Censorship By Fear

By Edward Cline

Joseph Conrad, the writer, was astonished to learn early in the 20^th century that Britain, his adopted country, had a “Censor of Plays.” In a 1907 essay* he wrote about the character of an individual who would assume the power and harbor the hubris as the supreme arbiter of what appeared on the British stage. Needless to say, he does not “appreciate” the existence of a censor:

End Compulsory Education

My formal education effectively ended in the eighth grade. I attended a Catholic parochial school for eight years. I do retain memories of that experience, some of them not so fondly but now recalled with humor. One is of a nun aptly named Sister Barbarossa, of the order of St. Joseph, a six-foot-plus ogre tough enough to beat up the school’s football players, and with a permanently red face that reflected a high blood pressure problem, congenital anger, or constant inebriation. She would persecute the disobedient and dream up unusual punishments. She often whacked my knuckles with a wooden ruler for doodling instead of studying, and many times made me sit in the leg space beneath her desk and kicked me with her brogans.

Our Perilous Trust In Government

I possess an enameled tray that holds five flash drives containing two sets of the texts of my columns, the texts and artwork of my books, and photos and other images. One set is my primary source, the other is a backup. I don’t trust my computer or the power not to fail at some critical juncture in the future. For the same reason, I periodically backup my computer on an external drive to preserve its operating systems and other software as a failsafe against my computer being zapped by a lightning strike, overwhelmed by a power surge, or invaded by a hacker (government or freelance) to introduce a killer virus.