Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature; sex is a weak second. – Phil Kerby
Every year, the last week of September is Banned Books Week, a celebration of intellectual freedom sponsored by the American Library Association. Since I haven’t actually worked as a librarian since 1995 I have a tendency to forget about the event until just after it’s over, but since I didn’t exactly have a venue from which to speak about it in my stripping and escorting days it hardly mattered. Last year I remembered just in time to mention it in “The Camel’s Nose”, published on the very last day of the observance, but this year I was fortunate enough to spot a press release a full week ahead of time, which gave me ample opportunity to write this. I’m usually pretty skeptical of “Official Whatchamacallit Week” type things, but I find the idea of a week specifically dedicated to reading books which busybodies want to stop people from reading to be irresistibly subversive.
As this map indicates, we don’t really have a lot of censorship challenges in Louisiana; even though the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom estimates that only about 20% of all book challenges are reported, the dearth of Louisiana-based incidents is supported by my own experience. Perhaps it’s the same laissez-faire French attitude which renders most South Louisianans unable to get worked up about nudity, or maybe it’s that other libraries there took the same practical approach we did. If anyone came in with a complaint about a book, we simply asked them to fill out a form we had for just such an eventuality; it asked the complainant to fill in the page numbers on which the offending passages occurred, to explain what his complaints about those passages were, and to write a short essay explaining how he felt those passages were objectionable within the context of the book. Only once in my library career did I have to issue such a form, to a group of “holy rollers” from the local fundamentalist church who had got the bright idea that they were going to challenge some book (I honestly can’t remember which). Needless to say, neither form nor complainants ever came back.
Nowadays, the vast majority of censorship attempts are advanced under the “Think of the Children!” banner, and therefore the number of challenges to books in literature curricula and school libraries dwarfs those aimed at other types of libraries; once public libraries are added to that figure what remains is negligible. Since ALA began keeping statistics in 1990, there have been a total of 4048 reported challenges to books assigned for classes, 3659 reported challenges to books in school libraries and 2679 to books in public libraries…and only 798 to all other institutions combined. Here, too, Louisiana tends to be very tolerant; in high school I was assigned many of the books which are frequently challenged or banned, and remember that I was taught by nuns!
The images in this column represent many frequently-banned books; two of them are from ACLU posters which are here in PDF form. The ten most often challenged books of last year, and the excuses would-be censors gave for demanding their banning, were as follows:
1) And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
This children’s book in which two male penguins adopt and hatch out an egg was challenged on grounds of homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and “unsuited to age group”, a clever dodge which allows censors to pretend that they wouldn’t object to the book if it were assigned to children who were older than theirs. Of course, the fact that the excuse is used even in high school challenges exposes it for what it is.
2) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
This semiautobiographical novel about a young Indian who decides to transfer from the reservation school to an all-white high school was challenged on grounds of offensive language, racism, religious viewpoint, sex education, sexual explicitness, violence, and “unsuited to age group”. One noteworthy point: though we tend to think of censorship as the province of so-called “social conservatives” (and indeed, “sexually explicit” and “offensive language” are still the two most frequent excuses), so-called “social liberal” excuses such as violence, racism, sexism and “insensitivity” have become gradually more popular in the last two decades.
3) Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
This classic dystopian novel was challenged for reasons of “insensitivity”, offensive language, racism and sexual explicitness; a Missouri challenge from 1980 sniffed that “it makes promiscuous sex look like fun” (your point being?) and in 1993 a California parents group objected that the sexual norms in the fictional culture contradicted the school’s “abstinence only” sex education course.
4) Crank, by Ellen Hopkins
This semiautobiographical novel has been compared favorably to Go Ask Alice (another frequent target of the thought police); it depicts the narrator’s struggle with addiction to crystal methamphetamine and was challenged because of drugs, offensive language, racism and sexual explicitness.
5) The Hunger Games (series), by Suzanne Collins
These novels of a dystopian future were challenged due to sexual explicitness, violence and “unsuited to age group”.
6) Lush, by Natasha Friend
This story of a teenage girl coping with her father’s alcoholism was challenged for drugs, sexual explicitness, offensive language and “unsuited to age group” (because obviously young teenagers never have alcoholic parents).
7) What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
This verse novel of teenage angst was challenged on grounds of sexism, sexual explicitness, and of course “unsuited to age group” because real teenage girls never think of sex until they turn 18; before that they’re innocent, virginal “children”.
8) Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich
It’s rare that a nonfiction book makes it into the most-challenged list, but I guess Ehrenreich’s exploration of the plight of the working poor is just too uncomfortable to contemplate for people who think living hand-to-mouth as a waitress or Wal-Mart clerk is preferable to making a good living as a prostitute. The official reasons for challenges were drugs, offensive language, political viewpoint, religious viewpoint and “inaccuracy” (because obviously the challengers were all economists).
