Is Peter Rabbit a Democrat or a Republican? weekly column 4 June 2023

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Is Peter Rabbit a Democrat or a Republican?

 

“You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”

 

-Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

 

Davis School District in Utah has pulled the Bible from its elementary and middle schools due to a parental complaint [https://tucson.com/news/utah-district-bans-bible-in-elementary-and-middle-schools-due-to-vulgarity-or-violence/article_38d3a71b-1c97-5f79-8651-f2fa895d2a3a.html].

 

This is part of the latest spasm of book banning in this country. Once upon a time people regarded public and school libraries as repositories of thousands of years of civilization, open to all, with John Milton shelved uneasily close to Geoffrey Chaucer and with Phyllis Wheatley a few aisles away from Margaret Mitchell.  An old saying is that if a library doesn’t contain books with which you vehemently disagree, it’s not a good library.

 

Book banning was an expression of Nazism and Communism and other tyrannies. Molly Guptill Manning makes an excellent study of books and freedom during the Second World War in her excellent When Books Went to War.

 

Unhappily, in the last decade or so banning and censoring books has become quite a fashion in the United States, with citizens all along the political spectrum demanding control of what others and others’ children may or may not read.

 

The irony is that this nation is one of the poorest in the world in reading [Can You Guess Where in the World People Read the Most? (mic.com)]. One does not imagine a father fussing at his son with, “Junior, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you to put down Macbeth and go watch television or play video games!”, or perhaps a mother advising her daughter that, “The Brothers Karamazov is okay, I guess, but I wish you’d spend more time at the nail salon or on Thick-Tok.”

 

When Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was first released, audiences, mostly young people, enjoyed chasing down the references to Shakespeare, including the title. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is enriched and informed by references to Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, and Shakespeare’s King Lear (there is something of Lear in both Kirk and Khan). The eponymous villain quotes from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, misusing this Christian epic about the Fall as an instruction manual rather than as a cautionary tale. Khan also quotes several times from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, using some of Captain Ahab’s lines for his own dramatic self-destruction: "From hell's heart, I stab at thee!"

 

The producers don’t simply take bits of Shakespeare and others for isolated quotes, they mine The Great Tradition of literature to explore the transcendental themes of the good, the true, and the beautiful in new ways through the cinema.

 

Those who made the first cycles of Star Trek television shows and films understood that the teenagers and young professionals of the 80s and 90s, the maligned millennials, appreciated The Great Tradition and appreciated being approached with respect instead of the patronizing self-referential cartoonery that infects popular culture just now.

 

In sum, in a nation where a family home might have more screens than books, citizens angrily wave their little made-in-Communist China Orwellian telescreens while banning the books that no one ever reads anyway.

 

Oh, and the bit about Shakespeare in the original Klingon is a joke. The Klingons know very well that Shakespeare was a human. The reference is to the Cold War, when Soviets claimed to have invented everything from baseball to antibiotics, and blamed the West for appropriating their work. In the original series Ensign Chekhov, a Russian, often claims proudly that a certain book or song or bit of technology was invented in Russia.  Further, the original Chekhov was a popular Russian writer from the Czarist times who is considered the master of the short story.

 

Everything connects.

 

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Taking Time to Stomp the Flowers - weekly column, 16 October 2022

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Taking Time to Stomp the Flowers

 

At London’s National Gallery last week two unhappy young persons, one styling herself “Ziggy Stardyke,” vandalized one of Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings by sloshing it with tomato soup.  Both were costumed in tee-shirts proclaiming, “JUST STOP OIL.” The purple-haired Miss Ziggy then yelled, “What is worth more, art or life? Is it worth more than food?”

 

[Van Gogh vandals are graduate, 21, and student, 20, who blockaded Trafalgar and Parliament Squares | Daily Mail Online]

 

The art was on the wall, and then the food was too; Miss Ziggy and her sullen comrade are the ones lacking a life.

 

Another reality is that the possibility of you or I having an intelligent, source-based give-and-take exchange of ideas with someone styling herself Ziggy Stardyke is remote.

