Canuck hopes American stupidity isn't catching

Walt chuckled as he read media reports on the emasculation of Owen Honors and Mark Twain by the puritanical American thought police. Michael Den Tandt, a columnist for Canada's Sun newspapers, got angry.

"[The pillorying of Honors and "revision" of Twain] all suggests moral rot," he writes. "That doesn't augur well for America, or for us [Canadians]."

Writing yesterday in the Toronto Sun and its sister newspapers, Mr. Den Tandt opines that a "virus of pathetic and hypocritical stupidity...seems to have overtaken the chattering classes down south. Common sense? Intelligence? Forget it. Both gone."

He goes on to dissect the punishment of Capt. Owen Honors for making some mildly raunchy and not very funny home videos. "To fire him now, four years after the fact...is patently gutless and wrong-headed." Indeed.

As for the removal of the word "nigger" -- Walt isn't afraid to say it -- from Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, Den Tandt says "to change it because some delicate moderns can no longer stand the sight of the ugly word is an abomination". Just so.

Walt confesses to failing, in previous posts, to take seriously enough the implicit threat of censorship of not just writing and speech, but of all thought. But I don't think "moral rot" is the right way to describe the syndrome.

It is, rather, an excess of puritanical and hypocritical moralizing -- not "morality" but "moralizing" -- not seen since the Salem witch trials. Start building the stocks, Rev. Mather. You're going to need them to lock up the millions who want to speak their minds without regard to the tender sensibilities of vizmins, Muslims, gays, feminists and all the other so-called persecuted minorities.

As one anonymous reader wrote to Walt yesterday, this is all about limiting -- or eliminating -- the freedom of speech. Books are rewritten or burned. Videos are "cleaned up" or not shown at all. Letters to the editor and comments on stories in the press are censored. Even access to the Internet is restricted, now, if those in power don't like what is being said. Case in point: Wikileaks.

In his 1941 State of the Union address -- now known as "the Four Freedoms Speech" -- Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed four fundamental freedoms that people everywhere in the world ought to enjoy. Number one on his list was the freedom of speech and expression.

FDR concluded, "That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create...."

Sadly, it seems that President Roosevelt got it wrong. The new millennium has brought us the very order of tyranny -- including tyranny over thought and belief -- of which he spoke.