We Should Have Expected This

Im sort of surprized it took this long. Via Joe.My.God.:

The Spotsylvania County School Board has directed staff to begin removing books that contain “sexually explicit” material from library shelves and report on the number of books that have been removed at a special called meeting next week. The directive came after a parent raised concerns at the School Board’s meeting Monday about books available through the Riverbend High School’s digital library app.

The board voted 6–0 to order the removal. Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned. “I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

The full article is here. You know who else liked to burn books? Let me refresh your memory:

On May 10, 1933, university students burn upwards of 25,000 “un-German” books in Berlin’s Opera Square. Some 40,000 people gather to hear Joseph Goebbels deliver a fiery address: “No to decadence and moral corruption!”

As part of an effort to align German arts and culture with Nazi ideas (Gleichschaltung), university students in college towns across Germany burned thousands of books they considered to be “un-German,” heralding an era of state censorship and cultural control. Students threw books pillaged mostly from public and university libraries onto bonfires with great ceremony, band-playing, and so-called “fire oaths.” The students sought to purify German literature of “foreign,” especially Jewish, and other immoral influences. Among the authors whose works were burned was Helen Keller, an American whose belief in social justice encouraged her to champion disabled persons, pacifism, improved conditions for industrial workers, and women's voting rights.

Do I really need to say more?

Today in Disgusting People: A Twofer (Update)

First, we have Junior, who has a knack for putting his foot right in it, hard:

Donald Trump Jr. likened his father's proposed border wall with Mexico to a zoo fence Tuesday evening, sparking a sharp backlash on social media from users who thought he was comparing immigrants to zoo animals.

“You know why you can enjoy a day at the zoo?” the son of President Donald Trump wrote in an Instagram post that has since been deleted. “Because walls work.”

I'm a habitual zoo goer, and I've seen some interesting transformations in animal habitats, including one case in which an exhibit in the bird house that had been open now has screening. Talking to other visitors, we really couldn't decide whether it was the keep the birds in or to keep people out.

Oh, and as for the idea that walls work -- ask the Chinese about that.

Via Joe.My.God.

Second in our spotlight today is Mat Staver of the Liberty Counsel, the "conservative" legal firm that has never won a case. He takes exception to a bill that just passed the Senate outlawing, after all this time, lynching:

The Justice for Victims of Lynching Act passed unanimously in the U.S. Senate but Liberty Counsel founder Mat Staver says it passed without some senators realizing an amendment was added providing special rights for homosexuals and transgenders. He calls that amendment the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent.

“The old saying is once that camel gets the nose in the tent, you can’t stop them from coming the rest of the way in,” he explains. “And this would be the first time that you would have in federal law mentioning gender identity and sexual orientation as part of this anti-lynching bill.”

Got that? Not being lynched is a "special right".

Oh, and of course he's lying -- the section was not an amendment, it was in the body of the bill:

“(2) OFFENSES INVOLVING ACTUAL OR PERCEIVED RELIGION, NATIONAL ORIGIN, GENDER, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, GENDER IDENTITY, OR DISABILITY.—

“(A) IN GENERAL.—If 2 or more persons, in any circumstance described in subparagraph (B), willfully cause bodily injury to any other person because of the actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of any person—

“(i) each shall be imprisoned not more than 10 years, fined in accordance with this title, or both, if bodily injury results from the offense; or

“(ii) each shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life, fined in accordance with this title, or both, if death results from the offense or if the offense includes kidnapping or aggravated sexual abuse.

But then, we know Staver is a liar.

Update: Looks like the social media storm got to him. From Joe.My.God.:

Some media have falsely reported that Liberty Counsel is opposed to banning lynching, or, opposes banning lynching of LGBT people. Such reporting is false, reckless, and offensive. In fact, Mat Staver said, “No one can or should oppose a bill that bans lynching.” Staver continued, “We oppose lynching across the board for any person. Period!”

“The bill in question created a list of protected categories, thus limiting the application of the law. Lynching should be prohibited no matter the person’s reason for committing this violent crime,” concluded Staver.

A little hysterical, don't you think? Must have hit a nerve.

