A Challenge Not Even Hit Yet

Sometime around mid-week I was listening to a morning show out of Springfield, Massachusetts. The day before they received a letter from someone anonymous stating to be on the look-out because parents are starting to get rankled by a title in school libraries for the start of the term: THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN by Sherman Alexie. The letter-writer stated that while nothing has been made official yet, some parents have been speaking about how the book should be removed because it's far too violent and sexually explicit for teens to be reading.

Had any of these parents actually read the book? Of course not. The source of the letter couldn't be confirmed and I haven't been able to find anything relating to a book challenge in Springfield this year. But people write stuff like this into this particular show because, well, Bax and O'Brien like to mock the shit out of stupidity. How much stupider could one be than a book banner?

They then went into a discussion about what they read when they were younger and asked why stuff like MACBETH wasn't being challenged because the body count in that read is pretty damn high. Of course, they mentioned the accessibility of the internet. Why would parents insist on banning books if their kid could just go on the internet and look up what a blow job is? Or go and play Grand Theft Auto and beat the shit out of some hookers for points? To that I say fucking duh.

You know, we're blue states. We're supposed to be the liberal ones, not wound up too tightly about religion or silly things like book bannings. Apparently. So to hear about something like this going on in my own nominally close back yard in the "liberal" section of the country makes me want to cry. Usually when you hear about book bannings they're coming out of the redder states where people have a larger, and publicly prominent, hold on religion and more conservative family values (states like Wisconsin, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, Virginia). But in Massachusetts? Yeah, the state's filled with obnoxious Red Sox fans but book banners? The state where gay marriage was first made legal? The first state to adopt mandatory medical insurance for all residents (a fart away from socialized medicine) first took hold? Really? I'm shocked.

Maybe my head's a bit in the clouds about this. Maybe I'm polarizing the states a little bit. Are the more Puritanical values ingrained up here too, just a little more in the closet? Or am I just naive? Book bannings can't happen here. We're crazy liberals that want to hug everyone. But apparently there are book banners in our midst. Nowhere is safe. I know that now. There are parents that want to parent everyone's children, not just their own, EVERYWHERE.

I mean, books have been banned in New York recently but that's not New England. They're not REAL Yankees (despite the team). But I guess it's reached New England too. Nowhere is safe from book banning anymore. If it ever really was. Maybe they've been around for a while and it just never made any kind of crazy attention in the likes of the recent Republic, MO issue going on. Still, it doesn't make it any less horrifying. Now I just have a medium where I can physically go to town meetings about this stuff and voice my opinion on challenging idiocy. Oh that's bad.

Neener, Neener, Poo-Poo Head

When I first saw the one sentence blurb to this article in my Publisher's Weekly email, I was ready to go ape shit. Some Texas mom had a book banned for the use of poo-poo head? Are you effing kidding me right now? Our verbal repertoire is shrinking, don't you think?

But then I read the article and I got it. I actually agreed with the book banning. For all of the Ban This! stuff that I do every year, how could I agree with a book banning, right? Goes against everything I believe in. But in this case it makes sense.

Why? Because the woman's kid was suspended earlier in the year for calling another student a poo-poo head. As FUCKING ridiculous as that is, and for which I could rail on that school system for having nothing better to do than not time out, not corner, not even detention, but flat out suspend a child for calling another a poo-poo head, I get what the mother did.

Here's her kid that got suspended for calling someone that and then a few months later, they're reading a book with the same "slur" in it. Something seems unbalanced there. Kids can read it, but they can't use it?

I think the greater issue here is that this school board needs to re-evaluate how they discipline their children. Perhaps they're taking themselves a tad too seriously. Not to mention they're making themselves look like raging hypocrites and sending a mixed message to very young kids. They're losing no matter what here.

But it brings up a good point for all reading levels, especially high school level. How many books have I read that I know are in school libraries that have vulgar language? Would a student not get in trouble for vocalizing those same words in the school halls? Isn't that a bit of a double standard? How can we condemn these kids for saying things in the books we're providing to them? Do we lighten up on the rules or remove the hypocritical books? How can it be justified that it's okay to read vulgarity but not use it yourself? How can you give a student detention for saying swears found in a book assigned to them in English class?