 

Two topics obtain in the recent adventures of Ziggy Stardyke and her sour-faced little Renfield. The first one is the matter of fossil fuels, including oil, coal, and natural gas.  Without these sources of energy we would all be dead. There is not enough wood on the planet to replace them, and solar and wind are still laboratory projects. Nuclear, which would also work, is mostly forbidden because some lazybones at Three Mile Island chose to ignore the layers of warnings and then the safety protocols.  

 

The other topic is civilization.  To paraphrase a character in an episode of Northern Exposure, we are not monkeys with car keys. We are humans, sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, as C. S. Lewis reminds us. We think. We build. We speak. We write. We draw. We paint. We sculpt. We identify and solve problems. We recognize Creation and our part in it. We deal with the complexities of creation through science, math, art, and poetry. As the Greek philosophers teach us, life is about questing for the good, the true, and the beautiful. 

 

Any utilitarian structure confirms this: a bridge over, say, the Houston Ship Channel is good because it provides enhanced freedom of movement and the exchange of goods and services for people going about the business of life. A bridge is also true because its engineering and construction work together in physical harmony through the applications of engineering, geometry, metallurgy, hydrology, and the other sciences. Finally, a bridge is beautiful because its functions and proportions personify the human spirit. The suspension cables, the towers of steel, and all of the works of human minds and hands that make a bridge a bridge are aesthetically pleasing.

 

Ziggy Stardyke and her Renfield have looked upon the good, the true, and the beautiful, upon at least 10,000 years of civilization, and have found them wanting. Therefore, exactly like Nazis, Communists, Talibannies, and some of their own English ancestors [Puritan Iconoclasm in the English Civil War | Reviews in History], they censor them. They who have life only because of the wise use of fossil fuels condemn the use of fossil fuels, and express their condemnation by censorship, by attempting to destroy a work of art, one of Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings, which has no connection with fossil fuels except that we would need to take a London Transport bus to go see it.

 

These two childish individuals are purportedly educated women, but so far have demonstrated no knowledge of either the sciences or the fuzzy studies, and in their invincible puerile ignorance angrily destroy things of beauty while shrieking illogical demands at the rest us.

 

In the autumn of 1945 the Western world surely did not imagine that civilization would fall again into book banning, book burning, the censorship of movies, newspapers, and broadcasts, the destruction of art, and mobs chanting slogans of hate in the streets, but here we are. 

 

A sunflower is heliocentric – it turns to the light. Poor Ziggy Stardyke and her Grima Wormtongue turn to the darkness.

 

-30-

A Very Brief Review of WHEN BOOKS WENT TO WAR - weekly column, 9 October 2022

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Very Brief Review of When Books Went to War

 

When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned more than 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide…many more.

 

-Cover note, When Books Went to War, by Molly Guptill Manning

 

The “we” is a bit precious; the blurb writer was not in World War II, nor was the author, nor I, nor you. Still, the point is well made: tyrants don’t want people thinking for themselves. Books are dangerous to bullies, whether they are Hitler, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Vlad the Bad Putin, Chairman Xi, or the Ms. Grundy down the street.

 

Molly Guptill Manning’s excellent When Books Went to War begins with an overview of what books have been accessible to soldiers, beginning with the American Civil War, and then examines censorship of all media but especially books in the Nazi time.

 

When American entered the war the average education level among soldiers was the 11^th grade, which was the highest in U.S. military history. With an almost universal literacy rate, books would be important for morale and for helping promote critical thinking and a sense of culture for helping democratize learning among all Americans after the war.

 

The process of making books accessible was complicated, but by 1943 the Armed Services Editions (ASE) of all sorts of books – fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and scientific-technical - were being sent to our military all over the world.

 

These paperback editions were designed to fit a combat infantryman’s pockets, and were bound on the narrow edge rather than the wide. Given that printing presses and paper sourced had to be modified for this format, this was a challenge, but one successfully met.