Joe points out the big lie behind this disclaimer:

From the Liberty Counsel’s 2009 press release:

Today, Liberty Counsel delivered more than 100,000 petitions from people across America, opposing the so-called Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. The petitions were delivered on the day that President Barack Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, was scheduled to testify in favor of the Hate Crimes bill. If passed, this expansive bill would give “actual or perceived” “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” the same federal protection as race.

It looks like Staver only opposes some protected categories.

And, a bonus track:

In efforts to appease fits of manufactured conservative rage over the moderation of hateful content on social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter have relied on the advice of anti-LGBTQ extremists and far-right grifters “to help them figure out who should be banned and what’s considered unacceptable.”

Facebook is consulting the likes of the Family Research Council (which, you'll remember, has no programs for families and sponsors no research); its president, Tony Perkins; and the Heritage Foundation, not known for its inclusive approach. Twitter has gone to the likes of Grover Norquist and Ali Akbar. The latter was consulted about whether Alex Jones was too extreme. (If you don't know the name, google "Infowars".)

Well, I guess you go to the experts on something like hate speech.

Read the whole article; it's an eye-opener. And if you ever considered joining Facebook or Twitter, think again.

Also via Joe.My.God.

Footnote: I think this applies to our "independent press" as a whole. From the Media Matters article:

These examples show tech platforms’ tendency of caving to conservative whims in order to appease manufactured rage over baseless claims of censorship and bias. Evidence shows that right-wing pages drastically outnumber left-wing pages on Facebook, and under Facebook’s algorithm changes, conservative meme pages outperform all other political news pages. Across platforms, right-wing sources dominate topics like immigration coverage, showing the cries of censorship are nothing more than a tactic. And judging by tech companies’ willingness to cater to these tantrums, the tactic appears to be working.

For "tech companies" just substitute "mainstream press".

Happy Banned Books Week

Yes, it's that time of year again, when the forces of righteousness are acknowledged for their vain attempts to make ideas go away. Here's a nice little story on the subject. This struck me:

In March 2001, Reverend George Bender of the Pentecostal Harvest Assembly of God Church in Pittsburgh led his congregation in a bonfire of “ungodly” music, Disney movies and books including the Harry Potter titles. Later that year, another Christian church in New Mexico followed Bender’s example, calling the books “a masterpiece of satanic deception."

I suspect we all know what other group was known for public book burnings:

Somehow, the ideas didn't go away.

I Must Be Doing Something Right

I just discovered I've been blocked from commenting on WND, also known as "WingnNut Daily."

I guess the echo chamber gets confused when you introduce facts into the discussion.

Freedom of the Press

To self-censor?

From Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice:

If there was a golden age for American media, it was long ago and it was short.

Over at The Atlantic, Torie Rose DeGhett has an excellent, utterly unsurprising article about a photograph taken in the last hours in the first Gulf War.

The work of the the then 28 year old photographer Kenneth Jarecke, the image captures a fact of war hopelessly obscured by the shots that angered Jarecke enough to postpone a planned hiatus from combat photography. “’It was one picture after another of a sunset with camels and a tank.” — or, once combat actually began, gaudy displays of gee whiz toys, the disembodied beauty of missile exhausts, or bloodless shots of tires and twisted metal. War as video game, or a spectacle for the folks back home.

The bulk of Levenson's post is an embroidery on DeGhett's article (at the link, where you can also find the photo, which is under copyright and so does not appear here) detailing the history of this photograph and the fact that no major "news" outlet would touch it.

DeGhett goes farther, though:

Let me say up front that I don’t like the press,” one Air Force officer declared, starting a January 1991 press briefing on a blunt note. The military’s bitterness toward the media was in no small part a legacy of the Vietnam coverage decades before. By the time the Gulf War started, the Pentagon had developed access policies that drew on press restrictions used in the U.S. wars in Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. Under this so-called “pool” system, the military grouped print, TV, and radio reporters together with cameramen and photojournalists and sent these small teams on orchestrated press junkets, supervised by Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) who kept a close watch on their charges.