Kind of puts people in a sticky situation. And thus 'because I said so' was born.

Support Ellen Hopkins

As you all know, there were some shenanigans with the Norman, Oklahoma school district involving Ellen Hopkins and her books. One crazy ass parent ripped into the school, demanded Crank and Glass be removed from the library and didn't want Ellen speaking to any students in the entire school district. The psycho got her wish because the superintendent is a pussy and doesn't want to actually have a discussion about something like that and would much rather just snuff it before the flame gets too big.

So Ellen's books were banned from the library and she, as a person, was banned from the school district. Neener on them that she still spoke at a local venue but, of course, no one that made the fuss about her to begin with deigned to show up. Figures, right? Surely that wacko mom had never read any of Ellen's books either. Just found out what they were about and went on a stink about them.

Now Ellen's got a local radio personality on her ass about the good of the banning, the bad of her books and the immorality she's promoting by writing such filth. Yeah, if you're not *headdesk*ing by now, you're a better person than I am.

Now Ellen's asking for your help. Go to her blog and snag the email addresses she has listed. BE NICE and send in your reasons why Ellen is a fantastic author, why her books are encouraging and why they should remain on the shelves. The objective here is to BE NICE! Meaning, don't use coarse language. It'll pretty much invalidate your point and get your email deleted. Say what you want, but say it with class.

Yeah, this coming from me. Hey, I'm not sending the guy my blog post, am I? But be sure to send your thoughts to these guys and get your voices heard and make sure that Ellen gets her day in court. She and her books don't deserve to be treated like they have by the Norman, Oklahoma locals.

Your beliefs are touching me

I'm re-posting this from my writing blog. I was able to scrounge some halfway decent stuff from that bucket!

Self-censorship can be a beneficial thing. It’ll keep you from looking like an ass at inopportune moments and pretty much keep your dignity intact. But when it comes to school librarians self-censoring for the sake of the children, we have a completely different issue.

Especially in this economy, I can understand walking on egg shells and playing nice with the school board when they “highly recommend” that a book not get bought for their library because a job is better than no job. But the ones that do it out of fear of backlash from the parents or even because they themselves don’t agree with the text is a censoring best left to their own children.

In a poll conducted by the School Library Journal, a sampling of school librarians of all school levels from all over the country were anonymously polled about their censoring. That poll shows, among other things, that school librarians won’t shelve a book due to the potential threat from parents, this overwhelmingly over any kind of reaction from the administration. Now what does that say? That parents need to keep parenting to their own children maybe?

It’s bad enough when parents come out and officially challenge a book, or succeed in getting a book officially banned (honestly, they have to know that it has the adverse effect on their intentions) but when librarians refuse to even let the book out in the open for fear of repercussion is hitting a little below the belt. I’m the only one that should be dictating what my child can and can not read, not some worm with nothing better to do than organize a rally to get a perfectly good book banned because she doesn’t like the word scrotum in it. It’s not like it was on every page. It was said once. Ooo!

The level of bending to these harpies is getting ridiculous. Why does someone else decide, in a freely accessible school library, what is appropriate and available to my child? That’s not their call. Age-appropriate books should be shelved in the appropriate libraries regardless of what others might thing of the content. If they don’t like it, then their kid doesn’t have to read it but don’t take away the access my child has to it because you have a telephone pole firmly wedged up your butt. I understand that objectively deciding what is age appropriate does require judgment calls and can be individualized but refusing to shelve a book because it has a lesbian secondary character and said school “doesn’t have any gay students?” That’s just idiocy.

And, like that article points out, it’s not just the right wing conservatives throwing feces at the rotating device about books. The politically correct liberals are getting their undergarments all bunched up. One woman challenged a book with a dead turtle in it citing that turtles have feelings too and that they can feel fear. O_o *headdesk* Does she realize that no turtles were harmed in the making of that book? Does she think it was written in turtle blood or something?

