The Source Rather Than the Message

Reading this week in Bernstein's Inside Out, I was struck by the way in which Bernstein was able to continue writing in Hollywood, despite being on the the blacklist. Hollywood writers who had a connection to communism were arguably ostracized and forced out of work because the government and other concerned Americans worried about the Communist messages that they could be sending and subliminally suggesting in the pieces they wrote for television and for the movies. Yet at no point mentioned in the memoir does Bernstein note any of his previous works being called into question by the authorities, with specific passages cited as furthering the Communist agenda. And in order to get his script accepted by a studio, all Bernstein had to do was put someone else's name on it, a person that could not be tied to Communism.

This kind of double standard often seems to rear its head, in cases of censorship and beyond. It isn't so much that anyone has a problem with the message being communicated. However, if they take issue with the source of the message, they discount the message entirely, as though a harmless nursery rhyme has become suddenly dangerous because it is being spoken by a criminal. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is a recent banned book case out of Texas. In January of this year, the children's book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? was banned from the Texas curriculum because the author, Bill Martin, Jr., was confused with Marxist writer Bill Martin. Turned off by the "author's" writings for adults, one of the members of the board of education strongly cautioned against placing the children's book within reach of the children. The text itself was not evaluated on its own merit; that the author may have written some questionable things for adults was enough to discredit the book. Yet even if Bill Martin, Jr. had written communist literature, one has to wonder: What are they worried about? That osmosis will transfer communist beliefs from the mind of a writer, through a neutral text, and into the minds of children? What threat can a source pose if his message is harmless?