The "free press" has learned its lesson. Granted, it's impossible to present all the news that's happening every day. Editorial choices have to be made, priorities implemented, but if you view more than one news source, you know some stories are being buried. Levenson, though, points out something from DeGhett's article we all need to keep in mind:

The key here, as DeGhett writes, is that there was no military pressure not to publish Jarecke’s photograph. The war was over by the time his film got back to the facility in Saudi Arabia where the press pools operated. The decision to withhold the shot from the American public was made by the American press, by editors at the major magazines, at The New York Times, at the wire service. The chokehold on information at the top of the mainstream media was tight enough back then that most newspaper editors, DeGhett reports, never saw the image, never got to make their choice to publish or hide.

You can guess the excuses. “Think of the children!” For the more sophisticated, a jaded response:

Aidan Sullivan, the pictures editor for the British Sunday Times, told the British Journal of Photography on March 14 that he had opted instead for a wide shot of the carnage: a desert highway littered with rubble. He challenged the Observer: “We would have thought our readers could work out that a lot of people had died in those vehicles. Do you have to show it to them?”

Why yes, Mr. Sullivan, you do.

Emphasis added.

There are days I just want to give up. Read both articles.

Today In Government Censorship

Granted, its' a sneaky, back-door censorship, but we're talking about "conservatives" here.

The South Carolina House refused Monday to back down from plans to punish two public colleges in the budget for assigning freshmen to read books dealing with homosexuality.

The House rejected multiple attempts to restore $52,000 cut from the College of Charleston in the state budget, and $17,142 cut from the University of South Carolina Upstate. Those are the amounts the universities spent on books assigned to their incoming freshmen last summer. The efforts failed by votes of 69-41, 70-43, 71-40 and 71-38.

Opponents argued the cuts, which reduce what the colleges can spend from their own revenue sources, censor and micromanage college decisions.

When it comes to public colleges, legislators should be debating funding and building construction, not "pushing our own moral agenda on these institutions of higher learning," said Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg.

The rationales offered are what might be expected:

Rep. Garry Smith, whose subcommittee made the reductions, said he wanted to make a point after college officials declined to give students an option to read something else. He said he wouldn't oppose the books if they were part of an elective course. He called it promotion of a lifestyle.

"Freedom comes with responsibility. These universities did not act responsibly," said Smith, R-Simpsonville.

He made a point, alright, but it had nothing to do with responsibility. As if he knows what the word means. And I'd like to ask Rep. Smith, responsibility by what standard. Seems to me the universities were doing their job, which is to educate students. That necessarily involves exposing them to new ideas and new viewpoints. That's what education is, after all.

This one's choice:

Rep. Wendy Nanney, R-Greenville, said opponents of the cuts argue for a diversity of ideas but don't want to consider conservatives' viewpoint.

Um -- who is it who's trying to censor the curriculum? I think Rep. Nanney's viewpoint is coming through loud and clear.

It always astonishes me that a group that touts being "real Americans" consistently comes up with attempts to subvert the entire American system.

Via Towleroad.

Duck Dynasty Who?

You might gather from that that I don't watch much TV, and you'd be right. Nor do I pay attention to "reality" shows, which aren't. So I've been enduring the Phil Robertson flap (I had to look up his name) on just about every media outlet you can imagine (and it's taking up way too much space on the blogosphere).

My take? The guy's an asshole. That's the whole point of his show, as far as I can tell. OK, fine, so he's an asshole who believes in the Bible and thinks that makes him a Christian.

So A&E suspended him. According to the Conservative Bible, a private company can o whatever it wants to employees, including firing them just for the hell of it, or because Obamacare, or whatever. Apparently, that only holds true if said employee is a "liberal" (meaning anyone to the left of Attila the Hun) or offends Sarah Palin, who among her other attributes, may very well be the loudest nonentity of modern times. (Remember Martin Bashir? Did Palin stick up for his right to free expression? Hah!)

Digby has a very good post on this whole thing that lays out very plainly -- plainly enough that even Sarah Palin can understand it -- the noxious combination of ignorance and hypocrisy on the right. I'll give you a hint -- remember the Dixie Chicks?

Read Digby -- it's worth the time.

Free Speech? Whazzat?

Very interesting article from The Guardian on the increasing momentum in our so-called "Western democracies" to curtail the right to protest -- that is to say, let's just eliminate this pesky free speech thing, OK?

