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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