Really, this is insanity. Keep your beliefs to yourself and don’t try to impose them on entire school systems. I really don’t care what you do or don’t want your kid to read but don’t you dare try and limit what my child has access to because you’re a nut ball. If my kid wants to read about lesbians with dead turtles, then he’s going to read it. If it’s too much for him, he’ll put it down or come to me and start asking questions. While lesbians and dead turtles might not exist in those people’s planes of existence, they certainly exist in mine and I don’t want to make my child ignorant to the fact that lesbians are just like everyone else and everyone loses people and animals they love. It’s a lesson of life and I’d rather they learn it at 10 than 40 because Mommy Dearest wouldn’t let reality touch them.

Seriously, pick up Bacci ball or something. Something better to occupy your time. I hear knitting’s nice.

Author Bites - Sean Beaudoin Wants His Books Banned, Please

Sean Beaudoin was awesome enough to come back to Bites and ramble even awesomelier (get an English degree, then you can create cool words like me) on book banning for Ban This! Listen to what he has to say. Aside from being witty and funny, he's spot on right. And then go out and petition his books to be banned. He's begging you!

Please ban my book. Please? Hey, I'm fine if you choose either one of them. Maybe Going Nowhere Faster because between flatulence jokes lies a hidden Marxist subtext plunging us all one step closer toward socialized medicine. Or maybe Fade To Blue because some enterprising wiccan chick just discovered if you read chapter six backwards a message from the Lord Of Darkness (Ryan Seacrest) is revealed.

Listen, at this point, if your book hasn't been banned somewhere in the world, you're probably not trying very hard. If Salman Rushdie hadn't had the old fatwa slapped on him, he never would have become a punchline on Seinfeld, let alone a household name. He'd still be a creaky academic with good reviews and mediocre sales. In fact, being banned is the new biceps tattoo and chopped Harley of cultural outlaw-ism. And I, for one, want in on this gang. I want to join the ranks of George Orwell, S.E. Hinton, Charles Bukowski, Jim Carroll, Ray Bradbury, Allen Ginsburg, Judy Blume, William Burroughs, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. We can all hang out, drink gallons of black coffee, quote Rimbaud at terrified locals, and roar around town in our matching leather pants.

The thing doesn't seem to have sunk in yet is that the forces of banning always lose. Always. If it takes six months or twenty years, they are eventually revealed as prudish, reactionary, closed-minded, and boring. The forces for censorship invariably have an agenda for restricting art that is wholly different than their stated intent, namely easing their personal fears or increasing their economic gain. It is rarely because the work itself is too dangerous. There's no such thing as dangerous art. It's easy to forget, after all, that when Richard Strauss' opera Salome was first performed in 1905, the audience TORE DOWN THE OPERA HALL because they were so scandalized. Now, Salome is used as the background music for dental exams and Flo-nase commercials. There is nothing at all that can be written, from de Sade to Kathy Acker, that is scarier than someone telling you that you can't read it.

A modern offshoot of banning is Oprah-ization. Just ask Johnathan Franzen. Of course, Big O's imperial nod toward The Corrections made him an unlikely celebrity and wealthy man, but it seems to have also handcuffed him as an author, and permanently placed him in the realm of pop artifact. There are some things worse than being reviled, and maybe being loved too strenuously is one of them.

Of course, other books tend to want to ban themselves. Like the latest remaindered tomes from Ann Coulter or Michael Moore, which fill the national consciousness with something legitimately distasteful: rants that are too stridently mean, too manipulative, too fact-malleable, and too cynically calculated to divide. But we need to protect books like these as much or more than Roth's or Nabakov's. The easiest targets tend to go quietly, but once they're gone, the circle of moronicism draws tighter around those that are actually worth fighting for.

