Flap Over NEA Grants Points Up Censorship as All-or-Nothing Concept

When we review the Great Confrontations of 1990--such events as Tyson versus. Douglas, American baseball owners versus reason, J. Danforth Quayle versus the English language, Albania versus the world--one that is sure to make the list had its roots right here in Orange County.

I’m referring, of course, to Rep. Dana R. Rohrabacher (R--Lomita) versus Annie Sprinkle (political affiliation unknown-N.Y.).

Although they’ve never met face-to-face--or perhaps I should say, chest-to-chest--they measure up well. Rohrabacher is 42, weighs in at about 165 pounds, wears a beard and has a reach as long as his staff and apparently ample congressional funds. Sprinkle, at 35, looks as if she barely breaks 100 pounds; she has no beard; and her reach has been considerably extended through film and the theater.

That’s what troubles Rohrabacher. He doesn’t think the U.S. government should help pay for Sprinkle’s creative reach. Sprinkle counters by saying that her tax dollars go for “a lot of things I don’t like--like nuclear bombs.”

Sprinkle is in the erotica business. She once starred in pornographic films but has now elevated her work to the art-house level, where she is billed as a “Post-Porn Modernist” and puts on performances--apparently quite graphic--that relate to human sexuality. She says she’s read a lot of books on the subject.

Sprinkle got caught in the net Rohrabacher’s staff throws out periodically to discover how funds given by the federal government to the National Endowment for the Arts are being spent. When Rohrabacher pulls in a fish that doesn’t smell right to him, he calls the press and gives them a sniff. He also tells his colleagues in Congress, and his letter describing Sprinkle’s activities has apparently become a collector’s item.

All of this reminds me of The Dictionary of American Slang, which had a number of Orange County citizens upset some years ago. The dictionary had been gathering dust on school library shelves for many years before some intrepid erotica-sniffers--when Rohrabacher was still in grammar school, probably sneaking a look at “Catcher in the Rye”--discovered that it had a lot of what they called “dirty definitions.”

So there was a big campaign to get this book out of Orange County schools, and in order to show what a terrible book it was, dozens of earnest soldiers in the fight against dirty books spent many hours poring over the dictionary, singling out the “dirty words” and printing them up in a flyer. That way the kids--especially those who didn’t know the words in the first place--didn’t have to go to the trouble of looking them up.

Rohrabacher is carrying on a similar holy war in the halls of Congress, and we probably should be grateful to him for forcing us to look at the concept of censorship and all of its implications.

Rohrabacher’s bird-dogging of the NEA grants points up one cardinal fact--indeed, the only cardinal fact--of censorship: that a free society must decide on the basis of what the public sees as the greater risk. Those who would censor what the public sees, hears or reads do so on the argument that social harm would grow out of the free dissemination of certain ideas. And those who fight censorship argue that in a free society, no one has the right--or omniscience--to decide what another human being should be able to see, hear or read.

Rohrabacher insists that his efforts are aimed not at censorship but at withholding government funds from creative work that he considers unsuitable for such support. But it amounts to the same thing. Many artistic activities that aren’t commercially viable in this country would simply die without the pitifully small support provided by the NEA.

So Rohrabacher versus Sprinkle isn’t so frivolous after all.

If you want to put this argument into perspective, ask yourself whom you would allow to tell you what you can see, hear or read. And if your answer is “no one,” then project that answer to the rest of the society in which you live, and you have the basic ingredients of the choice we have to make.

There is no middle ground.

If we accept the concept of censorship as a societal necessity, then we must also accept the risk that the censors may well be narrow-minded, anti-intellectual and fearful--as, for example, the people who would ban “Catcher in the Rye” and “Huckleberry Finn” from our classrooms. And if we reject the concept of censorship and assert absolute First Amendment rights, we must accept the risk that we will be exposed to art that we might find personally offensive--and that might also have a negative impact on society. Accepting this position opens the possibility of some uncomfortable bedfellows, as the publishing industry discovered in the Hustler magazine case.

Personally, I’ll take Sprinkle over Rohrabacher. I don’t want Rohrabacher or Sen. Jesse Helms deciding where my tax money in support of the arts should go. I’d rather turn creative minds loose and take my chances. You may choose otherwise--but perhaps the most important point to understand is the nature of the choice that needs to be made.