"I'm with the banned books"
And other things liars say
Dear T,
Idaho News 6 reports that Concerned Citizens of Meridian wants to abolish Meridian’s library district. This all sounds radical to me; but the CCM already proposed four totally normal things, and it doesn’t look like the current district will honor them. Those four things are as follows, in their words:
Place inappropriate material for minors in a secure location with procedures that only allow parents to check out such materials for their own children.
Require financial transparency by the library board.
Bring back public discourse as indicated in the current bylaws.
Place the library under the oversight of the Ada County Commissioners.
This led, of course, to a backlash by liberals, who said this amounted to a “banning” of books — even though the 50 books in question remained in the library, and the concerned parents in Meridian just wanted to see where their tax money was going. And this backlash is happening all over the nation. Parents don’t like their kids reading gay smut or anti-white propaganda at school, the libraries don’t listen, and the liberals cry Nazi and double down on the gay stuff. Thus the movement for “banned books” that keeps showing up in the media.
But whenever someone tells me they’re “for the banned books" I like to ask, which ones? and where?
Once you ask which ones, the obvious thing about all these lists of "banned books” is they’re best sellers* — the first sign, to most people, that a book hasn’t been banned here. But the next most obvious thing, once you ask where, is that the books they claim are “banned” are bought at school libraries: i.e., with public money, for children.
What this means is that a so-called “banned book” to them is the polar opposite of banned. It's effectively mandatory. It means the state took money from you to buy books, that you don’t like the books, and that your kids should be allowed (or forced) to read them anyway. If the majority of parents in your district disagree, the objection itself constitutes a “ban mentality.” If this is the case, and parents aren’t allowed to object, we ask, who are the libraries working for? And why are they not accountable to the public?
What liberals never mention is that most books -- in fact, 99.99% of all books, aren’t carried by any school libraries for three reasons. Most usually 1) because the books aren't good enough; 2) because the kids aren't old enough; and 3) because people don’t like what’s in them. To be a good librarian is to follow these three criteria; and if you don’t follow them, nobody will read books from your library. If your money came from donations, that’s a tragedy. If the money came from taxpayers, it’s an atrocity.
Another reason I think the “banned books” movement is disingenuous is because there are plenty of books that actually have been banned across the world, and these books are never featured in the banned book sections. Mein Kampf was banned for 70 years in Germany, for instance; The KGB raided homes and hanged a woman to keep Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago from getting published; and The Bible, historically the most banned and burned book of all time — at times even burned by the Catholic church itself, I remind you — is never featured in these halls-of-fame for underdogs. Scores of people died to share the Bible. They’re still dying for it today. Nobody has even gone to jail for giving Gender Queer, the “most widely challenged book of 2022,” to children. But somebody should have.
And lastly consider this: if you want to buy gay books for other people’s kids, and encourage them to switch genders, you might get problems from the parents. But according to the ACLU's Statement on the Bible in Public Schools: A First Amendment Guide, if you buy the Bible for public schools to encourage kids to love Jesus, you will get problems from the ACLU — and from the federal government.
What does this mean? That so far from being "anti-ban” they have the best of both worlds. They ban teaching the things they hate. They force teaching the things they love. None of their books are actually banned; and all the while they pretend they’re against the thing they obviously are.
Yours,
-J
*Why do we keep seeing books like Slaughterhouse Five and To Kill a Mockingbird placed alongside Gender Queer? The obvious implication is that what conservatives hate today will be considered classics tomorrow.
There’s some truth to this assertion. All progress, at some point, is rebellion; and all successful rebellions are forced to become conservative. The things you impose one day are defended from attack the next. What’s offensive becomes tradition — and you might even say it becomes offended. Thus who’s to say what the next “classic” will be? All we know is that if it makes a statement, there’s going to be a fight about it.
