Warnings? Human nature sees only temptations

Woodworking Column by Dave Wood, Columnist

I don't suppose I'll get much argument when I say that human beings are the most perverse mammal lumbering across the face of this old earth.

Tell them to do one thing and they'll do another.

When my grandmother told me not to stick my tongue on a cold pump handle - probably the last thing I ever thought of doing on my own - I went right out and licked one.

Well, I didn't actually lick it because it stuck tight on contact.

Later on, my father warned me not to "pee-pee on the new electric fence."

Guess what I did and your eyes will water.

But I'm not the only human to depart from reason when reason dictates a reasonable course of action. I remember my grandmother, of pump handle fame, telling me that lips that touched liquor had never touched hers - until the Prohibition Era.

"Once alcohol became legal your grandpa and I loved driving out into the country to some sleazy speakeasy and drink home brew, sitting on the runningboard of our 1917 Nash touring car."

Our relatives the monkeys, for instance, don't smoke noxious cigarettes (unless we train them to), free-base cocaine, patronize tanning parlors or indulge in any of the idiocies that human flesh is heir to.

So why this Jeremiaid on the nature of human frailty?

Well, it all came to a head when I was browsing through a new tome entitled "100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature," authored by UW-RF English professor Nicholas Karolides with Margaret Bald and Dawn B. Sova.

If you want a quick index to perversity, just browse in the table of contents to see some of the books, which communities or individuals, in their "wisdom," have seen fit to prohibit.

Let's start with books banned for religious reasons.

How about The Bible? Or the Koran? Or the Talmud? Or Tyndale's version of the New Testament?

All banned in one place or another as we humans sat in holier than thou judgment.

What about books banned on social grounds?

Try "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "The Diary of Anne Frank," "The Canterbury Tales," "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin," and "To Kill a Mockingbird" for starters.

Then, of course, there's sex.

Voltaire's "Candide" got the axe. So did Flaubert's "Madam Bovary," which read like 'Guideposts' when compared to today's adolescent literature.

Yeah, but all those books were banned in backward places like Tupelo, Mississippi, right? Wrong.

Karolides and company list seven censorship cases right here in HighQualityofLifePackerland involving those 100 books covered. Across the river in Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Political Correctnesses, the authors report six cases.

The new book is a real eye-opener, categorizing the types of banning, summarizing the books banned and giving the censorship history of each.

Of course it's just the tip of the iceberg. One of my favorite censorship stories happened in Iowa about 20 years ago, when the academic dean of Waldorf College found out that the school's drama department planned to perform Arthur Miller's "The Crucible."

The dean, an ordained minister, said "Sorry, you can't do that. 'The Crucible' features a minister who commits adultery and men of the cloth just don't do that sort of thing."

This of course made every newspaper in the upper Midwest.

A month later, the dean-minister was arrested in Des Moines for soliciting a prostitute.

That, too, made every newspaper in the upper Midwest.

So, I guess we perverse humans have to be content in the knowledge that, sometimes, what goes around comes around.

Questions? Call Dave at 426-9554.