Censorship and the digital razor

A couple weeks ago, I rented Michael Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter, the very first film based on Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon. It had been a favorite film of my teenage years; my own copy was a grainy VHS tape which, like the clay tablets of Mesopotamia, has become embarrassingly passé.

Towards the very end of the movie, I was astonished to realize that a scene I remember quite well from Manhunter – where William Peterson’s character goes to visit the family he’s been trying so hard to protect – was gone! In its place was a bland panorama of two people overlooking a beach. The original scene, the real scene, had been ignobly snipped out of existence. The original finale has been scrubbed away without a hush of protest.

It isn’t the first time this has happened, though other instances were rightly accompanied by furor and public attention. As every fanboy knows, the original Star Wars film had Han Solo shooting the green bounty hunter first. And other instances of cinematic revisions have been discussed for more than a decade now.

Mind you, we can easily dismiss this as a quirk of the movie industry. And we’d be wrong to do so. There’s a great moment in Thank you For Your Smoking, in which William H. Macy’s overzealous anti-tobacco crusader wants to comb through old films where Hollywood stars like Bette Davis smoked, and digitally remove their cigarettes. When asked if this was rewriting history, Macy’s character vigorously says, “No, no! We’re improving history!”

Messing with historical records isn’t to be taken lightly. Today’s politics and religions, the catchphrases of news channel gasbags and the zeitgeist on tomorrow’s menu, have no business altering pieces of our past.

Think otherwise? Consider the Taliban’s spiritual leader Mullah Mohommed Omar, who before 9-11 started dynamiting ancient Buddhist statues which had stood in his country for some 800 years. These were priceless treasures to the world. Why did he reduce them to rubble? “I don’t care about anything but Islam,” he said.

Ah. So if a radical government took charge in Egypt, should they remove the “heathen” pyramids?

The Great Library of Alexandria suffered the same fate, when overzealous parishioners torched the “pagan” books. The courts of the First Chinese Emperor destroyed philosophers and philosophies alike that he didn’t like. The bonfires of Berlin extinguished books not meeting with Nazi approval. The courts of Mao, the trials of the Inquisition, and so the list goes. Every political faction and ideology has a hand in this loathsome pot; the pages of history are the ultimate equalizers.

This book burning happened in the far-off land of Pennsylvania, circa 2001

Censorship has long been a crippling pox against freedom and free expression, but today’s Digital Era makes it noiseless, secret, insidious. Like the painted commandments in George Orwell’s Animal Farm growing shorter and shorter… redone at night when the animals were sleeping. Each morning, the beasts awaken to see that their litany of guaranteed freedoms has shortened just a bit… and the animals scratch their heads, no longer certain of what once had been written there.

Modern civilization now exists under a heading called “The Information Age,” and the most obvious perk of this snazzy era is that we can access limitless vistas of data at the speed of light. The negative consequence is obvious. When you change something digitally, there is no default backup of the way it once was. An entire generation grows up knowing only what a click of the mouse tells them, unaware that the slice of the Digital Razor to accommodate someone’s politics has emptied out real history into a hidden wastebasket. There are even nasty programs called Tapeworms, which can hunt down and destroy specific phrases, without needing a human hand to guide it. Books, articles, historical records, and anything else we commit to our trusty digital vaults are raped and transformed without us realizing it. While we sleep.

Imagine the Digital Razor taken against literature, slicing “offensive” words from Huckleberry Finn, or deporting the talking animals from Charlotte’s Web, or smoothing out the sexual speculations from The Diary of Anne Frank or The Catcher and the Rye.

Think this is absurd? Think again: these very books have been criticized for the very reasons listed above. The Digital Razor can surreptitiously change the speeches of Thomas Paine into endorsements for communism, or make the once-already-transformed Pledge of Allegiance say “Under Jesus.” After all, not long ago would-be presidential candidate Mike Huckabee expressed his annoyance with the Constitution of the United States – you know, that framework for American government – because it was too secular for him. He repeatedly and publicly stated his desire to change it to be in accordance with “Biblical standards.”

Naturally, history is replete with examples of censorship and the lobotomizing effects it has on civilization.

The problem we face is far worse. Yesterday’s burnings required at least 451 degrees. Tomorrow’s censorship will be done not with torches, but with a search-and-replace command.