Little sense in censoring truths

It’s simple to reduce and make automatic our response to the old and the fearful who attack… It’s simple to reduce and make automatic our response to the old and the fearful who attack the lyrics of today’s music, the images in our movies and television shows, and occasionally the words in our books. Typically, here is my take on censorship.

We must remain free. If you don’t like it, don’t listen to it. Don’t watch it. Don’t read it. If the government were to prevent musicians from expressing their desire to drink 40s and have random sex, then we’d be well on our way to an opiate-financed dictatorship right here in America.

Sure, I don’t think 12-year-olds should be listening to (insert offending recording artist here), but I want to be able to roar about poor political decisions in a public forum, so it’s a concession I’m forced to make, lest I be the one the Man comes after next.

The details can get mixed in my occasionally persuasive tangents, but that’s generally my more polite approach to that tired accusation phrased as a question:

“What’s with that Eminem and all those swear words and all that, that, that noise you kids listen to?” That’s followed by the even less subtle, “It’s disgusting. It’s rotting our society.”

I particularly love it when that line comes from the parents of new teenagers — those same pure souls who were not too many years ago begging their own musical gods to pour some sugar on them.

Just for them, I’m considering switching to a new response. It’s a little bolder, and I’m afraid it may confuse more than a few members of the burgeoning 21st Century Inquisition, but here it goes: the music, the movies, the comic books — none of them creates the ills they chronicle, reference or celebrate.

Murder happens. Overdoses happen. Rape happens. Even consensual premarital sex happens. However dangerous these half-witted crusaders think an issue may be to the youth of America, their fear does not make it any less valid a topic for artists to use.

I’d never deny that art (even poorly crafted art) can dramatically impact people. That’s what it’s supposed to do. And the more vulnerable we make ourselves while we view it or hear it or read it, the more completely we can experience it and the more likely we are to be altered by it. The young are less guarded and seeking to be changed, so, of course, it’s going to have a big effect on them.

That is not the artist’s fault. It’s not his responsibility. Parents must protect their children from those things which children are not yet ready to understand, and they must guide them through the process of putting into a meaningful context that to which they are being exposed.

But whiny and terrified parents need to understand that keeping 50 Cent out of the home won’t keep the kids from learning about ghettos. It won’t keep them from swearing. It won’t preserve their angelic nature. And chances are, when they do stumble across whatever it is you don’t want them to see during one of those rare moments they’re avoiding your Sauron-like eye, I doubt they’ll grow from the experience.

Ease them into reality, just like my parents did for me and my brothers. I couldn’t watch “Terminator 2” when I was eight, and that caused quite a lot of conflict between us. My brother couldn’t watch “Underworld” when it came out, and that caused quite a lot of conflict between them.

However, just last week my parents gave my 17-year-old brother and me money and told us to go see “Hustle ‘ Flow.” My dad swore it was the best writing and acting he’d seen in five years, and my mom said it was a real “slice of life.”

The movie is about a pimp having a midlife crisis. When I say pimp, I don’t mean someone who looks like Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch. D-Jay is a tired, sweaty man who explains to his customers, “It’s 20 in the front seat. 40 in the back.” He’s a pimp. A real pimp. And he wants to make something of himself. A series of events lead D-Jay to try to make it as a rapper. The movie’s full of cleverly honest lines like D’Jay’s “primary investor” telling him she “ain’t no ATM machine.”

I have no way of knowing if that movie is a slice of life or another piece of whatever the hell it is Hollywood’s been feeding us. But I did think for a bit. I did wonder. I was shocked to see people I was taught to think of as criminals and degenerates dealing with love and life and fighting to become more — more than what they had been told they were since birth.

These were downtrodden people tapping into the great human spirit and trying to live and grow in the face of enormous odds. Sex, violence and swearing aside, what more positive a message could any parent hope to give her child?