FREE ESSAY ON CENSORSHIP- WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE

CENSORSHIP- WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE

Erin Lowe- also author of many outstanding American History essays.... of which two are
published somewhere here..... one about Peter Noyes, and another about Mercantilism.....
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail... In the long run of
history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad
ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is
a liberal education. The only way that the ideas of this world that are deemed bad are
going to go away is if we are allowed to see them and change them. If we are not allowed
to see what is bad then our society will never grow to become a better place. What
censorship does is keep us protected; leaving us living sheltered lives. If we never see
a racist comment how are we to know that racism is bad? At the same time Censorship can
be a good thing because it keeps children from seeing pornography, and terrible acts of
violence. However censorship should not keep anyone from seeing literature, even if it is
considered slightly explicit in a sexual, racial, or violent manner. Censorship should
leave the ideas of people alone and leave them with their first amendment rights. 
Amendment one of the United States Bill of Rights reads Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise there of; or
abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble.... What this means is that we, in America have the right to be any religion,
and to not have that religion forced upon us. We have the right to say what we want and
to publish our ideas if we so wish, and to read the ideas that others have published. We
can also peaceably assemble, or gather in protest without violence what we think is
wrong. 
The biggest right that we have is that of free speech and press. We can say what we want!
As American sometimes we take this for granted. However even though we have the right to
free speech we have to draw the line somewhere, but where?
We so often condemn books that were written to fight the very things that we claim to be
fighting. This quote illustrates one of the things that are so wrong with censorship. We
seem to ban or censor books, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that are actually
against racism or whatever the objection to the book is. When a book is taken the wrong
way it is simply the fault of the reader, and not the book. The book therefore cannot be
censored in this case.
To override the right of free speech on the grounds that the speech in question is likely
to harm or offend others is to commit an act of censorship. Not all censorship of this
manner is unjustified however, for some speech causes significant and direct harm to
others, such as maliciously defaming speech, and speech which opens national secrets to
enemies. There should be however a presumption that all speech is protected from
censorship in that the censor always has to prove and to persuade the people that the
speech is bad. In this way it is using new and better ideas to eliminate the bad ideas.
The speaker should not have to prove every time that an individual challenges his/her
speech that it really is good. The proof has to be that whatever harm or offense the
speech has caused is significant, and direct. Free speech is a valuable thing, and should
not be restricted by its remote or superficially adverse affect on others.
Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful...
Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech that denial of free speech. The abuse dies in
a day, but the denial slays the life f the people, and entombs the hope of the race 
This quote had an excellent point in the case against censorship. To discover new ideas
and the truth of life we need to be exposed to new thoughts, and different thoughts. If
we always saw the same thoughts over and over we could never expand; we could never
become better as a society without new ideas. If new ideas cannot be written or seen then
their discovery is useless, for they cannot help without being seen. SO it is better that
we see cases in which free speech is used in a bad way, such as in defaming specific
people or groups or ideas, than to have no free speech at all as a result of free
censorship. Defaming something that should not be defamed can be recovered from, for good
things will be supported more than gone against. Also, things that need to be obliterated
from society will be by this right of free speech. 
The denial of free speech will smother the life of a society. A society where different
ideas aren't all owed will soon fail.
However there is no right to harm or to offend other people. If an idea in a book is
explicitly insulting a particular group or person it could be censored, depending on the
type of offense. If, for example a book says that African Americans are all stupid,
simple, and should be killed off for this fact the book should only be read by choice,
and not be forced upon anyone. An adult is capable of making a choice not to read, or
allow their child to read a book that is expressly offensive to them. 
People always seem to be not concerned with what they read, but with what other people
read. Quite often it is a white person that bans a book for fear that it might insult an
African American, or a male, thinking that it might insult a female. Did you ever hear
anyone say 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might me very
damaging to me'? People should really only censor for themselves, and they should be
allowed to censor for themselves. 
The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean This statement is
in many cases true. Small children should not be exposed to pornography, or to extreme
violence, for their developing minds are very impressionable. However they can be exposed
to a wide variety of ideas, so that as they grow older they can decide for themselves
what and who they want to be. If they are exposed to racist ideas, it is very likely that
they will also be exposed to anti-racist ideas, leaving their mind still undecided. If
children are exposed to minor sexuality then it will leave them having a much easier time
accepting themselves when they become young adults, and then adults. The things that are
put into the minds of the young will never leave them, and so in some cases censorship is
necessary.