And as the line between high and low culture shrinks ever further, to the point that Paris Hilton is as well known a fictional character as Holden Caulfield or Doctor Benway, it becomes harder and harder to find a subject matter that shocks, offends, or even just dribbles off into tedium. And while Janet Jackson baring her decolletage on national television was decried as the final blow to decency, every great book ever written has passages in it which would cause the very same contextually challanged whistle blowers to demand a bonfire in the streets. More likely, book banning lives with us now in a more insidious form: the quiet refusal to shock library shelves. Or an unwillingness to take on a fervent school board by assigning a controversial book. Banning is too easy to fight. Indifference is a much more difficult foe.

So ban me! Now! Soak down Fade To Blue with kerosene and hit your Zippo! I dare you!

The butt-biting of banning

This is a cross-post of one I made on my writing blog late last year. It was just after Proposition 8, maintaining that the only definition of marriage is between a man and a woman, was passed in California. This blog is one of the places where I really don't want to get political but books were brought into the argument, namely King and King. It fits the conversation of book banning, otherwise I would have kept it away. I don't want to make this a political place. Just a book-loving one.

If you live in the United States, then I’m sure you know about the passing of Proposition 8 in California, legislation banning gay marriage. Well, as they’re wont to be, books have been brought into the foray, namely King and King, a children’s book about homosexual relationships. Now, there are a slew of children’s books out there that address homosexual and lesbian relationships but this one in particular seemed to be loved a little more by those that promote ‘love thy neighbor’ with an asterisk.

Now, I don’t know about you but I find it a little . . . I don’t know if the word I’m looking for is hypocritical or ironic. Or both. Either way, the supporters of Prop 8 used this book in defense of their argument, claiming this is the kind of immoral behavior that’ll be taught to our children in schools if Prop 8 isn't passed. I just want to laugh because they’ll use the book to their advantage, give it free promotion, will have other people wanting to get their hands on it to read it to see what all the fuss is about, and then attempt to ban it because people shouldn’t be reading it.

Has your head stopped spinning yet?

What I see here, aside from complete idiocy and lack of a cognitive thought process, are people denying their children from being taught tolerance at such a young age. The article states that parents feel seven is too young to be introducing homosexual themes into their lives. So, are these teachers giving detailed instructions on how a homosexual relationship works while leaving the “normals” by the wayside to collect dust? These children are not learning anything more about homosexual relationships than they are about heterosexual ones. All they’re learning about is love and how and why different people love each other. Please don’t tell me these knobs are protesting books with interracial couples too.

People’s definition of a relationship is being shaken and they want to make sure their children learn and adhere to the rigid definition they, themselves, have adopted. The only tolerance they should have are for people just like them. Right? So books about love and compassion and tolerance and equality should only include those whom are loving, compassionate and tolerant of others just like themselves.

Yup. The head’s still spinning.

For how effective banning is, just look at Prohibition. My, how that one worked!

Banning books won’t make them go away. All it will do is draw attention to them and drive up sales, the exact opposite of what the banners’ intentions are. Banning gay marriage isn’t going to make it go away and it doesn’t make the supporters of Prop 8 right. It makes them witch hunters. What I read is no one’s business but my own. Who I sleep with, who I date and who I marry is no one’s business but my own. Yes, marriage is, by definition, religious but in this modern day, marriage has become a government institution as well. Let the church deny who they will when it comes to marriage. Unfortunately they have every right to do that. But the state doesn’t. The first amendment has something to say about that, doesn’t it? For the government to say your relationship is lesser, it doesn’t count, it’s not real, it doesn’t mean as much as this other one, is a violation of a fundamental human right to love whom we want to.

The people that allow the restriction of others to love should be ashamed of themselves and maybe should open their eyes a little bit. They might learn something from these amoral heathens about love and compassion and tolerance. While they think they got the definition of ‘marriage’ right, they’re looking in the wrong dictionary for the rest.

If you have a child and you want them to be a well-rounded human being and love others for who they are and not judge them based on who they love, pick up a book like King and King and read it to them. They’ll thank you later for it. And I’m sure your heart will be a little lighter at the end of the day because of it.