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Sex and violence
Greg Karber
Issue date: 2/6/09 Section: Opinion
[Editor's Note: The original column submitted by Greg Karber for this issue was rejected by the Standards & Practices Board of The Arkansas Traveler, as per a clause in his contract. Instead, please enjoy the column below, which Mr. Karber wrote over the summer in preparation for such an eventuality.]
Ladies and gentlemen, students, teachers and faculty, online viewers and Sudoku-doers, if you are reading this, then I'm sad to say it, but I have been censored.
Allow me to explain: as part of my 23-page contract with the Traveler, I have requested and am required to have produced a replacement column in case my editors ever felt - for reasons of decency or matters concerning public health - that to publish my column would be an "irresponsible and dangerous act, not only to the public, but to the editors who had allowed it to be published in the event of a violent reaction by said public."
This is that replacement column.
What was in the replaced column that made it unprintable? Did I mention p**p? [Editor's Note: Certain segments of this replacement column had to be censored, as well.] The Pope? Politics? There are a variety of controversial p-words, but I'll stop there in the interest of good taste.
What was so shocking that printing it in a student-run college newspaper would, according to the language in my contract, "be the columnic equivalent of dropping the bomb, so extreme that it would change it all, so controversial that to even overhear someone mumbling the words to themselves as they read it would so taint your soul, your basic human nature, that you might never return to a state of normalcy, something so gut-wrenchingly offensive and preposterously politically incorrect that the mere summarization of it, no matter how condensed, would and should be banned from all American schools and libraries by even the most open-minded of librarians, something that when you read it, you're embarrassed and ashamed for having read it, where you feel like your mind has just been blown and will never unblow itself"?
Ladies and gentlemen, students, teachers and faculty, online viewers and Sudoku-doers, if you are reading this, then I'm sad to say it, but I have been censored.
Allow me to explain: as part of my 23-page contract with the Traveler, I have requested and am required to have produced a replacement column in case my editors ever felt - for reasons of decency or matters concerning public health - that to publish my column would be an "irresponsible and dangerous act, not only to the public, but to the editors who had allowed it to be published in the event of a violent reaction by said public."
This is that replacement column.
What was in the replaced column that made it unprintable? Did I mention p**p? [Editor's Note: Certain segments of this replacement column had to be censored, as well.] The Pope? Politics? There are a variety of controversial p-words, but I'll stop there in the interest of good taste.
What was so shocking that printing it in a student-run college newspaper would, according to the language in my contract, "be the columnic equivalent of dropping the bomb, so extreme that it would change it all, so controversial that to even overhear someone mumbling the words to themselves as they read it would so taint your soul, your basic human nature, that you might never return to a state of normalcy, something so gut-wrenchingly offensive and preposterously politically incorrect that the mere summarization of it, no matter how condensed, would and should be banned from all American schools and libraries by even the most open-minded of librarians, something that when you read it, you're embarrassed and ashamed for having read it, where you feel like your mind has just been blown and will never unblow itself"?
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