9) Revolutionary Voices, edited by Amy Sonnie
It’s a collection of stories by queer youth. Need I say more? Reasons: homosexuality, sexual explicitness. Big surprise.
10) Twilight (series), by Stephanie Meyer
Well, maybe the censors are right once in a while…just kidding! The challenges weren’t based on lack of quality or sparking an inane fad, but because the books are sexually explicit, promote a religious viewpoint, feature violence and (all together now) are “unsuited to age group”. I wonder if any of the censors would feel differently if they realized these books are actually abstinence propaganda?
I haven’t read any of these books except for Brave New World, and therefore can’t vouch for their quality. But that never stops censors; few of them bother to read works before trying to ban them, which is why our little complaint form stopped them cold. They just complain about the presence of certain “dirty” words or passages without making the least attempt to judge the work as a whole, and many of them don’t even go that far; they simply parrot the complaints of others in their club, church or other social group.
It’s bad enough when parents censor their own kids’ reading; though I have many complaints about my mother’s overprotectiveness I must give her credit for never, ever censoring our reading material. When a public librarian once tried to stop me from taking out adult books (I was eleven if I recall correctly) my mother left standing instructions that I was to be allowed to read and borrow anything I liked, without restriction. But far too many parents go in exactly the opposite direction; they not only want to restrict the intellectual freedom of their own children, but that of other people’s children as well. And while I don’t think society should interfere in a parent’s child-rearing decisions (and censorship only encourages the kids to read the forbidden material anyhow), campaigning to restrict the personal rights of others to do as they like because it offends one’s own sense of morality or propriety is totally unacceptable in a free society.
One Year Ago Today
“Out of Control” discusses the dangers posed by unbridled male sexual impulses and points out that current American laws sabotage the mechanisms evolved by society to channel those impulses.
Hell if there is any book that is age innaproprate it has to be the bible. Murder, rape, slavery, hookers, sex slaves, incest, interracial sex, genocide, a woman pulling a 60 man train
Forgot about the beastiality, idolitry and orgies
i thought twilight was celebrated by american parents,i mean what other book promotes the boy being responsible for keeping the girl ”virtuous”until marriage,sex being the reason for suffering(half vampire hybrid breaking the mothers bones during pregnancy)and even arranged marriages?(werewolf imprinting on baby)and all theese looking so charming under the guise of the perfect love story between the most boring girl on earth and the prince -fangless-sparkly- pussy vampire- charming?
There are indeed lots of American mothers who think Twilight is just wonderful; I was honestly surprised to read it was in the “most challenged” list.
A note of interest about the Twilight Series:
The reason Prince Charming Vampire doesn’t have sex with the teenage girl is that he is actually about a hundred years old.
But it begs the question of, what is a hundred year old vampire doing in a contemporary American high-school in a small town? In my book, that is the last place a century-old vampire would ever want to be.
He’s trying to “fit in”. He does not feed from humans, and his family are trying to become part of the community rather than the monsters they have become. Edward became a vampire at 17, so he’s very young looking and can pass as a high school student. Which I imagine bores him stupid during the day.
He doesn’t have sex with the teenage girl because he’s afraid of losing control of himself and harming her (vampires being much stronger than humans).
The amusing thing to me is that the banned books I’ve read, featured in your pictures, were almost exclusive to junior and senior high school. Slaughterhouse five, Brave New World, Catch-22, Bless Me, Ultima, Beloved, The Color Purple (if that one offends the thought police, just wait until they read The Secret of Possessing Joy), Catcher in the Rye, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Only the newer books like the Harry Potter series and the Twilight series were read as an adult.
I understand that the Twilight series is Mormon propaganda. I guess I didn’t know enough details of Mormonism to recognize it as such.
No, it’s not Mormon propaganda. Except perhaps for the abstinence. I live in the heart of Moromon-dom and I can tell you Twilight has nothing to do with it. Its only link is that the author attended Brigham Young University. However, for those rabid thought-police who hate Mormons, that may be enough.
Interesting. I read the Mark Reads blog for a hilarious chapter-by-chapter review of the series. He shared some personal experiences when several Mormon families were trying to convert him. He found several parallels in the books with what he knew of Mormonism including the great importance of marriage, the prohibition of alcohol & caffeine (several passages where Bella orders a coke or takes nyquill to fall asleep), and the (what Mark concluded was racist) belief that white = purity (several characters in the books who were people of color are now chalky, vampire white).
