Banned Books - Weak

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Banned Books – Weak

The problem with Banned Books Week is that books aren’t banned by this country.  You could look it up on page 313 of your niece’s much-marked copy of Fifty-One Grades of Nay.

Once upon a time, when prehistoric hamsters bellowed across primeval swamps, the United States Post Office (as it was then known) did not permit the mailing of pornography, and some local municipalities forbade hootchie-mama stuff in print.  For authors, though, being banned in Boston was much desired, as this guaranteed a rise in sales.

The reality is that in our progressive and enlightened era a cud-chewing TSA-ista at the airport will seize your grandpa’s Schrade-Walden Old Timer, but not a copy of Naughty Tales of a Runaway Teenaged Police Nurse with the jalapeno-hot illustrations of barely-legal stethoscopes.

Rest easy during Banned Books Week; your copy of Wordsworth’s Prelude is safe from confiscation by armed Ninjas in discount-store xtreem tactical commando camouflage rappelling down from unmarked Canadian helicopters, even though the Oxford de Selincourt edition features a really wild you-know-what scene in the 1850 variant, p. 417, line 392.

So what’s with the annual Banned Books Week?

Banned Books Week appears to be just another safe, fashionable (and profitable for some) cause, with posters and protests and posturing and computer downloads to forward to people who are already busy trying to liberate their in-boxes from the cascade of political cartoons people send them constantly.

And, hey, you can buy the really cool official Read a Banned Book tee-shirt at and other trendy accessories at http://www.alastore.ala.org/SearchResult.aspx?CategoryID=269!  Men’s and women’s sizes are $23, and the too, too precious tote bag is only $12.

Bracelets, buttons, pins, posters, tees, and totes all speak Truth to Power just like, y’now, totally, Che Guevera, who was all like, stuff, like, y’know, so raise high the green flag and a clenched fist, comrades.  Nothing says First Amendment like a tote bag that was probably made in a country without any freedoms at all.

Surely there’s the requisite made-in-China toxic-metal ribbon, too.

Costuming one’s self in the official underwear of The Cause and menacing a 4’11” librarian is a whole lot safer than telling the owners of the famous-name-brand gas station down the road that they shouldn’t be selling weird drugs under fake names to children.

Public libraries are part of the package of civilization: streets, parks, traffic lights, fire departments, and all the other services and features that remind us that we are more than economic units or random assemblages of DNA; we are humans.  We think, wash, work for our livings, eat with forks, teach our children, walk upright, play baseball and the fiddle, read and write books, watch and make movies, care for our sick, talk about church but seldom go, and bury our dead with dignity.

Without books, we fall victim to what C. S. Lewis called “the cascade of nonsense” shrieking (not always metaphorically) from the megaphones of our noisy age, and entrap ourselves in the false ideologies of what Flip Wilson wisely mocked as What’s Happening Now.

The free public library is an idea that originated in the USA, the idea that everyone should have access to all the ideas of civilization, to the democracy of the dead, not only to What’s Happening Now 1-800-Send-Me-Money demagogues, and so through a combination of taxes, endowments, and gifts almost every town is blessed with a free public library.

But even the most generously-funded library must work from a budget and from intellectual discretion.  No library can possibly shelve ever volume ever printed, and, contrary to the manufactured outrage (that, too, is profitable for some) of the fat boys on the radio, no librarian will shelve pornography except on the order of a judge, often a judge democratically elected by the people who then blame the librarian.

Adults choose the books they read and shelve in their own homes, and they know what books their children are reading (even while wholly unaware of what their children are accessing on the Orwellian Telescreens that seem to be stapled to their little hands).  That’s not banning books, that’s being a good father or mother.

When you visit the book store and buy, say, a volume of poems of Keats and the autumn number of Field and Stream (which goes well with Keats’ “Ode to Autumn”), you are not banning all the other books and magazines; you are making a free choice about what you want to buy with your money, just like a real American.

Banned Books Week is not about banned books because, while the majesty of the law is a bit harsh on little girls painting scripture posters in the school gym, the majesty does not at present ban books.  Thus, perhaps the name of the cause should be Books I Like That Other People Don’t Like and Won’t Buy Even Though I Command Them to do so Which Means They’re a Bunch of Fascists Week.

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