Muzzling Free Speech

Yesterday, I was  treated to censorship. I had been asked to write an Obama opposing viewpoint because the editor of the online magazine had seen some of my posts and wanted more balanced coverage (i.e., not all Obama praising). After three days, I wrote the post, which I posted here yesterday, breaking a 2-month hiatus from Facebook. While I worked, the op-ed column was taken down without letting me know until much later.

I asked what the complaints were and was told some readers and advertisers misunderstood what I wrote. I don't see how. What I wrote was as plain as plain English can be. What I found out this morning was that readers and advertisers called the ezine's offices to make their voices heard, meanwhile my virtual voice was silenced.  The editor apologized for putting me through "the battle" when all she wanted was to offer fair and balanced reporting. I guess fair and balanced at her ezine is Obama praise and no opposition.

Since ezines exist because of writers but are funded by advertising, I understand the editor in chief's actions, but what I don't understand is why he did not contact me and let me know.

I have hit against this particular brick wall a number of times. The first time was a profile I wrote about a woman who, with her family, spent World War II in a Japanese internment camp because her father refused to take an oath of loyalty. The newspaper struck my original lead likening the camp to concentration camps in Europe during that same war and turned it on its head, likening her stay in the internment camp to summer camp, which was more palatable to the advertisers. I did not like it them and I do not like it now.

Just because I understand why the editor in chief of The Celebrity Cafe killed my op-ed column does not mean I like it or that I do not realize I was censored in a country prized for its free speech. Speech is not free and I wonder if it ever has been. Loud, angry voices and money speak much louder than simple truths, facts, and figures, something I am very aware of on Facebook, and part of the reason I left Facebook. I came back because I feel that I have something worth saying and thought that my voice and my opinions should be heard, regardless of the opposing views. I do not engage in name calling or shouting down my opposition but I do civilly and respectfully disagree, often with facts and figures.

This country has become polarized and there is no middle ground where the quiet voice of truth can be heard. That is sad. This country was founded on ideals and beliefs that seem no longer apply and that is sadder still, especially when advertisers have the power to censor any voice that opposes them -- or speaks the glaring truth.

I can only hope that once this election is over and the ballots are counted sanity will return, but it is a faint hope after yesterday. I am a realist and I have been battered by this particular storm for too long to believe that we can ever return to fair and balanced reporting that is no longer censored.

If you'd like to read the original op-ed column, please feel free to do so.

The Only Choice America Can Survive | TheCelebrityCafe.com

The Only Choice America Can Survive | TheCelebrityCafe.com

Who will get your vote in November?

EDIT 10/25/12 at 6:41 p.m. MST:  I have just been informed that the original op-ed column listed above has been taken down because readers and advertisers at TheCelebrityCafe.com took my column the wrong way. I don't see how facts and figures can be taken the wrong way, but there it is. Good thing I saved the post on Red Room. You may read it there.

http://redroom.com/member/jm-cornwell/blog/counting-down-the-days

Review: The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

The Midwich Cuckoos has been filmed twice under the title Village of the Damned, but you will find very little of what made it to the movie in the novel by John Wyndham. As always, it is best to treat book and movies as two separate entities.

Having seen the movies and knowing (I thought) what the book was about, I decided to read it for myself. The book is long on philosophy and sociological meanderings and short on plot. Most of the story is told from an insider's point of view, a narrator that was part of the Dayout when Midwich was separated from the rest of the countryside by an invisible wall that rendered anyone entering its influence unconscious. The narrator and his wife, not allowed to return home, decide to make an end run around the police and military and find a way into the village only to be rendered unconscious. They are pulled out by the police and waken slowly and with few side effects of their ordeal by unconsciousness.

When the Dayout ends, the residents, having been under the influence of the effect longer, have some difficulty returning to consciousness and many are freezing. Some of the residents caught out in the open and subjected to the effects longest died as a result of exposure.

The narrator is friend with Dr. Zellaby, an author of philosophical and sociological examinations of mankind, and he is the first to realize that the pregnancies of young virgins and every woman able to bear children in the village a result of the Dayout. The military also have an inkling since they saw an anomaly at the center of Midwich during the Dayout when they flew surveillance. Dr Zellaby's wife is also pregnant, but it turns out she was pregnant by the usual means and her child is not one of the golden-eyed male and female hive minds born.

I won't waste too much time detailing the differences between the movies and the book. The essence is there, but none of the flavor since Wyndham's novel is long on exposition and short on action. Most of the action is explained and detailed by the narrator and through long -- and sometimes boring -- conversations with Dr. Zellaby.

A novel about being tied to a changeling, or cuckoo as the novel terms the children, able to force the "mother's" return when she gets more than 6 miles from Midwich is something that only a man would term science fiction, having never given birth to a child or been tethered to the child's demands for food, clean diapers, and attention. Many of the mothers, and indeed Zellaby's own daughter, leave their children behind for the town and military intelligence, who have taken control of the situation, to deal with. The rest of the story leads up to the death of a young man that nearly ran down one of the Cuckoos and the subsequent vengeance taken by townspeople and the Children, which leads up to the extermination of the last group of Children from the Dayout in Midwich.

The Midwich Cuckoos is an interesting story written at a time when the conventions of fiction were different. As I said before, the book is long on exposition and hearsay and short on action. Everything, aside from Zellaby's lectures, most of which are convoluted philosophical Mobius strips, is told second-hand, except where the narrator is on the scene. The ending leaves a bit to be desired, but there is a solid story behind the archaic conventions of storytelling. The novel is worn around the edges by newer and brighter tales of the same stripe but the heart of the story remains what happens when man is threatened by a new and different species that might supplant him -- fear, anger, and eradication. That part of the story still holds true and is worth the reading.