I don’t know enough about Mormonism myself to know if he is correct or not. Since he used personal experience and a few quotes from the Book of Mormon, I took it at face value. On the other hand, he has apperently taken the hyper “politically correct” view of everything neofeminist & similar, so I seldom comment there.
Tonja,
I’m ex-Mormon (atheist but I had this parent…). I could find other religions that hold the same beliefs, the caffeine-alcohol is the closest Twilight gets to Mormonism. The white=purity is common throughout Western culture (the Bride’s dress, eh?). Consider Read’s view as confirmation by bias or prejudice.
Given that Stephenie Meyer attended BYU, even if not Mormon because not all are, some of these ideas may have come from those great gab fests where the profound is resolved. Anti-Mormon prejudice runs deep and any hint (real or delusional) of Mormonism in anything brings out the nuts.
Remember Romney’s run in the previous election? Mormonism is this millennia’s Catholicism (look up JFK 1960 if unfamiliar). The conservative Christians were in an uproar over Romney, the heretic. He was the Governor of Massachusetts, so I can understand…you know, that hotbed of Mormon
heresy.
Acctually,the whites bride dress started(in modern western scociety) with Queen Victorias marriage, aspart of a ploy to increase sales of white lace,something wich england had a huge supply of but very little demand for purchase. It was the veil that symbolized a well manard woman.
Interesting side note but Mary Queen of Scots dress was white. It was designed as and seen as the insult it was to her husband as white was the color of mourning in france at the time
Back in Roman times, white clothes were the sign of wealth and privilege. The Roman upper classes wore white togas while the lower classes wore earth colors. That was because only the upper classes could afford to bleach their clothes to white.
Now that I know you were a librarian, I really admire you. Let’s hear it for librarians, the keepers of knowledge!
Thank you, Comixchik! Yes, I was a librarian from 1990-1995; I got my Master’s in Library Science in 1993. 🙂
My aunt’s a librarian, too, over at the CDC.
I’ve been meaning to get her the game Liebrary.
You might appreciate it, too.
I made an effort to read as many of the top 100 challenged books as I could a couple years ago. I’ll be honest: more than a few of them were dull as anything. I rechecked the list, and I’ve read 25 of the current 100. Not bad. My son has read two (the Dav Pikley books) and is working on another with me (Harry Potter). He’s seven.
The only bad thing I have to say about the Dav Pikley books is that they’re too easy for him, but he likes them so much he’ll reread them instead of trying something new.
I worked at a library in high school as a page and never really ran into attempts at censorship. But then most of our patrons were either very young children or adults. We didn’t get many young adults, so seem to be the most popular target for this kind of censorship.
That was one of our jokes as librarians; nobody would’ve read some “controversial” books had the busybodies not made a big deal of them. Often censors are an author’s best advertising.
Hard to believe “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich would get banned. What are some people thinking?
On the other hand, I’m all for banning “Twilight” on the ground of stupidity. The whole vampire craze thing gets on my nerves. Then again, if it makes kids question mainstream religion, then what the hell. Or will that last word get my post banned?
Nickel and Dimed goes against the grain of those who think they’re “saving” the poor.
Twilight, to me, is a reasonably OK love story. I don’t know if it would make me (or anyone else) question mainstream religion. There seems to be a strong moral theme running through it (the vampires don’t feed on humans, Edward and Bella do not have sex until they are married, etc). I’ve read the books – all of them – several times for light entertainment, but I’ve never seen the “stupidity” in them, nor have I seen any “mainstream religion” issues one way or another. There is a lot of young adults questioning the wisdom of their elders, however. Is that what you are referring to?
I too have read them several times. I find them to be entertaining, even if the writing is less than great at times. *shrug* maybe that makes me a silly female, but I like those books (even if I also enjoy funny parody or witty criticism of the series). I’ve always loved vampire stories, especially Anne Rice’s saucy vamps and the kitsch of Buffy.
I’m a traditionalist; I just can’t handle the modern “vampires are just like humans except they drink blood” interpretation. To me they are and always will be evil spirits in human form who deserve only extermination. The only variation from that I ever enjoyed was in Dark Shadows, because they were the first ones to play with the idea, not followers of a trend. And even Barnabas Collins had to be cured of vampirism before he was able to control himself.
i find the whole pure evil thing really boring,there is nothing pure good or pure evil in the world and thats the reason i often find the presentation of good and evil in american movies kinda shitty,because the characters are just one dimentional,no character development.from vampire related books and shows ive only liked the vampire chronicles and true blood(i consider the latter brilliant ).from twilight the only worthy characters i find are the volturi clan and stephenie meyer didnt even develop them as characters,she said it would take too much fact checking to create flasbacks for their past(she wrote however that the vampires with the names aro,caius and marcus are from ancient greece,but of course those are not greek names,the two latter are roman)yeah,the effort that the author puts in her work is obvious.
