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"Who told you to sugar me off this case?" The question is a line from the 1946 detective film The Big Sleep. Philip Marlowe, detective, has been hired by General Sternwood to clear up some blackmail and mischief involving one of his children. The General's older daughter, Vivian, would rather Marlowe look no further, because, as it develops, young Carman has not only gotten herself mixed up in a pornography racket and murder, but is mentally unbalanced as well. When Marlowe seems to have solved the initial problem, Vivian makes a pass at him, in addition to giving him a check for more than Marlowe thinks he has earned. After some salacious, double-entendre repartée, the perceptive Marlowe asks her that question. "All right," he says when he receives no reply, "don't answer me.... But somebody put you up to it."
Censorship is a safe topic of discussion today. No one seems to be afraid to pronounce the word, which has become less a bogeyman among both those who know what it means and advocate it and those who have only a vague, tenuous notion of it. To these latter, censorship was once an object of abhorrence, of detestation; it was a touchstone for tyranny. Now they are being persuaded, against their better judgment or gut suspicions, that some forms of censorship are not only permissible but morally imperative. They are being sugared off the case by those who know what it means and want it. Someone or something has put both sides up to endorsing it.
The author had originally intended to devote this essay to the subject of how Americans have been sugared off their objection to censorship. But then he recalled some pro-censorship statements he had heard on radio and television and had read in newspapers and magazines, and decided to heed his own advice to others about poll-taking, consensus-auditing and man-on-the-street interviews: pollsters, auditors, and interviewers have a knack for choosing the most inarticulate or unintelligent people to address grave subjects in answer to usually leading questions such as "Should children be protected from violence and obscenity on television?" Not only do most of those asked that kind of question not recognize it for what it is, but they are unable to...