Presidential Malarkey

Consider what happened to the word "culture," seldom if ever encountered in political palaver. Both candidates were rupturing themselves to appear civil. Both were in enthusiastic agreement that the federal government must find a way "to change our culture."

Alas, they were not talking about culture as the development or refinement of the intellect, manners, or customs that define Americans as a cultural group. They were misusing the word "culture" as a synonym for censorship. Without ever employing the word "censorship," both candidates vied to top each other in promising to explore ways to protect children from the vulgarity, obscenity, and pornography available at the flick of a switch on all forms of electronically delivered information and entertainment.

The fact that this urge to protect is never extended to include adults must seem strange to people learning our language and folkways. For instance what does "adult" mean when it is applied to the scratch houses that are called "adult" movie theaters or to creepy/peepy "adult" book shops?

The word "adult" started out as a description of a man or woman fully grown in terms of age, size, strength, and intellect. The triple-X book stores and cinemas have stripped the word of any connotation of maturity. It simply means that the scuzzy stock-in-trade is, by law, off-limits to anybody under the age of 18 years.

As to the word "maturity," the pious television warnings about the "adult language" in an upcoming TV program, as well as the designation of its intended viewers as a "mature audience," suggest to people for whom American English is a second language that a "mature adult" is one to whom sex, nudity, violence, and cussing is of not much consequence.

The misuse of these words for these pastimes must surely persuade children and adolescents that the attainment of adulthood is admittance to a porno bookstore or movie or a prime-time TV program unblocked by a V-chip. Never mind the loss in connotations of growth in intellect and responsibility that ought go along with growth in age, size, and physical strength when the word "adult" is applied.

Most librarians don't like the fact that their libraries' computers can be perverted to the access or exchange of every sort of sick behavior or fantasy. (In this instance, the word "like," which has more meanings than you can shake a stick at, is used as a synonym for "enjoy.") However, librarians don't like the notion of government-ordered filters and blockers at all. They are snug fits with the classic definition of censorship and thus subvert the Constitution's First Amendment.

Unfortunately, the statements on filtering issued by the American Library Association (ALA), the only national group speaking for librarians, don't make its members' dislike of the objectionable material clear in its opposition to government-ordered filtering.

It would not diminish ALA's championship of intellectual freedom to clarify the fact that refusal to police the use of the Internet does not imply approval of the salacious matter to be found on it. ALA councilors have discussed directing ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom to make this point clear, but the issue hasn't yet reached the council floor.

Meanwhile, we have the pre-election promise of a new President to take swift action to induce "a change in our culture." The phrase cloaks in respectability government actions that are tantamount to official censorship.

It's malarkey.