Tonja,
I have to admit that I’m a big Joss Whedon fan and that Buffy was my introduction. I know that a lot of people dismiss the series because of the name – there is some cognitive dissonance there – but I love the writing. And the way Whedon shamelessly plunders the classics. In fact, the TV tropes website got it’s start because Buffy fans were exploring all of the archetypes that Whedon employed in Buffy and then, like Topsy, it just growed.
I love the way he juxtaposed teen angst with the real world. For instance, Buffy’s mom grounds her for staying out late. (Of course she stays out late; when else is she going to slay vampires?) When Buffy pouts (from her mother’s perspective) “MOM!” she says, “I know that with teenage girls it’s all life and death and so dramatic. The world isn’t going to end if you don’t go out tonight.” And of course, the joke is, that yes, the world IS going to end if she doesn’t go out tonight.
And if there is a better presentation of how a boyfriend can change after sex than Buffy’s tryst with Angel in Season 2, I’ve yet to see it.
And the callbacks are a lot of fun and provide additional threads packaging the whole Buffy-verse together. For instance, in Season Two, we find out that William the Bloody’s nickname is “Spike” for his propensity to torture his victims to death with a railroad spike. What we don’t find out for 3 1/2 more seasons is that the reason he does that is that, when he was human and a very bad poet, someone opined that they’d rather be tortured with a railroad spike than listen to him read his poetry.
I’ve not read the Twilight books – but I did think she did a reasonably good job on “Host.” Not stellar, but readable.
Maggie, I too read most of the banned books in high school and college. However, I’m a voracious reader, and continue to read them today. (I read anywhere from 400 – 600 books a year.)
1984 was a favorite, and so was Brave New World.
I was blessed to have parents who did not censor my reading, even when I was reading the Amityville Horror and the Exorcist (at least not until I started having nightmares, which is when my dad started directing me to Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradbury. No censorship, just distraction. It worked well.)
Wait, you read 1-2 books a day? How do you ever have time to do anything else?
For years the annual “Banned Books” display at my local public library has bothered me, because it usually only displays books that most people agree should NOT be banned. I think that the display would be far more thought provoking if it included the likes of Mein Kamph and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yes, I am against censorship; the State should not have the power to prevent something from being printed. But the question isn’t simple. The First Amendment means that racist swine can spread their filth. Being against censorship isn’t being against stopping To Kill A Mockingbird from getting printed. Being against censorship is the much less pleasant position of standing up for the Right of some Holocaust Denier from publishing his drivel.
I know far too many people who consider themselves Anti-Censorship who are all for Speech Codes, or Hate Crimes tribunals. If Free Speech doesn’t apply to vermin like Fred Phelps, it eventually won’t apply to anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy.
C.S.P.S.,
Exactly, word for word.
We have a 1933 annotated side-by-side copy of Mein Kampf that has value to me because: 1) it shows the mind of a deranged monster; and 2) it leaves me wondering how anyone in the 1930s couldn’t or wouldn’t see that he was a deranged monster because he laid it all out. How could they not see it?
I wonder how these people would do with one of my favorite books, Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver? Ban it, likely.
Ariel,
I think that some of the reasons people didn’t see where it was going was that “Germans were Civilized.” Despite the black propaganda coming out of WWI of German troops raping Belgian Nuns, I think that Germany still benefited from it’s old reputation as “The Land of Poets and Philosophers.” For “really evil” things to happen, you had to go to backward places like Russia and their pogroms and the like.
And Eugenics wasn’t considered the evil then that it is now. Oliver Wendell Holmes based at least one of his Supreme Court rulings on it; George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and other prominent Progressives endorsed the idea.
Anti-semitism was alive and well in much of the West. Aside from the British – whose British Israelism movements equated Britain’s ancestral tribes with the diaspora of the lost Ten Tribes of Israel – you really didn’t have any place that the Jews were welcome. Joseph Kennedy, JFK’s father was FDR’s ambassador to the Court of St. James and openly spoke of the “Jewish Problem.”
The British Israelism movements morphed into the Christian Identity movements which, in America, were explicitly anti-Semitic. Groups such as “The Order” and the “Aryan Nations” are the ideological descendants of these.
German anti-semitism has had a long history. Martin Luther’s later writings were so anti-semitic that the ELCA explicitly repudiated them in 1983 and the Missouri Synod did so in 1993.