It's a fairly short article, so just click through and read the whole thing. I do want to highlight this quote from South African author and Nobel Prize winner JM Coetzee:

I used to think that the people who created (South Africa's) laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers ahead of their time.

Well, yes.

Another Reason Not To Do Facebook

A rather brilliant video from the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, on its exhibit Masculin/Masculin -- the male figure in art from 1800.

"Hmm. . ." you say. "Facebook?"

Well, you see, if you posted this to Facebook, it would be censored. From John Aravosis:

Here’s what I posted last night on Facebook – a French newspaper report on the exhibit. It included a risqué ad that is on the streets of Paris for all to see:

And here’s what happened to my post:

Aravosis is somewhat nonplussed that Facebook would censor an art exhibit at one of the world's most famous museums, and I don't blame him, but I have a couple of questions for Facebook:

What community? Who determines these standards? And would Facebook be quite so ready to censor this video if it were about an exhibit featuring the female figure?

The sad part of this is that I don't find it surprising at all.

And While We're All Outraged About That Russian Dictator (Updated)

Look what's happening at home:

In December 2011, approximately five million e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, an intelligence contractor, were hacked by Anonymous and posted on WikiLeaks. The files contained revelations about close and perhaps inappropriate ties between government security agencies and private contractors. In a chat room for Project PM, Mr. Brown posted a link to it.

Among the millions of Stratfor files were data containing credit cards and security codes, part of the vast trove of internal company documents. The credit card data was of no interest or use to Mr. Brown, but it was of great interest to the government. In December 2012 he was charged with 12 counts related to identity theft. Over all he faces 17 charges — including three related to the purported threat of the F.B.I. officer and two obstruction of justice counts — that carry a possible sentence of 105 years, and he awaits trial in a jail in Mansfield, Tex.

According to one of the indictments, by linking to the files, Mr. Brown “provided access to data stolen from company Stratfor Global Intelligence to include in excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information, and the authentication features for the credit cards.”

Because Mr. Brown has been closely aligned with Anonymous and various other online groups, some of whom view sowing mayhem as very much a part of their work, his version of journalism is tougher to pin down and, sometimes, tougher to defend.

But keep in mind that no one has accused Mr. Brown of playing a role in the actual stealing of the data, only of posting a link to the trove of documents.

(Emphasis added.)

Via Digby, who also inks to this article:

A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university's servers, focused on his area of expertise, which is cryptography. The post was highly critical of the government, specifically the National Security Agency, whose reckless behavior in attacking online security astonished him.

Professor Matthew Green wrote on 5 September:

I was totally unprepared for today's bombshell revelations describing the NSA's efforts to defeat encryption. Not only does the worst possible hypothetical I discussed appear to be true, but it's true on a scale I couldn't even imagine.

The post was widely circulated online because it is about the sense of betrayal within a community of technical people who had often collaborated with the government. (I linked to it myself.)

On Monday, he gets a note from the acting dean of the engineering school asking him to take the post down and stop using the NSA logo as clip art in his posts. The email also informs him that if he resists he will need a lawyer. The professor runs two versions of the same site: one hosted on the university's servers, one on Google's blogger.com service. He tells the dean that he will take down the site mirrored on the university's system but not the one on blogger.com. He also removes the NSA logo from the post. Then, he takes to Twitter.

Do you see where this is going?

Now add this little tidbit:

The National Security Agency violated privacy protections between 2006 and 2009 when it collected phone records from millions of Americans by failing to meet court-ordered standards, U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal Tuesday[.]

Want to bet all those phone records are classified? Along with any information relating to how they were acquired?

Hah! Just found this article:

Walton’s dissatisfaction with the Obama administration’s handling of the surveillance program are contained in hundreds of pages of previously classified documents federal officials released Tuesday as part of a lawsuit by a civil liberties group.

The Obama administration has been facing mounting pressure to reveal more details about the government’s domestic surveillance program since a former intelligence contractor released documents showing massive National Security Agency trawling of domestic data.

The information included domestic telephone numbers, calling patterns and the agency’s collection of Americans’ Internet user names, IP addresses and other metadata swept up in surveillance of foreign terror suspects.

