Submitted For Your Approval...

PICTURE A MAN, giving an interview which handily anticipates the whys of the current flap over Bill C-10.

Imagine that he explains, eloquently, exactly how "pre-censorship" works.

Note, if you can, how this concept of pre-censorship lines up rather handily with the critique Canadian artists, lawyers, filmmakers and writers have about the C-10 proposal to deny tax credits to whatever the government deems to be "contrary to public policy."

Now, imagine that interview took place almost fifty years ago. And that the subject is considered to be one of the greatest TV dramatists of all time. And he's been dead for decades.

Issues like this don't go away. They keep coming back. And battles of pre-censorship must always be re-fought, from generation to generation.

Now, submitted for your approval, what Rod Serling talks about here is mostly to do with sponsorship and networks. Substitute a minority government, elected (as most governments are in our multi-party system) by a minority of the population, and imagine that these officials are the arbiters, not of taste based on sales or commerce, but taste based on political agenda.

Now imagine the shoe was on the other foot. And it was a radical left wing government who actually, you know, DID go after the tax-exempt status of churches...

I wouldn't support that either.

It's amazing how the more things change, the more they stay the same. For those who claim C-10 has nothing to do with censorship, I respectfully submit that you're living in a little place we like to call....The Twilight Zone.

The "pre-censorship" comments start about 2:07 in.

H/T to Floppy Toth