So think most observers looked at Hitler as a slightly harder version of Eugenics and German anti-Semitism and nothing to worry about. And since most leaders in the West, including Churchill and FDR were looking to Fascism as the economic future, they weren’t all that concerned with a philosophy whose bases they shared, even if in a less virulent form.
C Andrew,
There were people who didn’t consider the Germans to be “civilized”; Rudyard Kipling, for one. The “lesser breeds without the Law” that Kipling refers to in “The White Man’s Burden” isn’t a racist reference to brown people. It’s a quite specific reference to the Kaiser’s Germany (something that tends to get lost in the general Right Thinking Outrage whenever that poem comes up).
But people who didn’t think Germany was civilized, or (and Kipling was here too) didn’t think that WWI settled anything weren’t popular, and for a reason you seem to have missed;
World War One was an absolute horror for Europe. Much worse than any part of the military action of WWII, excepting Stalingrad. The United States got off VERY lightly; The British Empire lost 1,115,597 military dead. France lost 1,397,800. Thats DEAD, not casualties. That is to say EACH of those two countries lost more dead than BOTH SIDES of the U.S. Civil War. And the surviving casualties were an order of magnitude worse than in any previous war with which the Europeans were familiar, because of how many mangled men lived. Nobody in Europe wanted to think that anybody was wicked enough or deranged enough to reawaken the engines of death. Nobody wanted to admit to themselves that most of a generation of young men had been butchered to no good end. The people who were willing to look that horror in the face and say so were treated like pariahs; Kipling, and Churchill being prime examples.
This is a hot button for me, because our precious public schools do not teach military history, as a rule. They are willing to spend weeks blathering on about social fringe groups and civil rights, but they don’t go into detail on wars. And if you don’t understand the cost of the Civil War, you can’t possibly understand the subsequent history of the country. And if you don’t understand how bad World War One was, the history of World War Two – especially the beginnings – makes no sense whatsoever.
Oh I agree. Didn’t Kipling lose his only son to WWI? And my exposure to “White Man’s Burden” indicated that he might have been ironic in his intent; he seems to emphasize the extreme cost of it throughout the entire poem as, for example, in these lines:
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
And while he might be denigrating the “natives” it is also possible that he is satirizing the folks that sent the military there in the first place as he does here in “Tommy.”
Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.
Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll.
I think that you are correct that there were large numbers of people sticking their heads in the sand in regard to German expansion after 1933. The lack of French opposition to re-occupying the Ruhr, Chamberlain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia, the Washington Naval Conference – thinking that they could regulate or appease war out of existence were probably all reactions to the horror of WWI.
But I think that there was also a commonality of fundamental belief amongst the leaders of that time period. Mussolini was praised by both Churchill and FDR as one providing leadership and vision for the Italian people; Mussolini’s own house organs were told to cut back on their praise for FDR’s programs in the United States because they were laying bare the philosophical connection between Fascism and the New Deal and this wasn’t helping FDR’s cause in the US. Hayek addressed “The Road to Serfdom” to “Socialists of all Parties” and Keynes and intoned that “We are all Socialists now.”
Collectivism was in vogue; individuals were subject to the rule of the state and, like it or not, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia is the end-game to that political philosophy. Great Britain and America had some resistance to that in their traditions; Germany had none, having crushed whatever liberal aspirations that might have existed between the Revolutions of 1848 and the unification of the Germanies under the Iron Chancellor in the following quarter century.
The partition of Poland between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany was the wakeup call that could not be ignored.
So while I’m not dismissing the willful blindness that followed on the horrors of WWi, I also think that that blindness was buttressed by a commonality of political thought between the Axis powers and the Politicians in the West – and it was those shared ideas that lead to the Western Powers being in denial about where the Nazi and Fascist machines were going. After all, British and American leaders agreed that collectivism,with various national differences, was the wave of the future. British and American Intellectuals and American Politicians shared a common belief in the utility of Eugenics. And American policy at all levels of government were anti-Semitic including our Foreign Policy. The fate of the MS St. Louis highlights this.
Tolkien, Lewis and White have all indicated that their concept of evil was highly influenced by the abattoir of WWI. And three disparate writers, Rand, Heinlein and Meredith Wilson have written that unless you were alive before WWI, you can have no concept of how the world changed afterwards.
I will never have that direct experience. The best I can do is to look at the history. (And you are right that our public schools woefully shortchange if not eviscerate the subject.) WWI ended almost a century of peace – compared to the centuries before – that was built on the Conference of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. And gave us a century of collectivist political philosophy and the rise of the omnipotent secular state where individual life was reduced to a “statistic” and the liberal philosophies that gave us the American Experiment and the 19th century were all but forgotten.