The documents released Tuesday came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They relate to a time in 2009 when U.S. spies went too far in collecting domestic phone data and then mislead the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about their activities.

(Emphasis added.)

Can I call 'em?

Update: It gets worse. Read the whole article -- it's fairly short.

I Almost Forgot

It's Banned Books Week.

What are your favorites?

You Have to See It to Believe It (Updated)

It all started out when a linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens, Brendan Ayanbadejo, expressed his support for same-sex marriage (which, as you'll remember, is on the ballot in Maryland this year).

Apparently, Maryland Delegate Emmett C. Burns, Jr., thought this was going too far and wrote to the owner of the Ravens demanding that he shut Ayanbadejo up:

Rob Tisinai points out the problem with this:

This is a state legislator…writing on official Maryland House of Delegates letterhead to a man’s boss asking him to shut down his employee’s free speech.

It's not a matter of criticizing Ayanbadejo's stance on the issue. It's a matter of using one's public office to attempt to quash a private citizen's freedom of speech by demanding that his boss shut him up. That, to me, says "government interference in fundamental rights."

Well, Burns got a response from another football player, Chris Kluwe of the Minnesota Vikings:

I find it inconceivable that you are an elected official of Maryland's state government. Your vitriolic hatred and bigotry make me ashamed and disgusted to think that you are in any way responsible for shaping policy at any level. The views you espouse neglect to consider several fundamental key points, which I will outline in great detail (you may want to hire an intern to help you with the longer words)[.]

That's just the beginning. Read the whole thing -- it's perfect.

Here's an appearance by Kluwe on The Ed Show discussing the whole flap. Ayabadejo has been fairly quiet about it, but maybe that's the best strategy -- he's got a lot of supporters.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Oh, and as Tisinai points out, Burns really put his foot in it with his remark about no other NFL players having expressed an opinion on marriage equality. The list includes:

Cleveland Browns linebacker Scott Fujita, Houston Texans linebacker Connor Barwin, Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe, New England Patriots safety Bret Lockett, New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie

And where, you might ask, are those stalwart defenders of "free speech" Tony Perkins, Brian Brown, Peter LaBarbera, and the whole crew? Yeah, exactly. Update: Kluwe published a "cleaned up" version of his letter that is, if anything, even funnier. Read it at his blog.

Favorite Protest Note

Anime News Network yesterday had a small black diagonal bar across the search key that said "censored."

SOPA/PIPA

Going dark for the day proved to be beyond my capabilities, even though the Webmaven at Sleeping Hedgehog kindly provided a widget -- which Blogger will not accept -- and a link to further instructions, which I didn't understand. (It's like they always start at step 3, you know?) So, this is my protest of the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) two bills which will allow the government censor the Internet. Find out more at americancensorship.org or the video below.

And write your Congressional delegation -- all of them.

Banned Book Week

We're right in the middle of it, more or less, and I was thinking that I should make a comment or two, and then I ran across this post by Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar. He pretty much says everything I was going to say, and probably much more politely. Read it. It's long, but read it.

One thing to notice, and that's the frequency with which "age appropriateness" comes up as a reason for objecting to books. Batocchio addresses that issue quite nicely (from last year's post on the subject):

I'm not dismissive of parental anxieties, but as with questions brought up by students in class, normally they can be addressed. Racial slurs in Huck Finn, The Elephant Man and Invisible Man can and are discussed in the classroom, and that's usually a better, safer place to do so. The reality is that parental discomfort generally emerges when a parent doesn't want to discuss something with their kid. Age and maturity are legitimate issues, of course, but teenagers are often more mature or informed than their parents admit. It's that same maturity, not the lack of it, that can further unnerve an anxious parent. Navigating all this is an important part of growing up for students, and a crucial part of good parenting for the parents. Challenging a book is often just a proxy for deeper issues...

Kids are able to handle a lot more than parents want to admit.

Rewriting Twain

This is something that's been bruited about for years, and someone has finally done it: bowdlerizing Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to remove the "n" word and replace it with something theoretically less offensive. Via Firedoglake, here's an excellent discussion from Prof. Melissa Harris-Perry of Princeton:



And here is an excellent rant from AngryBlackBitch:

Twain’s use of that word offers an opportunity to discuss it, why many find it offensive and to ponder why and how Twain used it. There is also an opportunity to explore the historical time in which Huckleberry Finn is set…what society was like in Missouri and what America was going through.