 

Ironically, there were strong attempts to censor the content. Title V, the Soldiers’ Voting Rights Act, was burdened with a rider that would have banned any book with even a hint of politics. Although Title V was so botched that very few soldiers overseas were permitted to vote, the censorship was scrubbed. As The San Antonio News said, “One would think that the men who fight the Nation’s battles would be quite able to decide for themselves what they would like to read” (p. 142).

 

Miss Manning appends the titles and authors of the thousands of ASEs. Many of these are action books: westerns (Hopalong Cassidy Serves a Writ), detective stories (The Postman Always Rings Twice), historical novels (Death Comes for the Archbishop), and a very few war narratives, along with essays, science fiction, biographies, drama. There is a little poetry: Robert Frost, for instance, Carl Sandburg, Whitman, Longfellow, and others, including Robert Herrick, who would now be found only in a university graduate course. There is a Russian novel written by a fellow named Kalashnikoff (as spelt) and German Erich Maria Remarque’s Arch of Triumph.

 

The ASE’s would in fact represent the holdings of an especially good library in a mid-sized American city or a very large high school.  That is, of course, before all the Ms. Grundys thundered in looking for th’ dirty books.

 

…over 123 million Armed Services Editions were printed. The Victory Book Campaign added 18 million donated books to the total number distributed to American troops. More books were given to the American armed services than Hitler destroyed (p. 194).

 

Those free and uncensored books were examples of the many things this nation gets exactly right. Thanks to Molly Guptill Manning for reminding us.

 

-30-

 

 

 

A Child's Garden of Worse(s) - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

A Child’s Garden of Worse(s)

 

Some poets wrote verses which were not meant to charm the reader

but to get them a Stalin prize.

 

Yevtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography, 1963

 

The children who are permitted to live

Are not permitted to read what they want

When they ask for adventures our censors give

Ideology, instead of a jaunt

 

The children who are not submissive to the code

Not following this week’s fashions in science

Or who presume to kick against the goad

Will be inclusively loved into compliance

 

And from the Hippocrene a taste, a drink?

Oh, no! Children are now forbidden to dream or think

Censorship by the Proletariat - doggerel

 

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Censorship by the Proletariat

 

There is a topic in the news today

Most worthy of a throw-away line

But in our cultural lockdown there is no way

To share a joke, however benign

The War on Books - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

The War on Books

 

The war on books, codified by Stalin’s functionaries

at the Soviet Writers’ Conference in 1934 and ruthlessly

waged by the secret police for the following fifty years,

was finally coming to an end, and Zhivago’s insurgent

guerrillas were winning.

 

-Duncan White, Cold Warriors:

 Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold war

 

What books will America purge this week -

What childhood adventures, what scholarly works

What entertainments of an idle hour

Will be forbidden to us in this Land of the Free?

 

We pray that nations blessed with liberty

Will smuggle books to us, stories and poems

With innocent ideas that give delight

And in their innocence threaten tyrants

 

What books will America purge this week –

And when did we become afraid of ideas?

The Grinches Who Steal Childhood - weekly column

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Grinches Who Steal Childhood

 

He recoiled from the group-think of many of his fellow writers. “Don’t yell at me,” he said to his peers at one public meeting, where he was heckled for asserting that writers should not be given orders. “But if you must yell, at least don’t do it in unison.”

 

-Pasternak, quoted by Finn and Couvee’ in The Zhivago Affair

 

I have never read anything by Dr. Seuss. The covers look stoopid (as in “stoopid,” not merely “stupid”). And, yes, I will judge a book by its stoopid cover. I don’t care if Horton Hears the World Health Organization or if the Grinch steals Arbor Day; the covers look stoopid. So there.

 

But then, I’ve always thought that the best reading lesson is predicated on a child, a fishing pole, a pond, and an old copy of Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood on a quiet summer afternoon before it’s time to get the cows up for the evening milking.

 

Still, a great many parents whom I know to be good, kind, loving, thoughtful, intelligent, and discerning read Dr. Seuss’ books to their children and the kidlets seem to enjoy the books and have not been persuaded to become ax murderers, arsonists, terrorists, or motivational speakers.

