This week I'm away at a family reunion which is taking place on a strangely shaped island in the far north of Washington state. It's named "Orcas Island," probably after the strangely slick creatures that patrol its banks in search of tasty swimming food items.

From the air the island looks like a pair of lungs. It's easy to find one's way around as the beaches are named "West" and "East." There's also "Massacre Bay," but that's another story.

Thinking about what to present in my absence, I came across a column I wrote for KZYX ten years ago, when I was just starting out here. In those days Words on Books was called "BOOKWAVES" and I have no idea why Mary Aigner thought that was a good idea. It's her fault. It's always her fault.

This is what I wrote on October 23, 1997:

As one of the newest programers on KZYX, I'd like to say I'm proud to be heard on a station that takes issues of free speech seriously. And that plays so much classical chamber music, but that's just me.

So far my five-minute Philippics have been about nothing more controversial than children's books, or a new biography of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Already I have shared precious air time with daily live broadcasts of the Bear Lincoln trial, and with a wide variety of newsworthy public affairs programs. This kind of programming contains information of great importance to the people who live here.

Journalist A. J. Liebling wrote that "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" and it's still true today. Of all the sources of news, information and entertainment, very few are supported primarily by their readers or listeners. When you support KZYX you are voting with your wallet for freedom of speech -- and for a heck of a lot of great and diverse entertainment.

In this New Age, when great media conglomerates own the major national book publishers as well as most newspapers, when TV sings the seductive song of Buy Me - Try Me, when most of the things you hear on the air are driven by advertising -- where does a person turn to hear her neighbors talking to each other? To hear local news that doesn't focus on car accidents? To alert the community to environmental dangers or neighborhood meetings? To listen to Bach, Mozart and Charlie Parker?

You already know the answer to these questions. You are listening to it. KZYX has become the best source of unbiased local news and commercial-free programming for many miles around.

Last month bookstores and libraries celebrated National Banned Books Week. Maybe you didn't know that all sorts of books still are being challenged or banned from school and library shelves.

Among the most frequently challenged books are the Goosebumps series by R. L. Stein, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and books by Maya Angelou, J. D. Salinger, Judy Blume and others.

According to the people who track censorship, sex, profanity, violence, and racism were the primary targets, but challenges also were directed at books considered "dreary" (that would be Shel Silverstein's A Light in the Attic), books that contained "armpit farts" (Bruce Coville's My Teacher Glows in the Dar), books some believed handled suicide inappropriately (Judith Guest's Ordinary People), and books which depicted teen smoking (Ryan White: My Own Story).

In Lindale, Texas, classics such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Herman Melville's Moby Dick were removed from the high school's reading list because they supposedly "conflicted with the values of the community."

Censorship takes many forms, some lethal. In 1993, Reuters photo-journalist Dan Eldon was stoned to death by a Somali mob reacting against a UN bombing. His journals are the subject of a book titled The Journey is the Destination, The Journals of Dan Eldon. In Algeria's civil war journalists were targeted for death. In many places writers are intimidated or silenced.

In Mendocino county, life goes on in its serene and beautiful way. We have to remember that it was not always thus, and may not be thus in the future. We have to protect and nurture our liberties, or we will lose them.

Radio stations as interesting and useful as this one can only survive when their tiny operating budgets are solidly and fully supported by listeners. That's you, and that's me, and any time is the best time to help KZYX continue to exist, and improve.

Aired Sunday August 19, 2007 at 10:55 am and Wednesday August 22, 2007 at 1:00 pm

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