality”, says Garry, ignites a belief that “perhaps by changing the image…we can change everything.” (10) To advocates of censorship, free speech with no boundaries becomes almost a scapegoat for this nation’s many flaws. To silence the negative voices that its citizens are exposed to would then be a giant leap in the right direction for this country. In the following quotation from “An American Paradox” Patrick Garry sums up this true cause of American censorship:

Perhaps because of this economic might of speech, Americans also ascribe great remedial power to speech. For the most complex and deeply rooted social problems, speech often becomes the perceived remedy. If we prohibit panhandling and the sale of sexually explicit material on our streets, the problems of the homeless and of sexual violence will somehow go away. Cities will be cleaned up and renovated if just the graffiti is washed away. The drug problems can be cured if everyone “just says no”. (An America Paradox, p. 9)

This logical explanation of censorship does not, however, justify it in the eyes of Patrick Garry, nor in my own. Simply because censorship is viewed as the cure-all to every world problem does not mean that it actually is. What it comes down to is a simple question: Are America and its citizens a reflection of America media and entertainment, or are American media and entertainment a reflection of America and its citizens? To me, as well as to Garry, the latter seems much more likely to be the case. The media and the entertainment of our nation exists only to give us what we want. If they didn’t we wouldn’t be interested and they would lose money. And the number one goal of American businesses is to make money, not to make the world a better place or anything idealistic like that. A case can certainly be made that American media and entertainment exploit the American people and their desires, but that does not make American media and entertainment responsible for its citizens and their desires, so that argument is irrelevant to this debate. Censorship, then, is also irrelevant, as it exists to take away the cause of corruption in society, but it focuses on the wrong area, as corrupt media and entertainment are not the cause of society’s corruption, but rather the result.
According to Marjorie Heins, writer of the sarcastically-titled “Not In Front Of The Children”, however, the natural tendency of a parent to shelter their children, along with the natural tendency of a government to shelter its citizens, is not only ineffective but also detrimental to the growth of the sheltered. “Intellectual protectionism frustrates rather than enhances young people’s mental agility and capacity to deal with the world,” she argues. “Censorship is an avoidance technique that addresses adult anxieties and satisfies symbolic concerns, but ultimately does nothing to resolve social problems or affirmatively help adolescents and children cope with their environments and impulses.” (257) Heins argues that adolescents are better off being exposed to the darker aspects of human life at a relatively young age, while their parents are still around to put these darker aspects into their proper contexts. Rather than censoring these images and essentially trying to convince the youth that the world is only slightly less pleasant than the worlds of “Barney” and “Sesame Street” that they were raised on, she believes that we should focus on teaching the youth how to deal with these very real issues. The images that are a constant in our society, then, are the ideal medium to educate the youth on the world that they live in, and how to deal with its many faults.

I need only to listen to the pattering of rain and look at the shut blinds in my dorm room to realize that Marjorie Heins’ claims make perfect sense. Sure, I can shut the blinds on a rainy day like today, but that won’t stop the rain from falling. Likewise, sex, violence, drug use, and profanity can be completely eliminated from the airwaves of Radio and TV and from the shelves at Wal-Mart and Target, but that doesn’t mean that my thirteen-year-old sister won’t eventually come into contact with these things that are so prevalent in the world we live in. She needs to know what to expect and how to react, just as I need to know not to head to Cudahy Hall in a T-shirt and shorts on a cold and rainy October night. Because, as much as I dislike the idea of being cold and wet on a dark night like the one staring at me through the window, I like the idea of my little sister being unprepared for the darker aspects of this world a whole lot less. And that is what censorship will ultimately do for her, as well as the rest of us.

So if censorship is not the answer, then the question that must be asked is simple- what is? If the government isn’t allowed to tell us how to live our lives and deal with the world we were born into, how will we ever manage to figure this crazy place out on our own? What the answer eventually comes down to, after all the layers are stripped away, is your own personal view on how much faith can and should be placed in the average person. I, for one, believe that if presented with a half-way decent education, both moral and intellectual, the citizens of this country and others, given the choice, will almost always pick what is right over what is wrong. Maybe if Sarah, a mother of two young children, would, just for one day, take a break from her picket signs, her catchy slogans, and her constant attacks on an entertainer who is too busy collecting his next 7-figure paycheck to care, and instead focus on teaching nine-year-old Jimmy and eleven-year-old Mary the difference between right and wrong- and not just that but why what’s right is right and why what’s wrong is wrong- then maybe, just maybe she will have found an alternative to censorship, one that actually works. And then maybe, just maybe, Jimmy, when confronted with a difficult choice, will know what to do, regardless of who his favorite rapper is, or how many hours he’s logged into the often-censored video game Grand Theft Auto. America depends on its citizens to make it the country that it is, and, the way I see it, not even the occasional violent video game, sexually explicit movie, or profanity laced CD will ever stop us from making it great.