 

And yet the Miz Grundys of the world are becoming shriller in finding evil – perhaps they are only reacting to the evil within their own cold, shriveled hearts and ossified brains – in the most innocent and most needful of childhood joys, good books. From a casual perusal of the newspapers, the InterGossip, and television anyone could list of his or her (not “their;” one man or woman cannot be “their”) own childhood books now faulted or even unavailable for not being comradely enough.

 

Technically this is not censorship, which is practiced by governments. Our national government, grounded in the First Amendment, has almost – almost – always protected our freedom to read the books we want.

 

When on an outing to Barnes & Noble a parent chooses a book for his (the pronoun is gender-neutral) children instead of another book, he is not censoring; he is making wise parental decisions as to what books will be appropriate for his children in their formative years.

 

If, however, any government entity were to forbid the publication of, say, Robin Hood, Little House on the Prairie, The Once and Future King, or Hank the Cowdog, or, more sneakily, bully the publishers into surreptitiously changing bits of the text, that would be censorship.

 

That would be illegal.

 

That would be uncivilized.

 

That would be un-American.

 

Alas for freedom, a functional censorship can be exercised by a mob, even by a mob of the purportedly educated. One infers that most of the censorious are not educated at all, but merely credentialed. There is a difference.

 

Publishers don’t appear to show much courage in the matter, so we will have to. No, no, don’t form mobs and yell at people and burn books – that’s what the credentialed do – simply make good books a part of your budget for your children, and do some comparisons to see if the writer’s original wording has been changed for recent editions.

 

As for those awkward or clumsy or maybe just plain wrong stereotypes or assumptions that date from the past, then this is when the parent enlightens the child with solid teaching about the fallibility of all people in all times.

 

Martin Luther King was not the first to remind us that the arc of history points toward the truth, but his witness enhances the lesson. We do not teach our children about the concepts of the good, the true, and the beautiful (attributed to Plato, but, again, he was not the first) by tossing books into the flames of the Orwellian Memory Hole.

 

Just think of what some future Miz Grundy will find wrong, bad, evil, and un-comradely in the book you're writing for your children.

 

Finally, for the sake of your child’s proper upbringing, don’t forget the fishing pole, the pond, and the quiet summer afternoon.

 

 

Here is a brief list of easily available books about propaganda and censorship:

 

Fahrenheit 401, novel, Ray Bradbury

 

The Book Thief, novel, Markus Zusak

 

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, novel, Mary Ann Shaffer

          and Annie Barrows

 

The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book,

           non-fiction, Peter Finn and Petra Couvee’

 

Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War, non-fiction,

          Duncan White

 

The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, non-fiction,

           Elizabeth Kantor

 

When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II,

          non-fiction, Molly Guptill Manning

 

 

-30-

 

Do Luddies Read?

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Do Luddites Read?

If in the past a tyrant wanted to eliminate a book not acceptable to his ego or his ideology he had to go to a great deal of bother to discredit books and their writers. Seizing and burning books meant organizing government or military departments to search out copies, although many university students were (and still are) eager to volunteer in ideological censorship.

With gadgetry our culture has progressed from burning books (which, after all, pollutes the air) to deleting books from the disinformation superhighway by clicking an app.

One of the early sellers of electronic books discovered that it was selling a book without the permission of the copyright owner. The book was not only withdrawn from sale, but all the copies already sold were made to disappear instantly from the little plastic boxes of all the people who had bought the book. The purchasers were given credit, and all was well except for this disturbing reality: any book, or even all of them, can be made to disappear from any electronic reader at any time.

Books on any sort of electronic device can be altered or deleted by someone else upon command. The book you begin to read can be changed before you finish it. Any titles you read can of course be monitored by anyone who is interested in knowing what you are up to.

And this is nothing new, except for improved efficiency in shoving unacceptable words down the Orwellian memory hole. In church, for example, some familiar hymns have been altered for contemporary sensitivities. Church committees and publishers have sometimes determined that our ancestors were wrong, and have then changed or eliminated words, phrases, and entire songs very dear to generations of worshippers.

