As a result we see the nonsenseorship in a new light. We feel it more
keenly now than ever before. It is revealed as the Procrustean bed which
cramps us up until we ache inside. If there is anything the matter with
us, if we are introverted, introspective, neurotic, complicated, have
too much ego or too little ego, are dyspeptic, sick, sore, inhibited,
regressive, defeated or too successful, unhappy, cruel or too kind,
if we differ ever so slightly from the enforced average, it is because
censorship presses upon us. And the cure for censorship is more
censorship. Have your psychic insides censored; if you would be a
perfect 36 mentally and morally, with the Hart, Schaffner & Marxed soul
which modern society wills that you shall have, conform not only
without but within, and be "splendidly null"! I think it is the sudden
realization that just a little more of individuality, our hidden
individuality, is threatened, which makes the nonsenseorship irk us now
as it never did before.
The race has always had it, but in the beginning it was a crude and
simple thing, troubling itself only with externals. A woman whose
official duty it is to look after the virtue of the movies in
Pennsylvania or Ohio, will not permit on the screen any suggestion that
there is a physiological relation between a mother and a child. This
method of protecting the race has its roots back in the primitive mind
of mankind. When men really did not understand how children came about,
births were catastrophic. A woman at a certain moment had to disappear
into the wilderness; she came back having found a baby under a cabbage
leaf. Any contact with her while she was making her discovery might
bring pestilence and death to the tribe.
We still believe in the pestilence even if we no longer have faith in
the cabbage leaf. The lady censor of Ohio or Pennsylvania is the tribe
driving the pregnant woman into the wilderness. On the whole the tribe
did it better than we do; it only removed the offender and the mental
life of the little community went on just as before. We keep the
offender amongst us and close our minds. Our simple ancestors covered no
more with the fig leaf than they thought it necessary to hide; we wear
the fig leaf over our eyes: that is the nonsenseorship.
Mr. Griffith recently brought out a cinema spectacle called "Orphans in
the Storm," which presented many scenes from the French Revolution.
Now it was not long ago that we Americans were all rather proud of the
French Revolution. We had had a revolution of our own and we thought
with satisfaction that the French had caught theirs from us. We were
as pleased about it as the little boy is when the neighbor's little boy
catches the mumps from him. He sees an enlargement of his ego in the
swollen neck of his playmate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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