This is the part where you get to call me a conspiracy theorist.

Either the individuals/embodiments that are hell-bent on oppressing us are doing a TERRIBLE job…or the intellectual repression I fear from the government and other powerful bodies is working so well that I’m not noticing it at all. I offer a simple example. I’ve yet to find a place anywhere I’ve visited in the US where I can’t find Ayn Rand’s writings, or where I can’t access an online streaming database of Stravinsky and Beethoven. No ISP I’ve ever seen blocks Wikipedia, or inhibits my occasional foray into servers from other countries, like Project Gutenberg Australia or Russia’s official library system. D.H. Lawrence was freely available in the last bookstore I visited- and so was Playboy and several Penthouse Forums! Though I don’t use my money on those last two items (a waste of my time and money, to muster an opinion), the point is established. Censorship in this country against what I would consider ‘radical’ topics and ideas- things that would upset the standard intellectual snapshot of a capable individual, or many individuals thinking the same thing together- is simply not effective.

If we take the negative approach to this observation, and conclude that the censorship is so effective that I don’t even notice it, this gets really messy. Is there a sea of information out there that neither myself nor any of my capable peers have ever seen? Who has it? Why is it being withheld from the intellectuals of my country? I realize this proposal is ridiculous, but I can’t help but entertain the idea that America’s freedom of information is only a shell of what most people seem to understand. I am going to place my confidence on the opposite shoulder- the idea that our government simply SUCKS at withholding problematic information.

So, if I’m at least as smart as the government, and I realize that people like myself are finding whatever they want, and planning to disseminate information in a method consistent with their beliefs, why the hell not take action now?

Maybe I should go back to writing poetry now…this is getting a bit hard to stew on…

Literature to cover this summer

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Beautiful and Damned
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Bilthesdale Romance
Lewis, C.S. God in the Dock
Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto
Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead
Rand, Ayn. The Romantic Manifesto
Wilde, Oscar. The Profundis and Other Writings