Destroying art is an ISIS / Taliban thing, not our thing, even when prefaced with “as arranged by…”

However, the words in the printed hymnal do not change while you are holding the hymnal. Any printed book in your hands can be determined by you to be a bad book or a good book. But nothing about that physical book is going to change except for the inevitable decay of physical matter through fire, immersion in water, or the passage of years. The contents of an electronic edition, however, could be whatever the publisher or service provider wants them to be at any moment.

Resistance both to snooping and to changing words and songs and texts is not a matter of being a Luddite, but a reasonable desire that the editors and purveyors of those words and songs and texts remember that they are not Shakespeare, John Newton, or Lord Byron. Ms. Grundy and her doppelganger Josef Goebbels don’t rate a veto on art, music, and faith.

An electronic book is even more ephemeral than Radio Shack™. There is much to be said for – and by – that printed book on the shelf.

And, hey, Luddites – happy bicentennial!


Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1987.

Finn, Peter, and Petra Couvee’. The Zhivago Affair. New York: Pantheon Books. 2014.

Manning, Molly Guptill. When Books Went to War. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pubishing Company. 2014.

Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1960.

Slonim, Mark. Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, 1917-1967. New York: Oxford University Press. 1967.

-30-

"O Canada, We Obey the IOC"

Mack Hall

P.O. Box 856

1286 County Road 400

Kirbyville, Texas 75956

409 423 2751

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

“O Canada, We Obey the IOC”

 

Last week Penguin Books pulled Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: an Alternative History from circulation in India, and destroyed copies still in its supply chain.

 

Professor Doniger’s book is almost surely boring – any book with a colon in its title is going to be a yawner.  After all, from our high school lessons in anatomy and physiology we remember what a colon is full of.

 

But Penguin didn’t destroy its own book because it is a doorstop; Penguin meekly surrendered to a religious group which didn’t like the book. 

 

One might expect self-censorship by a company in India, but surely not in Canada, the nation based on that whole thing about The True North Strong and Free.

 

USA-ians wanting a frozen-moose report from Newfoundland or another exploding-train-in-Quebec news item from north of The World’s Friendliest Border will not be hearing anything on CBC Radio via livestream.  To call up CBC radio on the ‘net (rather like Macbeth calling up those witches in Act IV?) is to be greeted with Hamlet’s “The rest is silence.”  The electronic page is there, all right, but nothing happens except a sign reading “From Feb. [sic] 6-23, CBC Radio One live streams will only be available to Canadian listeners due to Olympic rights restrictions. However, you can visit cbc.ca/radio/ to listen on-demand or download podcasts.”

 

Whatever amount of money was exchanged between the International Olympics Committee and the CBC apparently wasn’t sufficient to buy enough letters to spell out “February.”

 

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which Canadian taxpayers must fund through taxes, chose to silence its own livestream outside Canadian borders.  The bit about listening to on-demand to podcasts is not technically a lie, but until the IOC gives Canada permission, no new podcasts are being generated.

 

If this self-censorship by the CBC applied only to live Olympics broadcasting, well, fair enough.  Bribes…um…money has been exchanged from oily hand to oily hand for the games.  However, the CBC has silenced all its livestreaming outside Canada’s borders – weather, news, recipes for roadkill moose, and the latest rumor about the whereabouts of the elusive Lyuba Orlova.

 

The last news USA-ians heard of the abandoned Russian ship Lyuba Orlova was that it was infested with giant cannibal rats and drifting toward Ireland.  Until the IOC gives its colonial minions in Ottawa permission to broadcast again, no one will know if the giant cannibal rats on the Lyuba Orlova are reading up Irish stew recipes in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or Rod Serling’s To Serve Man, or innocently rehearsing choral routines from The Flying Dutchman.

                                                                                        

Canada is this nation’s biggest trading partner and a solid ally.  Every day thousands of Americans cross the border to work and shop in Canada, and thousands of Canadians cross the border to work and shop in the USA.  All along that 3,000-mile border people cross this way and that for lunch with the in-laws.  Tons of food, manufactured goods, raw materials, and the occasional moose are daily traded via rail, roads, and air between our two great nations.  That Canada can be bribed or bullied into silence, compromising friendly relations, suggests not incompetence by a few functionaries but malicious intent by a third party.  Who?  And why?

