Censorship Chews a Hole in Our Cultural Fabric

“He heard the click-whir! of Wilson’s big Nikon, and again a second click-whir! and turning saw the lion, horrible-looking now, crawling toward Wilson in the edge of the tall grass while the red-faced man worked the film advance lever on the short ugly camera and aimed carefully as another click-whir! came from the housing, and the crawling, heavy, yellow bulk of the lion stiffened and the huge head slid forward and Macomber, standing by himself in the clearing where he had run, holding a loaded camera ...”

--Ernest Hemingway on a shooting safari, as might be re-edited for tender readers.

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Some days I wonder if the conspiracy theorists aren’t right: Maybe we are going daffy from the microwaves beaming out of cell phones or the acrylamide concealed in French fries.

How else can we account for the weird turn in censorship? It’s no longer necessary to protest something you find offensive. Or to try to ban it. Now all you have to do is turn to those who can make it disappear--simply edit it away, gone where it can’t offend again.

So now a group of film directors, backed by the Directors Guild of America, has been dragged into court in Denver to counter a frivolous legal action by a company that re-edits and sanitizes feature films to reflect its own moralizing world view. The company, describing itself as just a friendly co-op of good folks, asked a federal judge to affirm its right to rent these falsified movies to the public. The legal action has brought to light the nauseating spread of like-minded enterprises that similarly excise the combat from war movies, the embraces from romances and the raw from street scenes--all for the sake of you-know-who.

Hey, they’re good Christians and they can do what they want, right? After all, movies don’t represent the work, sensibilities, intellectual property and investments of the people whose names appear on the credits, do they? No, as long as you believe in you-know-what it’s OK to remake scenes to your liking--and never mind the fierce objections of those who created the film.

We hear family values evoked in this argument. But it is an assault on all our values to say that it’s OK to hijack and fake someone else’s work.

What’s next? Once these self-appointed revisionists finish cutting, think of all the editing opportunities to add scenes into movies. Maybe the friendly folks at the co-op will edit a sermon from Jerry Falwell into “Titanic” to drive home the lesson that awful things come to people who don’t follow the true path.

Cut a little cleavage, add a few prayers ... say, why don’t they make their own movie?

Naturally, it’s not just the you-know-who zealots who want to reshape our world at the expense of our values. The loonies on the other side are plenty busy with the same mischief.

This year, an observant parent in New York discovered that the state’s high school tests had taken passages from literature and re-edited them to fit snugly within the most extreme confines of political correctness.

References to race, religion and heritage were cut from the work of notable writers, including those whose careers were devoted to matters of race, religion and heritage. Fat became heavy, skinny became thin, mention of wine was cut from the phrase “fine California wine and seafood,” Jewish women became just women. Similarly, school officials in Massachusetts confessed to deleting mention that a character in a book carried a cigar.

Students were told to write reflective thoughts about these passages, never knowing they were deceptive.

What a foundation for learning, eh? Start the kids out for college with a pack of lies. Show them that there’s no need to quote accurately what someone wrote. Go ahead and attribute to writers what you think they should have written.

Unlike the righteous bubble-heads who are taking Wite-Out to movies, the bluenoses in New York backed down in the face of ridicule.

But you can bet they haven’t given up.

These extremists aren’t just silly, they are drilling wormholes beneath the waterline of our society. There are better ways--good and common-sense ways--to shelter our children and to stand up for fairness in our society. If the headlines of corporate scandals have shown us anything in recent months, it’s the damage that results when people lose sight of the difference between right and wrong in the pursuit of their own grandiose interests.

On D-Day, the Germans fired real guns that blew people to pieces on the beach where they bled and died. When Harry met Sally, Meg Ryan wasn’t pretending to be tickled in that diner. It didn’t happen that Herman Melville’s Ahab was captain of a whale-watching cruise.

And Ernest Hemingway didn’t write about photo safaris either.