You Find Censorship In The Strangest Places

So I pulled an all-nighter last night. It’s something I do on occasion. The combination ADD-Insomnia-Caffeine helps, but also I really wasn’t that tired. Maybe that’s the heroin talking. Anyway, not a big deal, but it led me to be bored out of my skull at about 3:30 in the morning. It’s the perfect time of night for there to be absolutely nothing on television. They’re replaying the first quarter of some NBA game I don’t care about on ESPN instead of SportsCenter (a show which I could watch the same episode of until I have it memorized, and often times I do); there are Bowflex and Girls Gone Wild knockoff infomercials on every other channel, some crappy half-star movie is on Sci-Fi (on this occasion it happened to be TMNT3); the normal nighttime stuff.

But then I happened upon something worth watching. On Bravo they were playing a special on censorship and The Smothers Brother Show, a show which I am a huge fan of. For those who aren’t familiar with the Smothers Brothers go do some quick research.

I’ll wait.

You back? Okay, good.

I adore the Smothers Brothers not only because they are hilarious but also because they broke down so many barriers for TV shows today. There is no true equivalent to what Lenny Bruce did for stand up comedy but what the Smothers Brothers did for TV is as close as you can get. To make a long story short, the brothers were not popular with CBS once they started getting political (in spite of their public popularity) and were essentially kicked off the air. Previous to their being run out of town, however, they had some very strange moments in censorship history. On singer Joan Baez’s first television appearance (which was on the show) she was giving a little talk about how her husband is going to jail because he avoided the draft, so here’s a little ditty about that. But what the TV audience heard was basically something like;

‘Here’s a song for my husband, who’s going to jail soon… (weird looking cut because the camera was on her the whole time) so here’s a song about that.’

Very strange, right?

Another one of my favorite arbitrary uses of censorship was in Patrice O’Neal’s Comedy Central special. It was a few months after the D.C. sniper had been caught so it was still a hot button issue. His bit went something like this:

‘For a month everyone was saying that this sniper was a genius and that he employed incredibly intelligent tactics in his attacks; but then they found out he was black and now he’s just a nigga in a Buick.’

Really funny bit, but I didn’t think so at the time because they bleeped the word Buick. Not nigga, no that’s okay to say on TV (it’s only cable), but Buick? Can’t say that. The bit doesn’t have teeth anymore, just as the Smothers Brothers struggled to have impact in the face of completely unchecked censorship.

Which brings me to my personal problem here; as I said before, I’m up all night (any Lionel Richie, ladies?). So I’m going out to breakfast and check my mail around 9 this morning and I’m taking the fliers for the radio show with me to put up. I’ve got about 33 of the ‘Cook Sock’ ones and about 17 or 18 of the completely non-offensive ‘Got Any Jokes’ ones. I’m sticking them around the dining hall and on the flier boards and such, until I’m completely out of the 50 sheets of paper I left with. I go back to my room.

Shit, I forgot my keys in my mailbox again (I do this about twice a quarter, probably the ADD).

So now I walk back into the dining hall area and I see that... Hey, where are my fucking fliers (I say to myself)? The one I posted over there is gone, the one on that wall is gone too. The one on that post is gone and that was the one that only had words on it! What the fuck, man? So I’m about to go to the grounds keeping office, because surely it’s the cleaning crew thinking this is just old announcements, when I see a man with a mustache in a tie and button shirt (who looks like he’s in charge of some part of the building) walking with about 10 pieces of paper in his hand. They’re the ads! My fucking ads! Shit. So I follow him and he walks to the head office of the complex, stops in for about twenty seconds, and walks back out. So now I’m a little worried, until I realize a few things:

Number one, there’s no real good way to track back to us (and no way to track back to me specifically) unless he goes to the blog address and finds us (and no one reads this blog anyway) or contacts ACRN.com about it, which may happen. But that’s a lot of work for a couple of fliers.

Number two, what’s offensive about this flier? A partially naked woman is somewhat offensive I guess, but not really. It’s nothing a woman hasn’t seen before, and it’s not like her jumblies are showing. So there’s a little bit o’ nip peeking out there. Barely noticeable unless you really look. A little areola never hurt anybody anyway; am I right or am I right? Does a body good to see some woman’s nipple every now and then. Also, there are no dirty words in the ad. None. Read it twice. Read it again. None. Just the illusion of one, like Muck Fiami, and that doesn’t count. What you see isn’t my fault. If you see ‘Suck Cock’ that’s all on you. It’s your mind playing tricks on you and taking it in a sexual connotation based on visual stimuli. You sick bastards.

Number three, let’s assume that it is deeply and emotionally offensive to someone or a group of someones (to which a little ditty about sticks and stones comes to mind) and that they trace it to me (seeing as I’m admitting it on this post that doesn’t seem that farfetched). Cry about it. What are you going to do about it? Arrest me? Suspend me? Take me to court for posting a few dozen fliers? Please, that’s crap. What right do you have to take them down anyway? I believe by friend Bill (of Rights) will back me up on this one. That’s illegal. That’s treading on Nazism. That, my friends, is misapplied use of authority and extreme censorship.

And who exactly am I offending so deeply on this liberal arts hippie campus (not hippocampus, that’s something else)? What is the flier that is so harmful? I seem to remember a truck with a picture of an aborted fetus on the side of it driving around uptown. I seem to recall protesters playing dead and posting pictures of decaying soldier’s corpses on foam core boards in plain sight of the common populous. And that was in town, not in the dorm areas that I was posting the fliers in (I was going to go post the fliers uptown later). How is what I’m doing so much different?

Jesus, it’s a joke. It’s designed to grab the reader’s attention (which it obviously did, at least one) and get you to listen to our radio show (7-8 pm Fridays on ACRN.com). It’s not promoting violence or bigotry or sexism. It has no possible political spin whatsoever. It’s a tongue-in-cheek turn of phrase with a funny photo to match.

Have a sense of humor for God sakes.

I guess we can blur the areola; that might be a little too much.