 

Emails to several CBC address were not answered.  Well, maybe all the headquarters gnomes were too busy listening to the games.  Certain the CBC leadership listens to the IOC.  The emails were not impertinent; they did not ask if some CBC vice-president’s daughter or son recently received a full scholarship to an exclusive private school in Switzerland or France, or if another CBC executive suddenly sported a shiny new SUV in his driveway.  To ask such questions would not only impertinent but wrong.  No rude questions were asked, and the respectful questions were not answered.

 

Perhaps CBC Radio shares the same ‘tude toward listeners that Air Canada displays toward passengers: “We’re Not Happy Until You’re Not Happy.” 

 

-30-

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.

-30-

 

Censorpaedia

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Censorpaedia

 Last week three related events occurred: the governments of New Zealand and the United States cooperated in the arrest of a German citizen accused of providing free (read: stolen) download access to copyrighted music and movies.  The purported perp pocketed his profits by peddling fast access modes and advertising.  Within the United States a law regarding downloads of copyright music, a law that no one appears to have read, was proposed and then ignored.  Finally, several ‘net providers of information – some say misinformation – shut themselves down for a day in protest of censorship.  Irony clearly eludes them.

All this is part of the continuing confusion of property rights regarding cultural endeavors.

The manufacturers of movies, for instance, enjoy repeated paydays under copyright laws.  After a film is constructed, the owners and actors receive payments every time the flickering bits of light are legally projected on a wall. 

In contrast, and in a clear denial of equal protection under the law, the builders of a house are paid only once.  An unbilled actor who appears for ten seconds in the background of one scene in Star Trek XXIV: The Girl Scout Zombie Cannibals of Mars will receive periodic residuals for the duration of the copyright, dependent on the marketability of the, um, art.  An equally unbilled bricklayer is paid only once; he will receive no residuals no matter how long the house he helped construct is inhabited or how many times it is sold.

The defense of residuals for actors is that someone makes money every time the film is (legally) displayed, so it’s only fair that the actors take a bit of that.  However, a house, too, generates profits each time it is sold, and perhaps daily if it becomes a commercial property, but our hypothetical bricklayer receives nothing.

Y’r ‘umble scrivener doesn’t have even a residual of a solution for that legal inconsistency: the laborer is worthy of his hire; why are most laborers paid once, but a privileged few, by law, over and over?  No one can steal the bricklayer’s residual payments because he receives none.

Two other problems with the electronic storage of movies, pictures, poems, and other forms of art are these: (1) How do we know that a work of art has not been tampered with? and (2) How do we sustain the existence of a work given the fragility of electronics?

The first problem is wonderfully Orwellian; without a verifiable original we can’t know if anything stored or transmitted on the World Wide Wonk, the Internaif, or in some unknowable Fog is as originally built.  Decades ago a few words in the introductory song in the Disney film Aladdin were modified because of perceived insensitivity.  A first-run videotape contains the cruel words; all subsequent tapes and DVDs do not.  Hardly anyone noticed; fewer cared.  Those who follow the news are well aware of how a re-broadcast of part of a speech or debate can change the intent of a speaker or the significance of an event by cutting a few words or an audience response.

The conventional fear of control and censorship is of a government (it’s all George Bush’s fault, blah-blah-blah), but other than the more feral sorts of porn the feds pretty much leave the aether alone; the proven censors (and thieves), over and over, are the private-enterprise owners of the servers. 

A physical book is certainly vulnerable enough: paper burns and rots, and is consumable by rats, mice, insects, and habitués of New Jersey.  However, as long as a particular volume exists, one can be sure it has not been altered; with an electrical book beamed down from moonbeams or rainbows no such assurance obtains.