Many books are censored for reasons of sex, violence, the occult, racism, or for having
rebellious children in them. Most common are the racism, and sex reasons.
Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut is an example of a book banned for these
reasons. The book is a collection of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut and the title is the
same as the title of one of the stories. These stories include Welcome to the Monkey
House, All the King's Horses, Who am I This Time?, More Stately Mansions, The Foster
portfolio, and The Kid Nobody Could Handle along with many others. Those listed however
seemed the most likely to be banned out of the book. 
Kurt Vonnegut is well known as a pessimistic writer, whose topic usually is the future.
He wrote these for mass produced and distributed magazines. They therefore are rather
conventional, both thematically, and technically. Through these stories you can see some
of the information about Vonnegut himself. He is the product of an Indianapolis middle
class family. Many of the stories also show Vonnegut's and America's preoccupation with
the Cold War, love, status, and identity.
The first story, Welcome to the Monkey House a future society is described in America
where a scientist had invented and ethical birth- control pill that removes all pleasure
from sex, and the government requires al women and men to take them. The pills are
ethical because they didn't interfere with a person's ability to reproduce, which would
have been unnatural and immoral, all the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of
sex. Thus did science and morals go hand in hand 
The hero of this story is a very short, funny looking man who calls himself Billy the
Poet. He seduces the suicide hostesses, whose job it is to help people commit suicide
painlessly and effectively, whenever they want in a pleasurable way. In this case he
dresses up as an old man who wants to commit suicide. When he seduces these women, always
at gunpoint he forces them to abandon their ethical birth control pills. The people who
understood science said that people had to quit reproducing so much, and the people who
understood morals said that society would collapse if people used sex for nothing but
pleasure 
This story is not nearly as pessimistic as some of Vonnegut's other novels, however it
isn't optimistic either. The story makes the government and the scientific community the
villains of the story for taking away sex. It also makes Billy the Poet a hero for
rebelling against the government edict and for spreading his philosophy of pleasure
through sexual intercourse. One thing that should be pointed out about this story is that
it was originally written for Playboy magazine. 
One of the ironies of the story was after Billy raped the suicide hostess and removed her
ethical birth control pills. He leaves her with a poem and a bottle of regular birth
control pills. The poem was How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways which is ironic
because Billy has shown no love for the suicide hostess, only a little bit of pleasure
for converting her to a Nothinghead. However the poem is appropriate because the suicide
hostess' feeling about sex were very like those of most Victorian ladies. The effect of
the ethical birth control pills is also much like the effects that the author of the
poem, Elisabeth Browning, felt after falling off of her horse. 
The theme of this story is not in the altruistic efforts of Billy the Poet, but rather,
things that seem good really aren't necessarily good.
The next story was All the King's Horses. This story is the product of the Cold War of
the early 1950's when Americans were becoming more and more suspicious of the Soviet
Union and of China. The Sort describes a battle between a group of Americans, led by
Colonel Kelley, and Pi Ying, a Chinese guerilla leader. The Americans were the victims of
a plane crash in China. Ying brings Kelley, his wife, his 2 sons, and twelve American
soldiers to a hideout where he offers the Colonel one chance to save all their lives. The
chance is that he must uses the Americans as chess pieces in a game against Pi Ying while
a Russian advisor observes. If Kelley wins the Americans will go free. Ying is a rather
evil bloodthirsty character and the Russian is eager for a war between the United States
and Russia as soon as the time is right. Ying is assassinated by his mistress, and then
the Russian takes over, but Kelley has already won. The Russian lets the Americans go,
and says that ultimately there will be a war between them, but later. 
This story now seems very dated, however it reflects accurately the American sentiment
during the early Cold War period. The theme of the story seems to be in the choices that
people make. People make good decisions and people make bad decisions. Those that make
good decisions come out well in the end. 
