There's an old joke about a guy on a bus who starts throwing strips of newspaper out the window.

"What are you doing that for?" asks the driver.

"It keeps the elephants away," says the man.

"What?" the driver says, "There's not an elephant in 2,000 miles around."

"Works pretty good, huh?" says the passenger.

Which brings us to Banned Books Week. Every year, librarians, scholars and other professional worriers get together and organize public events to warn us about the impending threat of censorship. On campuses, solemn-faced students and faculty members bravely gather on steps of libraries and dare to read from forbidden tomes.

And we in the news media, being reflexively sympathetic, dutifully do tongue-clucking stories about it all.

Hog wash. If we got out a big legal pad and started listing all the real threats to our civil liberties, foreign and domestic, a loss of free speech would not make the first page or two.

The worriers can always find some little town where "The Catcher in the Rye" has been removed from library shelves or some rapper's art is being censored. And then they present this as typical of what's going on all over the country.

But in a nation where HBO's "Tell Me That You Love Me" and Showtime's "Californication" are popular new TV shows, it's difficult to make a straight-faced argument that the intellectual heirs of Josef Goebbels are burning books in the town square. Spend two minutes on the Internet, stop by your local video store, click on the "adult" category of your cable company's on-demand offerings, and you can fairly gauge the level of censorship in America today.

That's a GOOD thing. We don't need prior restraint. And it's good that the librarians and others are vigilant about it, because the mind of the censor never rests. Unfortunately, they really will go after everything from the Cantebury Tales to Harry Potter. And the courts will continue slapping them down, every time.

Works pretty good, huh?