It has been pointed out about Edgar Rice Burroughs that the pre-WWI Europe he portrays in The Mad King is nearly as alien as his depictions of Mars or lost cities in Africa.
I didn’t know that, Maggie. I’ll have to see if I can find a copy.
Hi Maggie,
Looks like it is in the public domain and at Project Gutenberg.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/364/364-h/364-h.htm
And it looks like the founder of Project Gutenberg died on September 6th.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Michael_S._Hart
I’m sorry that he’s gone. I hope his work continues.
c andrew,
Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden was not ironic in the slightest; he seriously meant that the Civilized people of the world had an obligation to teach civilization to the uncivilized. It’s not a point of view that many people are comfortable with today, but frankly, after a few decades of tribal warfare magnified into genocide all over Africa a little Colonial Paternalism doesn’t sound so bad.Kipling BELIEVED in the rightness of the British Empire, and he believed quite seriously that the American occupation of the Philippines (which is what White Man’s Burden is about) was the best outcome possible (the likely alternative was occupation by the Germans).
Your point about collectivism is well take, at least as regards FDR and his administration. American losses in WWI were trivial compared to the losses of France and Britain, so the horror didn’t hit us anywhere near as hard. Another factor was a general contempt felt by the Educated Classes for populists like Hitler; they were SOOOOOO sure that he could be managed by more experienced, moderate minds. And that kind of class hubris, both regarding Hitler and regarding Japan, did a great deal to shape WWII.
About Kipling and the Swastika; it isn’t just one book, or one edition of his works. up until the Nazis adopted it most of Kipling’s books had the Swastika, or Ganesh either on the cover or the title or dedication pages. And you’re right; the people who accuse him of being a Nazi are either idiots who don’t know the history, or swine who know it but don’t care as long as they can avoid having to engage his ideas (which they hate).
Kipling requested that the swastika be removed from his books after the Nazis adopted it as their symbol (and before they came to power).
Oh, and on Kipling. One of his books that was published in 1919 used the ancient symbol of the Swastika on the cover. Because the contents were about India, this was appropriate; Hinduism and Jainism used the Swastika for centuries and it’s earliest recorded use was in the Indus Valley Bronze Age ca 3000 BCE.
Yet the know-nothings at HuffPo were calling Kipling a Nazi based on their ignorance of history. Even though the books was published a year before the Nazi Party was formed, let alone became infamous.
The American ignorance of history is nothing short of appalling, not to mention the total ignorance of the concept of a narrative voice. And those who apply stupid, one-dimensional labels to Kipling have clearly never read Kipling.
Actually, they probably have read some Kipling. And been appalled. Make no mistake; Kipling was a racist, a very very complicated racist, but he believed that some races have ingrained flaws that make them less fit to govern than the British. He was Patriotic to the point of Jingoism. He believed many things about women that could be called sexist, back when “sexist” meant something other than “disagrees with Andrea Dworkin”..
He was also a master storyteller, a great narrative poet, a great writer (storyteller and writer don’t always – or even often – go together) and an intelligent and penetrating observer of life.
A certain class of Liberal intellectual hates his guts, because they are scared to death of his ideas, and they know that they aren’t smart enough to actually engage with them. Pity. They might learn something, even if they never came to agree with him.
Kipling can only be called “sexist” in the sense that he recognized that men and women were very different. In that sense I’m sexist, and so are competent biologists and psychologists, and so is Nature Herself.
Some of Kipling’s Sexism on display here.
Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other’s tale—
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
One of my favorite poems; I’ve quoted it several times, most notably in “Mecca“.
CSP,
I guess complicated racist might be a good description. The reason I don’t use that term in regard to him is that the racists of today completely denigrate their targets as being less than human; Kipling accorded the lesser races their own virtues but maintained that Western virtues were superior.
OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
On that basis I reject multiculturalism but embrace the cosmopolitan. I think that there are valuable insights in other cultures but as a whole, Western Enlightenment culture is superior. I’ll take individualism over tribalism or any other form of collectivism and equality under the law over any form of selective oppression however it might be justified by its apologists.
I use oppression in the sense of coercion and do not subscribe to the post-modern theory that my exercising my right of (dis)association constitutes oppression in any form.
As far as the British Empire is concerned, ponder this. In the 19th century, for the first time in recorded history, slavery was not practiced openly anywhere on earth. That suppression was the accomplishment of the British Empire and their instrument was the world-spanning Royal Navy. I’m not ignoring the nations that changed voluntarily or at great cost – Brazil, the USA, or even Tsarist Russia – although that evolution was not complete at the end of the century. The Royal Navy swept up the loose ends and made sure that the slave trade could not prosper.
