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Anti-atrocity
poem censored by Handcraft Printing bureaucrats.
Grenville has sent an Appeal to the AHP (see panel at right), which will be discussed and voted on at the forthcoming Annual General Meeting. |
The
appeal.
The
Board and all the members, Dear fellow-printers, I write to appeal against censorship of two pages I submitted for "Vinculum" recently. Tara's letter to me of 4th December last year advised that the Board has vetoed my two pages. Under Bylaw 1b, I appeal against the censorship. I request that a copy of this letter be sent to ALL the membership, and that mail-voting on this matter be encouraged. This is a matter of freedom of the press, and it is a very serious thing when bureaucrats impose censorship on the freely created works of free printers! At the time the bureaucrats among us foisted incorporation on us, and then hoodwinked the members into voting it in, I warned of the dangers of this very thing happening. It is sad to see that time has proven me correct. About my two pages: one is a short poem, the other is a flier about my new book. Both are handset, and hand-printed, with the book flier having gone through the Adana six times to achieve the required colour scheme. The Board has chosen to ban the flier for my book under Bylaw 2b ("items which will not be accepted") as "commercial advertising material with no connection to printing." In response, I point out that all other AHP members have in the past been allowed to include fliers for their own books, or even several pages of extracts.
My second item rejected is a short poem I composed. I am seldom inspired
to write poetry, and since I had to handset it, I kept it short, so
the work comprises only six lines. The topic is the atrocities committed
recently on the civilian residents of Hamilton and West Auckland, where
aircraft are willy-nilly dropping carcinogenic spray on residential
areas. This is an atrocity that rivals anything done in the Third Reich, and many of my friends who live in West Auckland have conveyed to me their anger and frustration at this flagrant violation of their rights, and the severe impact on their health and that of their children. Not only that, but the NZ media is being bribed to minimise the health damage and either not report this scandal, or to trivialise it if they do cover it. The bribery is done by the Ministry of Agriculture paying for full-page, full-colour adverts in all the newspapers in the Poison Spray Zone, with the implied threat: print anything detrimental to the Poison Spray Campaign, and all that lovely advertising money will disappear! Of course, the commercial media are acutely sensitive to such subtle pressures on them, and the reporters are squeezed in turn. My informants feel frustrated that traditional expectations of freedom of the press have vanished, and you can imagine the frustration and anger at Helen Clark they feel in consequence. I decided that with no freedom of the press elsewhere in NZ, here was a vital issue that a small private press could cover. This is the background to my being inspired to pen my poem. It contains no swear words (which would certainly have called for rejection on the grounds of bad taste.) In my phone discussion with Tara on the subject, he says that the word "atrocities" (line 5) was considered objectionable, and that the poem "may disturb foreign members"! My response is that "atrocities" is used within its standard dictionary meaning, and we are calling a spade a spade here. Surely if the Board goes along with that view, and thinks that a six-line, non-swearing, heartfelt poem about an atrocity committed by our own government is likely to cause several unspecified foreign printers to cancel their summer holidays in NZ to the detriment of our luxury hotel system, it is the height of idiocy. Tara suggested I should not have been so "blunt" and perhaps worded the poem in another way (which would of course make it longer and harder to typeset.) I am reminded of the words of our late member and fellow-printer, Count Potocki de Montalk: "If modern poets had to typeset and print their own works, we would be spared an awful lot of verbose nonsense." ("The Count" video production by Stephanie Miller.)
I was utterly flabbergasted to have my two pages rejected like this.
But the follow-up was more amazing: in my phone calls with the various
bureaucrats of the Board, they all fell over their feet to point the
finger at someone else, and give myriad different excuses why the pages
were rejected. Ken Wood (president) denies that the Board rejected the
pages, and says it was Tara's decision as Vinculum compiler. Tara in
contrast claims that it was the Board's decision. Ken McGrath claims
that they had to censor the poem as if it were included, "Helen
may sue the Association for libel." He lectured me for over half
an hour on the dire consequences of a likely court case, which the AHP
could not afford to defend, as if it were a foregone conclusion that
such a case would take
place. Ken is entirely wrong here, on two counts: Our legal adviser and treasurer, Jack O'Brien, refused to even discuss the matter, nor give his reasoning for going along with the censoring faction. At a time when Vinculum is facing going the way of the dodo, it is surprising to find our home-grown bureaucrats have so little to do with their time at Board meetings that they bother to censor the works of a fellow-printer! Perhaps they should spend the hours of time they dissected my pages in actually doing a bit of hand setting themselves, and printing their own pages! I have always felt that one of the things us hand printers have in common is our commitment to freedom of the press, and I took it as read that we all concur with Voltaire's remark: "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." I have always enjoyed looking at members' contributions to Vinculum, and particularly those promoting new books done by members. Many of those books I will probably never read nor own, but I do like to see the fliers. Just because some retentive Board members may prefer not to read my book is no reason to ban the flier about it. I am very proud of the new book, but recognise that it will not have a place on everybody's library shelves. But each member can choose what books they read: it is not for a school-marmish Board to impose its views on us here! When the letter advising me of the censoring arrived in December 2003, closely followed by a demand for a sub for 2004, I seriously considered resigning from the AHP in protest. But I felt this is clearly what the censoring faction wants, so I have paid my sub promptly, and intend to remain and fight for freedom of the press. I hope you join me. I am forced to wonder if the censoring faction has any connection with another major corruption issue in the AHP: that of the hugely lucrative commercial type foundry, run by Ken McGrath. The AHP paid out handsomely some years ago to purchase the matrices for this operation, which depleted the club reserves severely, and at the time, we were promised that "regular dividends from the foundry will be paid to the AHP." At an AGM two years ago, I queried the AHP accounts, and urged that they be not adopted until the foundry dividends were included, much to the embarrassment of the errant Mr McGrath. Though the foundry has lots of customers, it has yet to give any dividend to its sole shareholder, the association, though it has happily thrown in token payments for the prizes in various AHP contests from time to time. I suggest now would be a good year for Mr McGrath to come clean, pay out regular dividends to AHP, and stop trying censorship on those who call him out. If an equivalent of AHP had existed in Germany under the Hitler regime, imagine a printer member being asked by Jews to print a short poem about the evils of the gas chambers where their relatives and friends had perished. The printer agrees it is an atrocity and prints a short poem, handset, in a nice colour. Then imagine the Verband Deutscher Handarbeitsdrucker declined to collate it on a similar silly excuse to that offered by the AHP Board: "you cannot include this poem because it uses the word atrocities." I think we all now agree that what went on in Germany with the camps were atrocities. In ten years time, historians will look back to today and agree that what is going on in New Zealand under the Clark regime are likewise atrocities. I feel it is important that this short poem should be included in Vinculum, if only so that future historians can look back and realise that while many folks outside the Zone were sucked in by the MAF "spin", some folks did realise the true nature of the atrocities of the regime, and made a tiny protest through a short poem in Vinculum at a time when most other doors were slammed in their face. Failure to do this means we condemn ourselves to be a bunch of nincompoops content to print nothing more serious than limericks about buttercups. I urge you all to please vote "AFFIRMATIVE!" to my motion: "That the two pages submitted for Vinculum by Bruce Grenville that were censored by the Board be PERMITTED to be included in Vinculum, and that the Board is instructed to not censor any further material from any member as long as it does not include swear words." Thank you. May we all live in a land where freedom of the press flourishes in 2004! Sincerely, Bruce
Grenville |
