bbw_mockingbird_lgThanks to Jen and Zen Mom for the heads up about Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of  the freedom to read. I’m a big freedom of expression Lefty and I find censorship of any kind intolerable. I wrote a post about my experience with books and the people who ban them last year and didn’t think I could improve it much. What follows is that post, slightly modified. If you’ve been around for a while, skip to the end. If not, this is one of my favorite pieces:

I know book banners and I know what they look like and sound like. I grew up in a small town on the steaming pine flats of north Florida. This particular town was famous for two things. One, Ted Bundy killed his last victim there. Two, they banned Chaucer from the schools. When I was a Freshman in High School, my county school board banned a humanities text book that contained excerpts from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” and Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”. That’s right, 5th century B.C. Greek drama and 13th century English frame tales were too dirty for our developing minds. A local preacher’s wife was helping her daughter with her homework one day and came across the mere mention of the existence of sex in Lysistrata and the “The Miller’s Tale” – a farcical story in verse that includes medieval fart jokes – and went all histrionic. She got her husband on to the case, who used his own little bully pulpit to get a rise out of his Southern Baptist congregation. As these things do in small towns, in a matter of weeks there was fury from the community about their precious innocents being forced to read such smut. Smut that 99% of them hadn’t bothered to read. Smut that the vast majority of them couldn’t pronounce, never mind spell.

The irony, of course, is that in the late 80’s most of these delicate flowers were having more sex than Aristophanes could ever conceive of and the jokes I heard in the halls of my school would have caused Chaucer to blush. But logic and reality tend to be irrelevant when a community is stricken with a righteous fury and the school board, with a cowardly unanimous vote, caved under the pressure and banned both the humanities book and the original text.

bbw_lorax_lgAt the time, I didn’t know Greek comedy from situation comedy and  I didn’t know that Chaucer was the father of English literature and laid the path for seven centuries of words to come. I was 15 and had bigger issues to deal with and I just didn’t really care about the ban.  I was young and still labored under the illusion that elected officials knew best and had my interests at heart. I’ve always been a little bit ashamed that I wasn’t angry at the time, that I didn’t get angry until I went away to college and read “Lysistrata” and “The Canterbury Tales”. It was at that point that I realized what had been done to me by the preachers and the school board.

I have no problem with anyone’s religious beliefs, none whatsoever. Largely because what anyone else believes is absolutely none of my business. If you don’t want to watch a movie or read a book or listen to a song because it flies in the face of your religious beliefs, that’s fine. If you don’t want your child to read a book or listen to a song because it flies in the face of your religious beliefs, that’s fine, though you probably ultimately do your child a disservice. Nonetheless, none of my business. But the Christianists that banned Chaucer and Aristophanes went a step too far, they didn’t want anyone to read, watch or listen to something that offended their faith. This is where I have a problem. This is where your religion offends me. This is where your beliefs tread on not only my beliefs, but my freedom to practice them. This is where it becomes my business.

I learned that in my first year of a private Christian college in South Carolina. I learned that I should be angry about what had been done in my hometown. I learned about book banning. It didn’t just happen in that small town in north Florida. It had happened throughout history when zealots with a modicum of power and more than their fair share of influence convinced an ill informed population that a book threatened their morality. And I got angry. And I wrote an essay for a literature class about book banning and book banners. My professor encouraged me to send that essay to my local newspaper and they published it as a guest editorial.

bbw_caged_lgMy small salvo in the war against book banning got me my first job as a writer. The surprisingly progressive publisher of our local paper gave me a summer job as an intern reporter. I spent two summers reporting on the local politicians. It was during those two summers that I became a liberal, that I began to question authority, that I learned the dirty truth about small town politics. During those two summers I got to know small town, small minded politicians who are so convinced that their personal morality is right that they are willing to force it on everyone else by any means necessary. I learned that if people wouldn’t listen and change, these people of will litigate their world view. There are lots of book banners on school boards and county commissions in small towns around the country, particularly in the South. I know them, I’ve worked for them and I’ve worked against them and I have had enough of them.

Now most of the time, these people don’t get far in politics. But every now and again one of them is clever enough, glib enough or charismatic enough to climb the political ladder. Sometimes they get elected to the State legislature, sometimes they might be elected to the House of Representatives. Occasionally one of them becomes governor or even a Senator. Increasingly, these small-minded proto fascists are making a dent on the national stage. Recently they’ve made their way on to the U.S. Supreme Court and into the White House itself. Things look a bit better after the latest American elections, but these folks are like bad pennies.

And I’ve learned that it isn’t just an American problem. Australia has a dubious history of censorship as well. As author Frank Moorhouse put it in an ABC Radio National program from 2006:

But the truthful joke about that period, and I’m talking up until the early 70s, was that if the Martians had landed in Australia and read our literature they would not have a clue how the species reproduced. There was not a clue in any Australian writing about how reproduction occurred. And of course as young people we were bereft of information about how to reproduce or how…most of us were trying not to reproduce.

But book banning is still alive and well in Australia today. In 2006, the Australian government refused classification to two books, “Defence of the Muslim Lands” and “Join the Caravan” by Abdullah Azzam. The Australian government is concerned that these two books may incite people to acts of terrorism. I guess my small town school board in the 80’s was worried about us thinking about sex and flatulence. Presumably advocates of banning the Harry Potter books were concerned about their children becoming witches and wizards. Today it is terrorism, the pornography of the 21st century. It is always something, but there is never a justification for censorship.

reading1The American Library Association has a list of suggestions of what you can do to fight censorship, keep books available in your libraries, and promote the freedom to read as well as a disturbing map of book bannings and challenges in the last couple of years in the U.S. Whether you’re aware of it or not, censorship is alive and well in the United States and around the world. Anyone who loves the written word has an obligation to do something about it.

Personally, I’m going to hit the grass roots. I’m going to try to instill a love for the written words in my son the same way that my parents instilled it in me. By reading to them every day*.

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Talking Heads’ “77″ is available from Talking Heads - Talking Heads 77 (Remastered).

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*Yes, I know that’s Dr. O’C and not me reading. But I do lots of reading too. I also do most of the picture taking. And the cooking. And the bulk of the work around the house…

What is fixing to get banned, however, is that dummy (pacifier) stuck in Boy Z’s mouth.

 
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