This planned censorship is disturbing for many reasons. My first thought was that the publisher was re-writing Twain based on the false assumption that only children read Huckleberry Finn. Further pondering made me reject the idea of re-writing Huckleberry Finn even if children are the only people reading it.

Literature allows for the exploration of the good, the bad and the ugly that is all around us and can be a useful tool for stimulating classroom discussions that help young people understand the good, the bad and the ugly.

It probably comes as no surprise that I'm in agreement with the attitudes expressed in both these commentaries. Art is not there to make us comfortable. It is not there to reinforce our assumptions. It is there to push us into questioning those assumptions.

And the idea that some professor can wade into what is arguably the greatest novel in American literature and alter it to fit contemporary sensibilities is beyond the pale. It's like putting a fig leaf on Michelangelo's David -- which has also been done. As Harris-Perry points out, the way to counter this madness is not to give into it, but to provide the tools to confront it.

Fighting Back

I mentioned this awhile back, in this post, but haven't had time to do a proper follow-up. Here's the original story, from HuffPo:

Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) spoke on Fox News Wednesday morning and explained his outrage over the critically acclaimed installation.

"This is a museum that gets $5.8 million in taxpayer dollars and in the middle of a high deficit, 15 million unemployed Americans, they decide to have money to spend like this. This is a museum that, by the way, has next to it a display of the American presidents, on the other side, Elvis, and then you go through this -- which is really perverted, sick stuff -- ashes of an AIDS victim, in a self-portrait, eating himself. Male nudity, Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her own breast - lots of really kinky and really questionable kind of art."

Kingston continued, explaining his concern that federal funds, though not at all related to the materials in the gallery, were being used to subsidize the building that the specific piece was housed in.

Got that? Federal funds are being used to subsidize a building that is showing art (the exhibition was privately funded).

Art has no place in the conservative mindset, I guess, unless it's saccharine paintings of Christ holding a lamb or something. (Or suffering on the Cross. They really seem to like suffering.) That's the sort of thing that happens when a legitimate political philosophy is hijacked by a bunch of radical religious thugs.

And a congressional investigation? You want to investigate something, how about giving the president sole authority to order the assassination of American citizens? That's worth investigating.

Bill Donohue, who speaks for four or five Catholics, was involved, of course:

Today, after a few hours of pressure from the Catholic League and various conservatives, it decided to remove a video by David Wojnarowicz, a gay artist who died from AIDS-related illness in 1992. As part of "Hide/Seek," the gallery was showing a four-minute excerpt from a 1987 piece titled "A Fire in My Belly," made in honor of Peter Hujar, an artist-colleague and lover of Wojnarowicz who had died of AIDS complications in 1987. And for 11 seconds of that meandering, stream-of-consciousness work (the full version is 30 minutes long) a crucifix appears onscreen with ants crawling on it. It seems such an inconsequential part of the total video that neither I nor anyone I've spoken to who saw the work remembered it at all.

But that is the portion of the video that the Catholic League has decried as "designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians," and described as "hate speech" - despite the artist's own hopes that the passage would speak to the suffering of his dead friend. The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus - 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing - and Wojnarowicz's video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.

They just don't get it. They don't understand art, they don't like challenges to their world view (which is what art is supposed to do, for the love of all gods beneficent), and they're really big on displays of naked power. If they were less aggressive in their ignorance, I'd be able to feel sorry for them. As it stands, I consider them about the lowest form of life. (That's an excellent piece from WaPo, by the way -- read the whole thing.)

Happily, we're now getting some pushback. Via Towleroad:

Mr. Wayne Clough
Smithsonian Institution
SIB Office of the Secretary
MRC 016
PO Box 37012
Washington, D.C. 20013-7012

Dear Mr. Clough,

The Warhol Foundation is proud to have been a lead supporter of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, but we strongly condemn the decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly from the exhibition. Such blatant censorship is unconscionable. It is inimical to everything the Smithsonian Institution should stand for, and everything the Andy Warhol Foundation does stand for.

