Cartoon editors are painstakingly working through more than 1,500 episodes of classic Tom and Jerry, Flintstones, and Scooby Doo cartoons to erase scenes of characters - gasp - smoking. Turner Broadcasting says it's a voluntary decision, but the move comes after a report from Ofcom, which has regulatory authority over broadcasters. So in this case "censorship" seems a reasonable term.
It's not the first time. France's national library airbrushed a cigarette out of a poster of Jean-Paul Sartre to avoid falling foul of an anti-tobacco law. The US postal service has removed the cigarettes from photographs on stamps featuring Jackson Pollock, Edward R Murrow, and Robert Johnson. And in the 20th-anniversary rerelease of ET, Steven Spielberg replaced the policemen's guns with walkie-talkies.
On one level, this is just a joke: they are redrawing cartoons to make them more kid-friendly. And just to make the rules completely PC, Turner is allowed to leave cigarettes in the hands of cartoon villains.
But there's something deeper here: an attempt to sanitise history, to rewrite it the way we wish it had happened. Smoking is a part of reality, and especially a part of history. Just look at any old movie. Everyone smokes: doctors, pregnant women, lovers. Real people smoked, too - people like Murrow and Pollock and Sartre. And some of them died of lung and throat cancer, which parents and teachers can point out. It's Orwellian to airbrush historical photos in order to remove evidence of that of which you disapprove.
Political correctness takes on a whole new dimension in American textbooks. No cigarettes, you can be sure of that. But big states and cities, who are big textbook purchasers in America's semi-decentralised school system, have forced "diversity" rules on the textbook publishers. Publishers say they are trying to avoid the old "white, suburban kids" textbook style. But they have instituted quotas that are just as far from reality.
McGraw-Hill's guidelines for elementary and high school textbooks say 40% of people depicted should be white, 30% Hispanic, 20% African-American, 7% Asian-American, and 3% Native American. The US population is 67.4% non-Hispanic white. (And about 1% Native American.)
Harcourt demands somewhat fewer Hispanic faces but more African-Americans. The Wall Street Journal reports hilarious and depressing stories of publishers' attempts to avoid depicting Asian-Americans as intellectuals or mathematics students, or redesigning the cover of a first-grade reader because the picture of a pig might offend Muslims or Jews. As you might suspect, it's hard to find wheelchair-bound child models, so they have to depict able-bodied children as handicapped - all in the name of greater reality.
But the biggest problem is that the attempt to satisfy dozens of interest groups can sap the life out of literature and the history out of history, as Diane Ravitch discussed in her book The Language Police. Textbook editors are told to avoid words such as landlord, senior citizen, dogma, yacht or actress. One US history textbook included a profile and photo of Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman pilot, but no mention of Orville and Wilbur Wright.
All this activism has resulted in at least one correction of the historical record: Franklin D Roosevelt spent decades trying to conceal the fact that he was confined to a wheelchair. Historians say that out of more than 10,000 photographs of FDR, only four show him using a wheelchair. Those are the ones that are now used in textbooks. One victory for historical accuracy. However, the FDR Memorial removed the ever-present cigarette from FDR's hands. Orwell's ministry of truth would be proud.