And there is little denying that life and limb were better protected by the British Empire than by the self-determined (a’la Woodrow Wilson) kleptocracies that have sprung up in it’s stead. For comparison, Indian Independence and the partition of the subcontinent killed between 200,000 people and 1,000,000 people; the death toll from 3 centuries of British Rule was less than 20,000. A good book on this topic, End of Empire by Brian Lapping gives the facts about the dissolution of the Empire. I don’t agree with his conclusions but his information is good.
I hesitate to endorse colonialism as a proper foreign policy – not for the Marxist exploitation accusation – but because of the cost to the colonial power. WWI did finish Britain as a World Power essentially coasting to her dissolution post WWII but it was her policy of colonialism abroad and socialism at home that finished her. Our monetary policy in the 1920’s was engaged in partly to bolster the British Pound Sterling by relatively devaluing our own currency through inflation of the currency. WWI was just the coup d’ grace.
I think that the USA stands today as Britain stood a century ago. We are squandering our wealth abroad in ultimately futile nation building and we are wrecking our economy at home with a socialist state that would have made the Fabians salivate. We’ve only lasted as long as we have because we’ve been the de facto international currency which has allowed us to export our inflation. If China declines to stand in the same position to us that we stood to Britain in the 1920’s, all that expatriate currency will come home to us. For a preview of that, look at what Paul Volcker attempted in the late 70’s and early 80’s where he attempted to control inflation by raising interest rates and brought all those foreign dollars home to the US.
It’s almost a taboo to admit to this. As this blogger points out in rather breezy style.
I would argue that there are a great many fairly subtle racists loose in our culture; it’s jut that since they present themselves are Civil Rights Crusaders they don’t tend to get noticed. Frankly, the way Liberal Democrat Intellectuals treat Blacks is just as disgusting as the way the Klan talks about them, and does for more harm. The entire ‘Affirmative Action’ edifice is built on the core assumption that, left to their own resources, Blacks cannot succeed. That it is impossible to educate them, and that it is our duty to pretend that they are as good as we are, when everybody knows this isn’t do. If I was Black I would hate Liberal Intellectuals with the white hot hate of a thousand suns.
“Often censors are an author’s best advertising.”
Damn right!
Back in the day my grandpa was in the army he had to confiscate Lady Chatterly’s Lover from someone, he (surprise surprise) took it home, read some of it, found it far too boring but still couldn’t work out what all the fuss was about.
My mother and one of my aunts read Lady Chatterly’s Lover specifically because it was banned, and they wanted to know if it was “really all that bad.” They never would have bothered if it hadn’t been banned.
Back in the 70’s, some people wanted to ban Mike Royko’s book “Boss” because it quoted Mayor Daley spewing profanities. His response was, “Yes, ban it please!” He even wrote a letter to them saying that it was a filthy, depraved, sex-filled book that would make Harold Robbins blush.
PS – How come my librarians never looked like you? 🙂 The librarian in my school was 735 years old and yelled at me for laughing (very quietly) at the stupid parts of Das Kapital.
Funny but true story: though I did wear sensible shoes and never showed any skin between shoulders and ankles (I’ve always had a preference for long skirts), I didn’t dress frumpily either and wore my hair down (or sometimes in braids). Once the head of reference (a fat woman who didn’t care about her looks) complained to the director (an extremely cool gay guy who really liked me) that I took too much time with male patrons, but as I explained to the director to his amusement, my supervisor had it backwards; they took too much time with me! 😀
lol
I haven’t read any of those top ten. 🙁
My brother has read some Sherman Alexie, but I don’t think he’s read that one. And my niece was reading Crank last year (she was thirteen). I don’t know if she ever finished.
At least I’ve read some of the books pictured. (To Kill A Mockingbird is one of the greatest books ever. What kind of sicko would object to it?)
I’ve met lots of beautiful librarians. Probably none as beautiful as you, but I don’t know where this old-and-ugly stereotype comes from.
Thank you, Platypus! I think the stereotype comes from the fact that since librarianship is a pleasant and rewarding job, most librarians keep at it their whole lives. So just by the law of averages, most of them any one person encounters will be at least middle-aged. I know there were definitely some pretty girls who went to school with me, including one who reminded me a lot of my first girlfriend Mae (except that she was blonde).
Well, the stereotype certainly didn’t come from “The Music Man!” Marian, Madame Librarian. And I love the “Sadder but Wiser Girl” that the professor and Marcellus sing, unwittingly, in front of Amaryllis.
To be fair, most librarians I’ve met were cool. In high school, my sci-fi friends and I would hang out in the library, reading and talking quietly about the latest episode of whatever. As long as we were quiet and treated the books well, they liked us. And when I had a teacher who hated me and would exile me to the library, they would recommend books.
