Recent studies state
the more intelligent you are
the more you swear.
I must be fucking brilliant.
I was born when you could be jailed
for saying fuck in a story, or a poem,
on a wall, in the street, on the tongue,
even though it was heard and seen
everywhere.
I was 11 when they prosecuted
Ferlinghetti for publishing Howl in spite
of the 1933 Supreme Court ruling on Ulysses
saying you could not censor literature for obsenity
if the obsenity did not promote lust.
The government assholes lost.
The authoritarian fuckers tried again
prosecuting Tropic of Cancer in 1934
and on anon for 30 years
until a 1964 Supreme Court ruling
told them to fuck off,
leave Henry Miller alone.
The Government pricks started early
and never stopped.
In 1629 the Massachusett's governor
sent a military expedition to stop
Thomas Merton from writing sexy verse.
Boston had to stop sales of Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass in 1881 because
the District Attorney threatened prosecution
yet when Philadelphia published 1,000 copies
the next year they sold out in a day.
1st officially banned book in America?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain, 1885.
In 1915 William Sanger and his wife Margaret
were both indicted for publishing
information on contraception.
1859 saw Charles Darwin raise a ruckus
with On the Origin of Species
but it took until the 1920s to censor it,
remaining banned until 1967.
Some cities banned Ernest Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms in 1929.
In the 1920s the famous "Banned in Boston"
caught Lady Chatterley's Lover,
An American Tragedy, Elmer Gantry,
American Mercury, and Strange Interlude
and more.
Some cities and school boards banned
Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto,
George Orwell's 1984,
John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
Way too recently they've censored
The Catcher in the Rye and
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
likely because they undermine authority.
The most challenged book in the 21st century
is the kids' book And Tango Makes Three
about homosexual penguins.
As late as 2003 Texas school boards
tried to ban Brave New World.
More bans on Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men
which is rated as our 12th best novel
and of course To Kill a Mockingbird
and the Harry Potter books.
Wikipedia lists Black Boy, Candide, Catch-22,
The Canterbury Tales, Captain Underpants,
Carrie (way to go Stephen King!!!), Fanny Hill,
The Decameron, The Federal Mafia, Homo Sapiens,
The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption,
Moll Flanders, My Life and Loves, Naked Lunch,
Operation Dark Heart, Uncle Tom's Cabin,
United States - Vietnam Relations 1945-1967,
Women in Love, Drama, Absolutely True Diary,
and Looking for Alaska.
Won't even go into the book burnings.
Who knew so many were so scared of thinking?
And of course Donald 'Chubby Cheese' Trump
would probably ban books if he ever read one.
This is but a taste of their wrongs,
there are many many many much more.
Appears the uninformed fear the educated,
the religious fear fact,
and the racists fear everything.
The sin here is the arrogance of the ignorant
believing they can tell the rest of us
what we can or cannot read.
So fuck the Puritans
and the perversion they rode in on.
--Steven B. Smith
The Catcher in the Rye and
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
likely because they undermine authority.
The most challenged book in the 21st century
is the kids' book And Tango Makes Three
about homosexual penguins.
As late as 2003 Texas school boards
tried to ban Brave New World.
More bans on Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men
which is rated as our 12th best novel
and of course To Kill a Mockingbird
and the Harry Potter books.
Wikipedia lists Black Boy, Candide, Catch-22,
The Canterbury Tales, Captain Underpants,
Carrie (way to go Stephen King!!!), Fanny Hill,
The Decameron, The Federal Mafia, Homo Sapiens,
The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption,
Moll Flanders, My Life and Loves, Naked Lunch,
Operation Dark Heart, Uncle Tom's Cabin,
United States - Vietnam Relations 1945-1967,
Women in Love, Drama, Absolutely True Diary,
and Looking for Alaska.
Won't even go into the book burnings.
Who knew so many were so scared of thinking?
And of course Donald 'Chubby Cheese' Trump
would probably ban books if he ever read one.
This is but a taste of their wrongs,
there are many many many much more.
Appears the uninformed fear the educated,
the religious fear fact,
and the racists fear everything.
The sin here is the arrogance of the ignorant
believing they can tell the rest of us
what we can or cannot read.
So fuck the Puritans
and the perversion they rode in on.
--Steven B. Smith
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