I'm With The Banned

 Hey kids: Quiz time! What repressive regime was responsible for banning more than one thousand books over the course of nine months? If you guessed the Nazis, I'll give you a point for coming close to the actual answer: Republicans. As part of an attempt to manipulate reality by attempting to make segments of the population simply disappear, conservative governors, legislators and school boards across the country are silencing voices of black, brown and rainbow Americans by removing them from school libraries. Back in November, the head idjit of the Lone Star State, Governor Greg Abbott sent a letter to the state’s school board association asking it to remove from districts any materials deemed “pornographic” or “obscene.” If this conjures up that scene from Footloose where right-thinking residents of Bomont, Utah get it into their heads that as long as they're keeping the kids from dancing they might as well keep them from reading as well. 

Which is when the good Reverend John Lithgow appears to call a stop to the book burning, reminding them that "Satan isn't in these books. He's in here - in you heart." And if you know the rest of the story, then you know that it turns out that all those kids in Bomont got their prom and got to dance after all. Some ideas, and dance steps, are just to big to be kept down. 

Which doesn't keep tiny-brained fearmongers from trying. Those ideas that do not conform with age-old notions about sexual identity and gender get dumped into a bin labeled "obscene." Different? Maybe. Obscene? Hardly. In my world I find these efforts to blot out segments of our population "offensive or disgusting by accepted standards of morality and decency." 

This is coming from a guy who read Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. when I was in junior high school. On the subject of being a banned author, Mister Vonnegut offered up this anecdote: "All citizens are entitled to hear absolutely any idea anyone from anywhere may care to express,'' he said. "And where did I get the notion there was such an incredible entitlement? I got it from the junior civics course that was given in the seventh grade at Public School 35 in Indianapolis.'' It was only a skip and a jump from there to one of the top ten banned titles, Slaughterhouse Five. 

So here's a quick confession: Part of what drew me to Kurt Vonnegut's novels was their naughtiness. I knew as a proto-teen that I was reading words that weren't found in most of the rest of the library. Or "polite society," for that matter. But what I ended up getting out of those books were ideas and wisdom that far outweighed any of the bad words that seemed to keep them from being read by every student. That was a long time ago, but wouldn't you know that some things never change. Some people's minds, anyway. All these years later, Kurt's books along with those by Toni Morrison and Judy Blume continue to show up on the right's hit list. The irony here being of course that just like putting a PMRC label on a record back in the eighties made it a million seller, banning Art Spiegelman's Maus had the effect of increasing its sales by more than seven hundred fifty percent. 

So while the non-readers continue their campaign against ideas, I'll be over here. Reading. And dancing.