The second problem is the existence at all of a book, film, picture, or bit of music.  The oldest book y’r umble scrivener owns was printed in 1806, is in quite good shape, and is almost without value because of its commonality.  Books over 1,500 years old are not unknown.  Good paper, stable ink, a little reasonable care, and avoiding Goths, Vandals, Anglo-Saxons, Frisians, Danes, Turks, Huns, and the New York subway means that a book written by a fellow, almost surely a Benedictine, in the 5^th century is easily readable today (if one can work through schoolchild Latin).

Consider, though, the weakness of every little box that glows in the dark.  No one has been spared the annoyance of the loss of information from an expensive device that, like Aunt Pittypat, fainted from the vapours.

We are told that someone setting a metaphorical match to certain types of easily-constructed bombs can destroy all computer storage and functionality continent-wide.  Not only can one not read the blank screen on a now-useless chunk of dead weight, there would be no light by which to read, not for years.  All the books, music, pictures, and films entrusted to the good fairies would cease to exist forever, while physical books, music scores, and pictures would carry civilization successfully through a new dark age.

Electronic books and other works of art are convenient, but they’re all Aunt Pittypats (or is that Aunts Pittypat?).

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Dirty Books

Mack Hall

I am a product of…endless books…books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books…in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder…books of all kinds…

-- C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy

The Congress of the United States, having passed laws to protect us from psychotic nail clippers and large, menacing bottles of shampoo is now banning children’s books for our own good. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), passed last August as a response to lead-based paints on Chinese toys (the North Pole has been outsourced to Shanghai), embraces in a B-movie death-hug all children’s books printed before 1985.

Inks produced before that magical year are said to contain lead, and thus are said to endanger children. Said. But said by whom?

Just how many hundreds of copies of Little House on the Prairie a child would have to eat in order to ingest a measurable amount of lead has not been determined, nor is that Congress’ problem. The burden is ours. Anyone – meaning you or me – who gives a child a book printed before 1985 is obligated by law to spend hundreds of dollars having that book tested for lead.

Mom or Grandma, under that law you can be prosecuted for passing on to your favorite rug-rat that untested, unregistered copy of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm you so enjoyed as a girl.

After all, every parent’s worst nightmare is of his child being pursued down a dark street by lead-intoxicated Scuffy the Tugboat.

Pops, giving the lads in your life your boyhood copies of Old Yeller and Rifles for Watie is verboten unless you pay a great deal of money to have them tested and approved by a benevolent government.

One wonders if this book-banning is an expression of backdoor censorship of old and now incorrect books. A solid American kid who reads Johnny Tremain might be a little more uppity about oppressive governments than some glassy-eyed serf malnourished on the weirdness of Captain Underpants.

So many books have never been reprinted, and exist only because old copies reside in home libraries, public libraries, and used bookstores. The destruction of these books by government edict would be as great a crime against civilization as the Taliban blowing up ancient cultural artifacts in Afghanistan. 2,000-year-old works of art aren’t in harmony with Islam, and 100-year-old children’s books might not be in harmony with powerful and relatively anonymous functionaries within our federal government.

Government controls the means of distribution of intellectual property through the licensing, regulation, and monitoring of radio, television, telephones, and the ‘net. A printed book, though, is a silent expression of freedom. Reading a printed book is an activity that cannot easily be monitored. A book on one’s own shelves cannot be rewritten by a government agency’s computer technicians overnight.

But a book is not completely safe – it can be lost, burned, stolen, or seized. Nor are you safe. Someone in our government has found a way to threaten your freedom to read not by crudely banning books outright but by promoting a bogus health issue: who but a cad could possibly be against safeguarding the safety of children? Thus the book is not demonized, but rather the possibility of content of lead in the type, and by extension he who owns the book. To expose a child to a book thus becomes a crime.

To tyrants, buying your child an old book full of stories of heroes is a criminal act. In truth, giving your child that book makes you a real hero yourself.

Just be careful to look over your shoulder.


“I mean they’ve erased our history and are rewriting what remains…whole zones of literature are now forbidden and are disappearing from libraries.”

-- Antun to Josip re Tito’s Yugoslavia in Michael O’Brien’s The Island of the World

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