It took a few minutes to scroll through the catalog and find the painkiller, though, then a minute or two more convincing the machine that it really did want to take coins, not the credit card I no longer had. I winced at the noise it made coughing up the tube, and the man taking live orders charged me for the cup of water. That was all there was to his mart, just the machine and his window, in a storefront six feet wide. Talk about low overhead. And minimizing shoplifting.
His gambit is obvious, of course.... If he can create a great deal of public furor over the more undesirable aspects of popular culture, he can distract the citizenry to the point at which they will become so involved in debating freedom to blast out sound and massacre lyric verse, that they will ignore the duller and more wearisome aspects the actions of the Assembly.
Speech is speech, whether it comes from the pulpit, the lectern, or the stage - or the music box, for that matter. The old bastard knew that, and was deliberately trying to impose his own definition on it for his own purposes - which had nothing to do with the survival of democracy or even of morality. He knew damn well that if he could get the public to swallow censorship on the stage, it was only a matter of time before he'd be trying to censor conversation between friends, and enforcing it with wiretaps and
agents provocateurs.
... You see, my boy, everyone really approves of censorship, underneath it all - as long as it's our enemies who are being censored. We all want to keep our opponents from saying things we don't like.
Our opinions, however, should be free from the slightest vestige of censorship. But the only way to protect our own right to free speech is to protect everybody else's, and the people in power always forget that. So once they've gained office, they begin to try to silence the opposition and if they're in the government, they may actually be able to do it. So there is constant pressure to limit open discussion, and it always comes in by decrying the immorality of the opposition's statements.