But this is as far as it goes. Barack Obama may have followed Clarence Darrow, but this doesn’t mean President Jared Fogel needs to follow Lolita. Artists will always offend us; but that doesn’t mean we need to stop being offended. It doesn’t mean we need to enshrine and rubber stamp the offense. It doesn’t mean that because we’re offended, we need to have our kids read it. And it doesn’t mean that if kids read it, it belongs with the Western canon of classics**.
**I’ve been reconsidering whether kids should be forced to read classics anyway.
I understand why people think they should. It’s said that kids should learn how to write well, that they should learn about deep subjects and complex moral issues, and that they need to admire the best writers we’ve got to offer. People (and especially kids) learn best through stories, and if you don’t have the best stories, you're at a serious disadvantage against the people who do.
Besides this, if you don’t put on Bohemian Rhapsody your kids will listen to Lil Yachty. If you don’t feed them fried eggs and potatoes for breakfast they’ll be happy to eat Lucky Charms. Whatever kids are fed becomes the standard; and if you set the standard too low you’ve ruined the kids. Kids have the option of stepping down from a high place. But if you raise them too low, it’s pretty unlikely they’ll ever climb up.
On the other hand I don’t think kids can really appreciate Dickens or Tolstoy, and that a bored reading of it when you’re too young can turn you off to it later. So far as I can tell, the comedy of Dickens is all lost on them; Shakespeare comes across as stuffy; and the really insightful things, things you can only feel if you’ve had experience in real life, take a backseat to the plot itself — which, if you’ve read Shakespeare or Tolstoy as an adult, you’ll realize isn't the point of reading Shakespeare or Tolstoy. So what the kids get isn’t what we want them to get: the bare bones of these stories bore them, and they grow up thinking the “greats” are for nerds.
This isn’t a pet theory: it’s what happened to me. I never knew Oliver Twist was funny until I was forced to pick it up this year. I was told all about Don Quixote as a kid and thought the windmills were the best thing he had to offer (they’re actually the worst). I would have totally misunderstood Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and Waugh's Decline and Fall and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. I’d have seen the characters and situations and taken them at face value and missed the whole point: that really great comedians are subtle and insightful; and that you can’t really laugh at people until you know them. Thus Oscar Wilde (the master comedian of scandal) belongs to the adults; and any parent who raises his kids on The Importance of Being Earnest is a scoundrel.
I read Chekhov’s Anguish to one of my kids last month. I’d advise everyone to read it, especially the Pevear translation, but essentially it’s about a horse-cab driver who just lost his son and is working a night shift. He keeps picking up drunks and businessmen and such and trying to have conversations with them, and at the end of his shift he just ends up alone and talking to his horse.
I asked my kid what happened and she said he was just driving people around and trying to talk to them. But kids miss the point. It’s about how a real man with a real family is going through an immense tragedy and is trying to make a connection with strangers to kill off the pain. And all the customers see is a means to an end and no more — just someone to deal with for a few unpleasant moments and then throw away. Like the average cashier we meet, or the lady who cuts our hair. There was no way my kid could understand the cabby. She had never served the public. She had never been a parent. She had never been a nobody. She had never been much else than somebody’s angel.
And you can explain what the story means, but you can’t explain the way it feels. You can’t make the sadness well up in a kid’s heart like Chekhov made it well up in yours. Not in real time as he intended. And you can’t explain why The Beadle starving orphans in Oliver Twist is funny. You can’t explain why anything is funny. As E.B. White put it, Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog; few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
So do we introduce children to classics in the hope they’ll become literate? Is the most important thing that they're used to good English so they can feel at home in the best stuff? Do we risk them missing the point and being turned off and never wanting to come back? Or do we hold back because they aren’t ready — and tell them when they’re older, if they’re worthy, they can pick up some Tolstoy?
Jury’s out for me; but I suspect the answer’s in between. Maybe we give the kids Oliver Twist with an asterisk — that you can't be an educated adult until you “get it;” and let the kids’ sense of pride do the rest for them.