Banned Books Week

I had no idea there was such a thing.

Here’s a link to a map of the ALA’s list of books currently banned or challenged.  Kind of cool to check out.

So we have a Banned Books Week.  And I think that’s good because I’m all in favor of banning books.  At the personal level that is…  We went over all of this before with the FCC’s unified rating system so I’ll be brief.  I have personally banned books in my own home.  Becca has been just short of obsessed with the WWII holocaust and she’s read just about every YA-rated book she could get her hands on.  When she saw a few books related to the subject in my den, she asked if she could read them. I told her no.  They were far too detailed for her at the time and I essentially banned those books from being read by her.

Why?  Because I’m her father and it is my job to watch out for her welfare.  So couldn’t the same argument be used that the government is there to “promote the general welfare”?

Well if we allow that then sure, start banning books.  Start with the really offensive ones.  The ones that have sex in them or swear words.  And then we’ll get rid of the ones that were written in a different era that use racially poignant words.  Oh, and then we’ll get rid of the books that offend people in smaller interest groups.  And with every shift of power, fad and fashion, with every political party change, we’ll whittle away the libraries until they are nothing more than empty brick buildings…

If we ban the books that offend us today, who will read them tomorrow and learn from us?  If we ban the books from yesterday, what have we learned?  And if we ban tomorrow’s book, who will bother to write them?

Banning media is never about protecting children, it’s about exerting power.  The ban is always over some political action group or a special interest group.  We’ll ban “Huckleberry Finn” because of what Huck calls Jim but we won’t ban movies such as “The Goonies” where the fat kid is called Chunk and forced to jiggle his fat for the amusement of others.  Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” was banned for reasons other than someone calling a character “Piggy Jim”.  One PAC has more influence that another.  Fat people of the world, unite!  Ugly people of the world… Meek people of the world…  That’s not going to happen, we seem to focus on big ticket issues like ethnicity, sexuality, and religion.  Those are the issues that get people excited, those are the headlines that grab the reader and get the legislator’s face into the news cameras.  If we had no elections for career politicians to preen for, if we had true religious freedom, if we accepted people for who they are and not who we want to force them to be, would we have things like book bans?  Or would there just be the local school teachers saying that maybe this book’s subject matter is a little too delicate for young Johnny and Mary?  Maybe Mom and Dad should step in and make decisions for their own kids…

Nah, just ban the books.  It’s easier and it’s a photo-op for someone to use as their political stepping stone.  The ruling class always tries to control communication.  They control and censor what the masses can read and what they can say.  It makes it easier to control us.  A few people recognized that fact some 200+ years ago and wrote it down.  It goes something like this:

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.

Books are just ideas conveyed by the author’s words.  If you ban the books, you ban the idea.  You can’t get rid of everything unpleasant in this world just by banning it and pretending it doesn’t exist.

There is a memorial in Germany that has the following inscription: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen”

Where they burn books, they will also burn humans in the end…