The story Who am I this time? is an example of Vonnegut's stories that show a concern
about role playing, and people being who they are, and aren't. The main character, a very
shy hardware clerk only comes alive when he is in a role in the local theatre group. The
director in the story decides to do the play A Streetcar Named Desire. The hardware
clerk, Harry becomes Marlin Brando in the play and a young girl named Helene who plays
Stella in the play falls in love with him. Because harry was left on the doorstep of a
church as a baby he has no concept of self, and Helene was always employed moving from
place to place, so she never developed a personality of her own. Both of them therefore
yearn for an environment in which they can blend in and feel that they have an identity.
They marry, and their marriage only works because they are constantly reading lines of
couples from various plays. 
The story More Stately Mansions was about a woman who from the beginning of the story is
rather odd and in the end seems completely psychotic. The theme of the story is that the
dream is always more precious than the reality.
A couple moves into a suburban home and discovers that their neighbor Grace has an
obsession with home decorating. Grace invites them over for a couple drinks and they
discover that Grace's home is rather dull, dirty, and everything is falling apart. Grace
falls sick and while she is in the hospital her husband inherits enough money that he can
do all of her decorating that she'd been dreaming about over the years. When she came
home from the hospital however the only thing that she notices is the bouquet of roses
that her husband bought her. She seems to think that this was the way that she left her
house, and that it was always perfect and beautiful. She sits on the couch, looking
rather depressed and her husband announces that a new Home Beautiful has come in the
mail, to which she replies read one and you've read them all when she used to be obsessed
with the magazines.
The Foster Portfolio is one of the most pessimistic of any of the stories. IT is one of
his many stories about the relationships between fathers and sons. Herbert Foster works
as a bookkeeper to support his wife and child. He has inherited almost a million-dollar
stock portfolio, but he feels that the money is tainted because it came from his father,
a man who abandoned wife and child to devote his life to playing music and to drinking
gin and he won't touch it. Three nights a week Herbert goes out to a cheap bar because he
had the respectability his mother had hammered into him. But just as priceless as that
was an income not quite big enough to go around. It left him no alternative but- in the
holy names of wife, child and home- to play piano in a dive, and breathe smoke, and drink
gin, to be Firehouse Harris, his father's son, three nights out of seven. Foster's split
personality causes him to find it necessary to create roles that help him cope with what
seem unbearable problems.
The story that gives this book the biggest merit is The Kid Nobody Could Handle. The
music teacher, Helmholtz is appalled to find that Jim Donnini, a juvenile delinquent from
the streets of Chicago, has been vandalizing Lincoln High School. Filled with compassion
and desperation Helmholtz offers him his most prized possession, John Philip Sousa'a
trumpet. When the boy initially shows no interest, Helmholtz hammers the instrument
against a coat tree and mutter that Life is no damn good ; and only then does Donnini
show any interest in Helmholtz. With the start of a new school semester, Jim Donnini
takes the last seat of the worst trumpet section of the C band. As Helmholtz tells him
and the rest of the band Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we
came into it... Love yourself...and make your instrument sing about it Vonnegut is saying
in this story that without a sense of self worth it is impossible for anyone to achieve
anything. 
The entire book Welcome to the Monkey House was banned only a few times, for it isn't
taught in very many schools. However the main example of it being banned was in Alabama,
where a teacher was fired for teaching it because the book promoted the killing off of
the elderly, and free sex. The teacher later sued, and won. 
These two things, the killing off of the elderly, and free sex were both in the actual
story welcome to the Monkey House. The story did promote free sex, but only normal
amounts of sex. The idea was that the pills were wrong, not that people now should have
more sex. As for the killing off of the elderly, the idea was for the killing off of
anyone that wanted to die because there was a large population problem going on. 
There were also many good reasons for the book being taught. The book has many morals
taught in it and just about every story has a positive message in it. The positive
message in All the Kings Horses was about making good choices and being bold in life, the
message in The Kid Nobody Could Handle was about believing in yourself. There was even a
positive message in More Stately Mansions that dreams are sometimes better than reality,
and that the dreamer is not necessarily bad. The positive message in Welcome to the
Monkey House is that sometimes the big guy is wrong, and change can be brought about by
one small person, along with that we shouldn't as a society be afraid of sex.
In most cases censorship indeed seems to be only a violation of peoples right to free
speech. It is, in the words of the Disinformation website an easy way for prudish control
freaks to get their jollies. However, there are cases in which censorship is right. For
children, there is a reason for censorship, but adults can decide whether or not they
want to read books like Welcome to the Monkey House.