the tawdry and tasteless smut field. Thus, ONE tends to agree with James J. Clancy, counsel for the Citizens for Decent Literature, reported in the N. Y. TIMES for 10/23/65 as telling a convention of his organization that the smut peddlers are arousing the public's anger. "We can take consolation from this," he said. "They are merely hanging themselves." Whether they will be killed off by the public's anger, or, as ONE predicted in last December's issue, by the public's boredom, remains

to be seen.

Unquestionably,

boredom-at-large,

not the anti-obscenity hysterics of a few, will prove to be the only and final "smuticide;" for without the boredom, increased censorship merely drives literary pornography, etc., into underground, illicit channels-without diminishing its volume appreciably-and thus it usually succeeds in creating a black market more active and more lucrative than the original legal market. Such censorship was recently attacked by Dr. Henry P. Weihofen of the University of New Mexico Law School, in Albuquerque. "The real question is not whether we are in favor of pornography (in literature) or against it," he said, in addressing a recent meeting of the local Library Association (ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL, 10/6). "The real question is, granting we are against it, is it worse to allow such books to be sold, or to set up a censorship which will tell each of us what we are, and what we are not, going to be allowed to read?" Pointing out that such now-famed authors as William Faulkner, John O'Hara, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley have had their books banned, he added: "I think librarians would agree that censorship

is a cure that is worse than the disease."

But in contrast with such liberal and rational views is a READER'S DIGEST article (December, '65), crusading against pornography with all of

the DIGEST'S customary hoopla and blasting of trumpets displayed in top form. Under a typical scarehead title, "The Damning Case Against Pornography," O. K. Armstrong recites harrowing testimony from various legal agencies concerning crimes resulting from use of "pornographic" materials. The crimes primarily complained of, by everyone from J. Edgar Hoover on down, are crimes of violence (including sexual violence) committed by juveniles. But no effective effort

whatever is made in this article (or by most policing agencies) to distinguish between the component of aggression and the component of sex in publications alleged as inciting to crimes of violence. On the contrary, amorous love and cruelty (actually contrary tendencies even in the sadist) are blindly equated, with total disregard of the facts of human nature, so that pornography, which properly refers only to what is erotically stimulating in literature and the arts, is arbitrarily and quite incorrectly made to denote all depictions of brutality as well.

ONE is being charitable enough to assume that this confusion (which no psychologist worthy of the name would tolerate) is simply the result of ignorance or misinformation, rather than indicative of the official triumph of the very motivations underlying the modern upsurge in criminal violence. It is to be hoped that, in Mr. Armstrong's recommended campaign against "this monstrous public enemy,' authorities will take the trouble to discover what the enemy really is-and to realize that pornography, per se, is an extremely minor factor in the rise of criminal behavior today, compared with our constant glorification of cruelty and barbarism into ideals, even norms, of human conduct.

All of this is obviously part and parcel of the authoritarian, undemocratic trends existing in America, in which "tyranny by the majority" con-

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