And I, of all people, should have something to say.
Let me start off by pointing you to this piece by Steven D at Daily Kos.
Usually when I think about freedom, perhaps the one I cherish the most is the opportunity to read what I want regardless of whether someone else approves or disapproves of my choices. The public library was as much a sacred place for me growing up as church. Yet for a "free country" the United States has a well known history of banning or restricting access to books, even in recent times. . . .
It seems everyday someone makes a complaint about why certain books should not be available because they find something about it that doesn't agree with their most cherished beliefs or prejudices. But isn't the entire point of freedom that we get to make those decisions for ourselves? That we don't turn away from books with ideas that we don't hold, but engage them and their ideas and make up our own minds?
This leads more or less automatically to a series of posts from last month about censorship, libraries, and the role of partisan interests, here, here, and here. That led to quite a debate with someone calling him/herself "SafeLibraries" who apparently wants libraries to be safe for everything except books. What is most interesting about S/L's comments is not their content, which was minimal, but the style of argument, which seems composed of equal parts of deflection and the sense that any resistance to the proponent's agenda is necessarily ideological, when, in fact, it's the proponent (in this case, "SafeLibraries") who is operating from ideology. (The giveaway in these exchanges is S/L's insistence that objections to "ex-gay" literature, or other things advocated by "conservative Christians" are passed over because of ideology, although I pointed out a couple of times that the "ex-gay" movement is founded on pseudo-science and quackery and has been demonstrated repeatedly to be harmful.)
Banning books is simply banning ideas, as Steven D points out. To me, that's a direct attack on the First Amendment, which I consider the cornerstone of everything that comes after (the lock-and-load contingent notwithstanding).
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Think about the sense of that sentence: it's all about access to ideas and the liberty to express them freely, which is exactly what the Gail Sweets and SafeLibraries of the world are trying to take away from us, under the guise of "preserving community values," the community being those they can stampede into agreeing with them by application of that old scare mantra, "Save the Children!"
(A note: Yes, I'm fully aware that children need to be guided and that they can't be thrown headfirst into a bunch of ideas that they're not yet equipped to deal with. There is an answer: it's called "teaching" and it makes use of books, many of which the Guardians of Morality (TM) would like to see banned.)
I'm not confining my condemnation to the right, by any means. I remember not so long ago that there was a movement to "clean up" The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of the great classics of American literature, because of its portrayal of race, including prominent use of the "n" word. The same mechanism is at work: blinkered vision, intolerance of other viewpoints, and an amazing inability to see other possible approaches. (And for those who might be inclined to quibble that Huck Finn was only being brought into line with modern sensibilities, or some such bullshit, a one-word response: No. Censorship is censorship, whether it be banning or "editing.")
My immediate response to someone who objects to a book is simply "Don't read it." Unfortunately, it's a somewhat more pernicious phenomenon than that: ignorance and lack of critical thinking skills are how we wind up with phenomena such as the teabaggers, who are so easily manipulated by the likes of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Newt Gingrich. And don't expect any politicians to buck the trend, at least not on the national level: their corporate pals don't want a populace able to think for itself.
I think the next censorship battle is not going to be over books. It's already taking shape in net neutrality, and it's going to be interesting to see which politicians will be falling over themselves to sell us out. I figure it will be the so-called "moderates" on both sides of the aisle lining up behind the corporate tools on the right.
We're going to have to come up with a way to implement a "Banned Websites Week."
In the meantime, read something that's been banned. And share it with your kids.
4 comments:
I should have expected the kind of off-point nitpicking that you've demonstrated here.
In point of fact, in any but the most limited, literalist sense, books are being banned, or someone is attempting to ban them, someplace in the U.S. on a regular basis. Is this an official act of the U.S. government? No, because the fed knows now that it can't do that. What it is is a function of small bands of "concerned citizens" with an agenda making life uncomfortable for school boards and library boards under the guise of "Save the Children!" In effect, they're co-opting the government to further their own agendas. (It's worth remembering that the religious right's first point of attack in its assault on our freedoms was running stealth candidates for school boards and local governments.)
