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.

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.

...I could guess they were playing the old game of squeeze-the-hand, trying to determine social status according to who could mash whose hand.  The whole ritual made me impatient; somehow I'd always thought that when men grew up, they left childish games behind.  But as I grew up myself, I saw that the petty competitions survived as rituals of competitive life.  I began to realize that those little struggles, like the enthusiasm for competitive sports, weren't really childish at all, but adult rituals to which children were introduced and guided early on.  The male of the species is built to battle other males - it goes back to the apes and way before them, for whatever reason.  We demonstrate our civilization by sublimating that drive into games, in which the risks are controlled and the likelihood of injury minimized.  The man who cheers at a football game is a living testament to evolution, and the dominance games that men live by all their lives are just part of the animal nature that still pervades all but two of our drives.  Boys are little men, not the other way around; it's just that they're more obvious, more open, and more honest about it than their elders are.

The notion that some people routinely get up at four o'clock in the morning is enough to give me shivers.  I mean, that's usually maybe two hours after I've gone to bed!  Maybe no hours at all, some night.

I found out later that that was a loaded question.  The straight answer was that there are a lot of people in show business who never stop to ask themselves what they're doing to their audience.  Some of 'em don't give a damn, as long as they make money.  Some of them care a lot, but have very different ideas from mine about what's good for the folks out there in the dark.  Most of 'em laugh at the idea that a show can have any effect on people.  I guess they're the ones who really think the argument over censorship is silly.