Open Books. Open Minds.

 

There’s a lot of commentary out there over a surge in book banning.  I know this practice has been going on for a long time (in the past, arguably worse), but there's good evidence we're in a real book banning frenzy.  Either way, there’s nothing about book banning that’s any good. Not at all, at no time, not ever. 

The notion that the tender moral and intellectual sensibilities of the average school kid could be irrevocably harmed by a saucy, blasphemous or retrograde work of art is preposterous.  Kids are a whole lot smarter and worldly than anyone knows, especially their parents.  If there are, in fact, those utterly devoid of critical judgement, easily swayed by some loony, anti-social thought, then all book bans do is delay the inevitable.  Meanwhile, you’re denying the vast majority the opportunity to form their own opinions and triangulate their sense of where they fall on the socio-political-ethical spectrum. 

And by the way, books aren’t really banned in the US.  They’re merely kept off the shelves of schools and libraries.  Any half-intelligent kid can get her hands on any book published in the world, and she will, if she wants to.  Book banning is a fool’s errand. 

You may think book banning is a favorite right-wing sport, but there’s plenty of it happening on the left.  Worse, some of the banning is done by publishers themselves with revisionist versions of classic works.  They don’t seem to realize that this is just as censorious and illiberal as banning Gender Queer.

When I was pretty young, I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer.  Both were beautifully written and nowhere near as salacious as I was hoping for at the time.  I also read Mao’s Little Red Book, and at no time did I feel compelled to murder capitalists or throw the intelligentsia into re-education camps.  I read all of Ayn Rand, which was lousy literature and had no influence on me whatsoever, though I wondered what all the fuss was about.  If you were corrupted by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Catcher in the Rye, you’ve got bigger problems than your choice of reading material.

I got a lot out of Ezra Pound’s commentary and obtuse poetry, though no fascist impulses emerged.  I think he was a traitor of the first order, but I still occasionally flip through The ABC of Reading, since it’s sort of humorous and full of compelling literary insight. 

Our son had a free-range education.  That doesn’t mean we didn’t offer opinions on what he was reading, providing some perspective, but he was never told how to think about the content.  I would only ask him to keep a big grain of salt nearby when facing various arguments.  Resonate to what moves you, but maintain a healthy skepticism.  You may at some time change your mind, and you’ll feel better about it if you didn’t first succumb hook, line and sinker. 

He turned out fine.  We don’t agree on everything, but that’s what independent thought is all about. 

It’s no accident that autocratic regimes ban books as a matter of course.  They all do, and always will, because they are trying to control their subjects’ minds.  Does history look back fondly on Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities, or Hitler’s book burning?  That should tell you all you need to know about censorship. 

The same applies to the news media.  I read everything, and always have.  Left, right and center.  I want to know what the political and cultural commentators are saying.  All of them.  Knowledge isn’t agreement.  It’s just knowledge. 

The most important impulse is to keep ones mind open.  Confirmation bias is absurd.  If you think you know everything already, don’t bother reading.  Use the time to ferret out trigger warnings in Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood or put horns on your head and charge the US capital. 

Moms Get Mad (and Get Lawyers)

Back in February, I wrote a piece about publishers cleaning up writers who’d fallen out of fashion, or more to the point, whose work would sound offensive to the contemporary ear – specific examples being Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie.  This is a practice commonly known as bowdlerization, after Dr. Thomas Bowdler, who published a 19^th-century edition of Shakespeare with the naughty bits eliminated.  Aside from the insult to the authors, my chief complaint is that it irons out context.

Mencken once remarked that a Puritan is someone who’s afraid that somebody, somewhere, is having fun.

The latest iteration of book-banning has dragged in Satan worship and the predatory sexual grooming of children, so plainly, calmer heads haven’t prevailed.  It’s belaboring the obvious to say that the fight against Woke is consciously a fight to marginalize the ‘other,’ and personally, I think the rest of us would be better off if these mouth-breathers were out of the gene pool, but far be it from me.

Which brings us to Ron DeSantis.

  DeSantis is fighting above his weight class, going after the Mouse.  Disney is going to wipe the canvas with him.  And instead of being a savvy, calculating political animal, triangulating his every advantage, he’s advertising himself as a vindictive little shit, who simply isn’t ready for prime time.  Are we meant to take any of it seriously?

Here’s the next wrinkle.

  A group of Florida moms have taken aim at book-banning by filing a lawsuit in federal court.  This is a direct response to a national right-wing organization known as Moms for Liberty, which spearheads the effort to remove titles from school curricula and public libraries.  (565 books were targeted in Florida, during the 2021-2022 school year.)  This lawsuit has been joined by PEN America, by some of the writers whose work has been censored, and by Penguin Random House – Penguin of course a division of Bertelsmann, the biggest publisher in the world.  Stop and think about that for a minute.  Does the state of Florida really want to take on Bertelsmann, in the wake of the Disney mess?

Bertelsmann has a dog in this fight.  The way to wrap your head around it is to realize the big money isn’t in James Paterson or Diana Gabaldon, no disrespect.  The big money’s in textbooks.  And a state like Texas, or Florida, has an oversize influence, because they buy a lot of schoolbooks.  In practice, this means that what passes muster in Texas or Florida, then winds up in Massachusetts and California.  The tail wags the dog.  You can’t produce different editions of a schoolbook for different states and political persuasions.  It defeats any economy of scale.  What just might be happening in this case, though, is that a major publisher is putting Florida on notice.  You may recall the DeSantis administration, or more specifically, the Florida department of education, recently rejected a very large percentage of textbooks, complaining they were tainted with Critical Race Theory, among other transgressions.

The most interesting thing about this new lawsuit is that it doesn’t challenge Florida statute, head-on. We might acknowledge that school boards or library trustees have the authority to pull books, under established process.  But the suit considers First Amendment issues.  The official – governmental – suppression of disfavored ideas is clearly a violation.  This could have legs.

See you in court.