You seem to be so hung up on your own ideology that you missed the whole point of this post: banning books is banning ideas, which is a direct affront to the guarantees of freedom of expression in the First Amendment. It's that simple.
"The children" is a cover -- you don't do any service to children by cutting them off from ideas. You educate them about those ideas and you guide them into thinking critically so that when they encounter something that may be unsettling, they're equipped to deal with it rationally.
I can't believe you find that so hard to understand. (And just so you know, providing a series of irrelevant links isn't going to spark my admiration.)
"You seem to be so hung up on your own ideology that you missed the whole point of this post: banning books is banning ideas, which is a direct affront to the guarantees of freedom of expression in the First Amendment. It's that simple."
You seem to be so hung up on your own ideology that you missed the whole point of what Judith Krug and Jessamyn West said: banning books having inappropriate material for children has nothing to do with banning ideas, thus avoiding a direct affront to the guarantees of freedom of expression in the First Amendment. It's that simple.
You know, if you'd bother to read what someone has written before you respond, you might look a lot better when your comments hit the Web.
Read again what I wrote about children and how to equip them to deal with ideas. There's nothing particularly ideological about it -- it's just pragmatism. This assumes, of course, that people want children to grow into adults who can actually think.
Then give yourself a few days to digest it all and respond to what I actually wrote.
My father was an autodidact. He was orphaned at the age of 12 at the beginning of the Depression, and went to work after his father was killed in a railway accident. His education was spotty, and although he was very intelligent, he was never given the intellectual tools to think in terms more complex than the absolutes. When he bought a house, he had a surveyor mark the property lines; he would then dig a trench, install benderboard or some other physical delineator precisely at the property line, and plant rose bushes the length of that line. He kept those roses trimmed with military exactitude so that no leaf, no bud, no twig protruded into the neighboring property; he was vigilant that no drop of his water supply went to the neighbor's lawn or shrubs. He was a man, in short, of literalities both physical and mental.
He would have begun his discussion of "Banned Books Week" almost the same way SafeLibraries does: "The last [literally] book [literally] banned [literally] in the United States was Fanny Hill." But Banned Books Week is not literally about banned books, as SafeLibraries surely knows. It's about books that are challenged in libraries across the country for reasons that are unworthy of expression by educated people. Mark Twain's fiction has been challenged because it frequently uses the word "nigger"; therefore, it is not appropriate for children, and we must always Think of The Children®. Jessamyn West (not the famed novelist; no relation, in fact) is correct in saying that the bulk of book challenges are based on age appropriateness for children, but that is a technicality overlooked by the common press in reporting these cases, and which results in more books being challenged on general grounds if a book is actually removed from the shelves. Putting The Children® out there as human shields is morally indefensible.
It's easy to quote an interview with Judith Krug on the topic of school libraries and the "rare occasion" when books are reviewed after delivery and discovered not to be within the selection criteria for the school library, and extrapolate that to the greater subject of suppressed or challenged books in general, but it's a false extrapolation. If SafeLibraries is as well educated as s/he would like us to believe, s/he knows it's a false extrapolation. S/He also knows that Nat Hentoff's article in fact says nothing about burning of books beyond a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was speaking metaphorically, not literally.
I assume that SafeLibraries is one person since s/he identifies him/herself as the proprietor of the blog SafeLibraries and as having a career with SafeLibraries.org; the two sites refer back and forth to each other as though they were a real organization and the thoughts of a real thinker. This is circular bullshit. If SafeLibraries is so proud of carving out a place of safety for library patrons, why is s/he afraid to identify him/herself by name and location? Just for your information, SL: We're not coming after you with torches and pitchforks – we're challenging your limited thinking, your fearful attitudes toward intellectual freedom, and your inability or unwillingness to speak directly to the subject when you comment. Translation, in case I've used words that are too long: Get a grip, stick to the subject, or shut the hell up, because you're getting really, really tedious. And if you're determined to play Oz the Magnificent behind your curtain, be prepared for a focused thinker in gingham to pull back that curtain.
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