Although we have enjoyed our growing relationship during the past three years, and have given more than $375,000 to fund several exhibitions at various Smithsonian institutions, we cannot stand by and watch the Smithsonian bow to the demands of bigots who have attacked the exhibition out of ignorance, hatred and fear.

Last week the Foundation published a statement on its website www.warholfoundation.org, condemning the National Portrait Gallery’s removal of the work and on Friday our Board of Directors met to discuss the long-term implications of the Museum’s behavior on the Foundation’s relationship with the Smithsonian Institution. After careful consideration, the Board voted unanimously to demand that you restore the censored work immediately, or the Warhol Foundation will cease funding future exhibitions at all Smithsonian institutions.

I regret that you have put us in this position, but there is no other course we can take. For the arts to flourish the arts must be free, and the decision to censor this important work is in stark opposition to our mission to defend freedom of expression wherever and whenever it is under attack.

Sincerely yours,

Joel Wachs
President

You may know that I'm an artist myself, and a great deal of my work would cause aneurysms in people like Rep. Kingston. I don't want my work censored, and I don't see any reason why some pig farmer from Georgia should have a say on what gets shown in a national museum -- and yes, it's taxpayer funded, and I'm one of those taxpayers.

Blake Gopnik, in the WaPo piece, had the best -- and truly conservative -- solution:

If anyone's offended by any work in any museum, they have the easiest redress: They can vote with their feet, and avoid the art they don't like.

Update:

Mahablog brings it all into focus:

Any attempt to suppress free expression by threats or bullying ought to be condemned. However, righties, that means any attempt to suppress free expression by threats or bullying ought to be condemned. That means your attempts, too.

Wikileaks

I haven't commented on this one -- which, as Digby points out, is the most genuine political discussion we've had in this country in over a decade -- and now Digby, bless 'er, had done a great summation, so I don't have to.


There are definitely huge threats in the world. And they are coming from many directions --- terrorist violence, massive economic corruption, global warming, extremists of all sorts. What should be clear by now, however, is that the system by which we manage threats is failing. It seems to me that one thing we might want to do is start talking about that problem. This is an opportunity to do that.

I do want to mention this, however:

“PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity,” reads a statement on PayPal’s website. “We’ve notified the account holder of this action.”

Most of the over $1 million in contributions WikiLeaks has drawn in the last year have come through its PayPal account, which belongs to the Wau Holland Foundation, a German non-profit group that manages the bulk of WikiLeaks’ money.

Attempting to donate to Wau Holland though PayPal on Friday night produced the message “This recipient is currently unable to receive money.”

PayPal’s move comes amid mounting U.S. pressure against WikiLeaks over its cache of over 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables. Struggling with denial-of-service attacks on its servers earlier this week, WikiLeaks moved to Amazon’s EC2 cloud-based data-storage service, only to be summarily booted off on Wednesday. Then on Thursday its domain-name service provider, EveryDNS, stopped resolving WikiLeaks.org, after the DNS provider was battered by the DoS attacks.

Isn't it reassuring to know that major corporations are working with our government to protect us from things they don't want us to know?

And here's Julian Assange himself.

As for my own stance -- well, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I don't like people trying to control what information I have access to, under any circumstances. I say this will full understanding that sometimes particular parts of government operations must be kept secret for the time being. When the Bush administration started classifying information that had been published years before, that broke it for me: someone needs to take away the government's ability to keep secrets, and I'm glad Assange is doing it.

As for the people calling for his assassination, trial for "treason" (excuse me? He's not an American) and the like -- well, read Digby.

Fire in My Belly

I'm posting this clip, even though I haven't watched it, because it's got the asshole right up in arms, and that's always a good thing -- it's one step closer to their heads exploding once and for all. I'll have more on this later:



Needless to say, the asshole brigade is out in full force, led, of course, by some Congressman from Nowhere, Georgia. In case you had any doubt, the Republican party, in addition to lining the bank accounts of its corporate owners, is real big on censorship -- of everyone else.

Note: as one commenter at Bilerico Project points out, this is an edited version. I'll see if I can find the full piece.

It's Banned Books Week

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.