But we had one who was, I think, where the stereotype was born. It was ridiculous. She was the like the ghost librarian in Ghostbusters, complete with the explosion anytime anyone made an unwelcome noise.
The worst librarians are those who think people are for books rather than the other way around.
I found the book, “Nickled and Dimed” quite offensive, not because of the content but because of its premise. The authoress starts off with the notion that a woman like her SHOULD be able to move to a randomly chosen city where she has no family or friends and quickly find a comfortable living despite having little more than a pulse to offer in the job market.
To all previous generations, this would be seen as nonsensical. Everyone in the past needed family and friends around to prosper, especially young women.
Ehrenreich apparently imagines a world where a single woman on her own can thrive without needing the support (approval) of her family or any particular man just because of who she is as a person – that plus a willingness to show up at a no-skills required job.
In other words, she wants that all women should be able slut it up with whomever they want – without needing to depend on and face the disapproval of one man or their own families – because that is their natural Right, or something.
I can understand why women crave their independence. I cannot understand why some of them seem to think being financially independent is like a Natural Right.
There are plenty of women who move around the country to randomly chosen cities and prosper, but they’re whores. Women who imagine that this can be done in a position other than on one’s back are living in a fantasy world. But no matter how silly a book is, that doesn’t mean it should be banned; I would even fight attempts to censor the writings of Andrea Dworkin or Melissa Farley.
It doesn’t have to be sexual capital to move around the country as a woman and make it, but it does take capital. It’s perfectly possible for a young person of either sex to move to a completely strange town and make it, if they have some form of capital-either the money kind, or the social kind ( education, good manners, no entitlement issues, and a work ethic). One of Enerenrich’s critics demonstrated this point by moving to South Carolina with $25 in his pocket and prospering. True, only women possess sexual capital from birth, but other forms can be substituted for it or added to it.
I think that need for capital is Ehrenreich’s real source of anger–she is a democratic socialist and her real target is capitalism. She doens’t dream primarily of a world where women are free to sleep around (that’s a second order consequence); her real dream is a world in which a certain standard of living is guaranteed even to those with minimal money or social capital, and one in which using sexual capital (if you are female) is unnecessary.
Maggie
I was thinking what you just wrote about whoring but I did not feel entitled to say it.
You are rapidly becoming one very respected blogger.
Thank you, Rum! I certainly hope so, especially if respect for me helps to win increased respect for the rights and choices of sex workers. 🙂
Well I’ve read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which doesn’t seem to be on the list this time around, but has been) and I’ve read Brave New World. I’ve read The Lord of the Rings. I’m a little surprised not to see any Harry Potter, but hey, I’ve only read two of those. I’m going to claim Tarzan of the Apes as a banned book that I’ve read, though I don’t know that it’s been banned in my lifetime. The reason it was banned? Because Tarzan and Jane are living in sin in the jungle. Oops, that was the Johnny Weissmuller movies; in the books they were married.
Why anybody would see the need to ban 1984 I’m not sure, since it’s hard to read and I doubt anybody would if it weren’t for the fact that it gets referenced all over the place.
Look at the third picture. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, challenged in South Carolina in 1999 for “serious tone of death, hate, lack of respect and sheer evil.”
Yeah, one I haven’t read (nor seen the movie) is in the picture. I should’ve noted that. But it doesn’t seem to be in the list linked to.
That list is only the top banned classics. Good as they are, the Harry Potter books don’t qualify as classics yet.
Ah. So it’s entirely possible that I’ve read more banned books than I thought. That’s cool.
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley: “it makes promiscuous sex look like fun” I thought that was the point? Like Fahreinheit 451, distract people with bread and circuses and they won’t care about anything else.
The Hunger Games (series), by Suzanne Collins: “sexual explicitness” ? I don’t think the challengers and I read the same series. I can’t recall anybody in the books having sex, or even talking about having sex.
Does anybody have sex in the movie? It could be another case of the book getting banned because of what’s in the movie, like with a certain lord of the jungle.
Nope, there’s even less kissing in the movie than there is in the books. The one thing that might have set people off, is that in the second book the lead character has terrible nightmares stemming from the first book’s events; so her male friend starts sleeping with her (actually sleeping, not a euphamism) to help her sleep. No make out sessions, no ‘let’s experiment’ thoughts, nothing.
Huh. Either they are just utterly off base in every way, or they’re worried that young people would start saying, “See, if I want to sleep with Sally and Billy and Jenny and Bobby and Tommy and Lilly, that doesn’t mean we have to have ssseeeexxx, so lighten up, Mom.”
Meaning that they’re just utterly off base in every way.