Censorship is Dead: How E-Readers Will Save The World

Earlier this year I read Fahrenheit, 451 to my daughters, and in addition to enjoying the story, I was amazed at Ray Bradbury’s prophetic prowess.  Interactive games, wall-sized TVs, mobile entertainment devices , sound-bites in the news, the dumbing down of society that began with the elimination of classical education – this guy saw it all fifty years before its time.  And he’s still alive, able to comment on today’s technology and how his books are perceived fifty years beyond their time (though some of his works might simply be timeless).

But what really caught my ear while reading the book is the theme of censorship and how it may unexpectedly be a thing of the past (something Ray Bradbury might have been hopeful for, but certainly didn’t predict).  In our modern world of eReaders – my family just purchased its first: a Sony PRS-950 – it’s not unreasonable to think that the advent of electronic books has not only revolutionized book-publishing for the better (and might yet reinvigorate the periodical industry), but has also made censorship an impossibility, a thing of the past, a relic of tyrannical regimes and small, isolated pockets of modern-day society.

For those who might not be familiar with the contents of Bradbury’s book, in Fahrenheit, 451 firemen actually start fires, their target being for the most-part books which been outlawed for years.  The idea that firemen once put OUT fires is a myth spread by liberal-minded folk who are now in jeopardy of being rounded up and eliminated. 

In fact, today physical books ARE being eliminated.  Just last July, Amazon announced that eBook sales outnumbered hard-cover book sales for the prior three months.   And while some may perceive this as bad news, and while there’s still something to be said for curling up with a good book made out of honest-to-goodness paper, I can’t help but think that the advent of electronic books – in addition to making book publishing a more profitable and equitable industry – has all but eliminated the idea that specific books might be eliminated from the face of the earth.  Censorship is, in fact, dead.  This wasn’t the case just over a half a century ago, when the attempted elimination of the Jewish people in Europe was accompanied by the attempted elimination of an entire culture.  Similarly, languages of native people everywhere were too once considered in jeopardy of being eradicated. 

No longer.

If one can e-mail word for word The Bible or Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Huckleberry Finn in a matter of seconds to anyone in the world, it seems implausible that we’ll ever find ourselves in a position to seriously worry about a manuscript’s disappearance. 

Torahs were once in rare supply, but even if every hand-written scroll was confiscated and burned, a million more would survive with the click of a button.

Backward states in the U.S. and backward countries who fear truth and the human condition might try to inhibit the free-flow of ideas and art, but what barrier can they possibly enforce in the modern day?  Even if all the servers in the world were to suddenly break down, or if a space bomb were to destroy the tens of thousands of satellites – working and defunct – that now circle the earth, eReaders would come to save the day.  Unless you can confiscate the electronic reading devices of every man, woman and child, you have no chance of eliminating a book from circulation.  Home printers coupled with eReaders make this idea an impossibility.

The world has shrunk in many ways.  People have become dumber in many ways.  Divisiveness rules the airways.  There’s much to be cynical about.  But censorship – the fear of eliminating a culture, a religion or a language – is now a think of the past.  It’s no longer a threat. 

And this is something to feel good about, a small way in which our society has progressed, a word which  can’t often be attributed to modern man. 

Freedom From Fear

Reading Phillip Roth’s latest novel, Nemesis, about the polio epidemic in 1944 Newark, sparked in me the image of Normal Rockwell’s oil paintings, The Four Freedoms.  These were based, I’ve recently come to learn, on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, in which he professed four essential human freedoms required for a better future: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.  While freedom of speech and religion are ingrained in our consciousness due to their inclusion in the amended U.S. Constitution, it’s the freedom from fear that resonates most with me, and it’s the one most easily taken for granted.  As if the rising body count and horrific happenings of World War II weren’t enough to instill terror in all citizens during the summer of 1944, the polio outbreak caused people to dread the very air they breathed, the water they drank, the hands they shook, the food they ate, the animals who prowled the streets, the neighbor who exhibited signs of illness – all were the possible source of an invisible virus that stole mobility, breath, innocence and the lives of so many people, young and old. 

