Censorship, Again

In the guise of an editorial about the recent outrage in a San Francisco art school, where a student was expelled for writing an unpleasant and violent short story, Michael Chabon has written a powerful defense of the Bill of Rights, and of the fucked up stew of emotion, uncertainty and fear that is the teenage mind. Here’s some of it:

It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy. The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own inability to control them in ourselves, are a fundamental part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity, tenderness, pity and love. It therefore requires an immense act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder. It requires a policy of dishonesty about and blindness to our own histories, as a species, as a nation, and as individuals who were troubled as teenagers, and who will always be troubled, by the same dark impulses. It also requires that favorite tool of the hypocritical, dishonest and fearful: the suppression of constitutional rights.

Thanks goodness there are people like Chabon around to remind us that ugliness cannot be ignored or censored away, only repressed; and only then for a while, and with disastrous consequences.

And how sad that, 200 hundred years after the Bill of Rights, we still need to write editorials like this to defend it against the forces of ignorance, fear, and repression.