The First Amendment right guaranteeing free speech is the issue here, even though it’s being obscured by the FCC’s self-important view of what constitutes “acceptable” speech. But even though the situation highlights the true dunderheaded silliness of the FCC’s point of view, all is not bad, because the censorship of an artistic event by the government usually results in unruly fame for that event.

Poetry is not much read in the United States, and without the 1957 trial, “Howl” would probably have remained an important work by an obscure poet, read only by students in the academy and the struggling few who actually write poetry themselves. But because of the trial, Howl, And Other Poems has now sold almost a million copies, and continues to sell briskly. Happily, it is such a fine poem, so terrifying a view of contemporary society, and one so beautifully written that it is my opinion that few who read it will be unaffected by it.

Ginsberg was culturally prescient as well. In the second section of the poem, a long accusation of American industrial/government rapaciousness, he uses the figure of Moloch as a symbol of corporate indifference to the individual.

“Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!”

The biblical Moloch was one of the princes of Hell. A terrifying demon, he is described by John Milton in "Paradise Lost" as "besmeared with blood/Of human sacrifice, and parents' tears," a fearsome devil who eats the children of the faithful. Ginsberg’s Moloch is the self-serving corporate entity who, for money, foments armed conflict. A more accurate metaphor for the current war footing of the United States cannot be found.

Perhaps the muffling of “Howl” in 2007 will bring about the same firestorm of wild enthusiasm on the part of a general public that the 1957 trial caused. This would be a humorous and good thing, and it may just happen. One hopes that imaginative minds will prevail against the FCC watchdogs of your personal morals, in the way that Judge Clayton W. Horn prevailed, who officiated at the 1957 “Howl” obscenity trial. He wrote in his opinion, “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemism?”

The answer, of course, is no.