This combination of war and illness must have terrorized even the most composed person at that time, and I wonder how we’d respond to such threats today.  I recall the aftermath of 9/11, when a tinge of uncertainty even entered the consciousness of those hundreds of miles away from New York and DC.  I took my kids to the Field Museum in downtown Chicago the weekend following the tragedy, and though not crippled with fear, I had a more heightened awareness that morning in the sparsely attended halls of natural history.  And I wondered how much more palpable my fear would have been had the attacks been on a less grand scale.  What if, instead of large buildings, the terrorists had attacked busses, movie theaters and cafes?  How would we have responded then?  Imagine those living today in Bagdad, Ciudad Juarez or Mogadishu. 

Or imagine the fear of parents in Haiti, whose children’s only choice is to drink tainted water.  Imagine the toll that’s taken on those in our own country who live in neighborhoods that make travel by night impossible, whose children’s walks to school are accompanied by the real threat of violence.   Imagine the fear of the young citizens of war-torn countries, whose peaceful slumbers give way to earth-shattering explosions or the crack of gunfire.

I will go through my day today with a concern no greater than what to make for dinner.  It’s a blessing that’s almost impossible to grasp, a gift bestowed upon so few in the world, past or present.  It’s a gift I will work hard not to overlook.

How Many Words Do YOU Know? Sort Of.

I don’t need anyone to remind me of how little I know, least of all myself, yet that’s what I’ve been doing on a daily basis lately.  In an effort to reinvigorate my quest for knowledge that took a major detour about thirteen years ago (two daughters), I’ve reintroduced an old custom of mine of writing down words unknown to me while reading novels.    

Although I consider myself a relatively intelligent person, I fully admit that vocabulary has never been my strong suit.  Sure, I can string a bunch of words together to get my point across, but ask me to use a more obscure word in a sentence, and I start to panic.  I guess I take some solace in that the average educated English-speaking person knows an average of 17,200 base words, a mere percentage of the total number of entries in the Oxford American Dictionary (over 180,000) and the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary (over 600,000).  (Base words are “word families.”  So the base word “love” might extend to words like lovely, lovable, lover, etc.)

There are words I clearly know, like the ones I’ve written thus far in this essay.  There are words I clearly do not know, like rehoboam.  This I can accept.  What kills me are the words I kinda sorta know but would be hard-pressed to define or use in conversation.  My kids have exposed this gaping hole in my chest of knowledge numerous times when asking me the meaning of a word that I thought I knew, but couldn’t for the life of me explain.  (“Well, capricious means…um…like unusual, right?  Um…why don’t you look it up?”)  And even when I sort of know a word, like bereft (meaning: void of), I would never use it in conversation for fear of making a fool of myself in case I used it incorrectly.  Just last weekend I used the word “indoctrinate” when I actually meant to say “inoculate,” which is sad an embarrassing, but I DO happen to know the word that describes the misuse of another word – malapropism.  I should have that word tattooed on my forehead.

Despite the odds, I’m determined to go to my grave with a better command of the English language than I have now, so I’ve created a list of words I’ve come across recently.  The latest book I read was Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked, a fine read and certainly not high-brow.  In fact, it’s really quite accessible, but that didn’t stop me from not knowing the meaning of the following words (how many of these could you use in conversation?):

Bathetic.  Opacity.  Perspicacity.  Torpid.  Detritus.  Phlegmatic.  Circumlocutory.  Feckless.  Pastiche.  Demur. 

And this is from a #1 New York Times bestseller!  Give me a copy of Ulysses and I’d be toast.  What’s worse is that even after looking up all these words and writing down their meanings, I still don’t remember them well enough to use them, so all my efforts have basically resulted in increasing the number of words I’ve heard before, but couldn’t use in a sentence to save my life. 

Luckily over the years, a few words have managed to squeeze into my lexicon (so if I’m average, I now know 17,202 words).  I can now successfully use the word loquacious (talkative) in a sentence, and I’ve recently added misanthrope (someone who hates people).  I’m still waiting to come across the word that means, “Ineptitude in expanding one’s vocabulary.”