Here we are again at Banned Books Week, another opportunity for a certain sort of person to scream, "Help, help, I'm being oppressed!", when in fact that's nonsense. In the Wall Street Journal, my pal Mitch Muncy, who was editor-in-chief at a publishing house in his prior job, calls b.s. on the Banned Books Week hysteria. Excerpt:
In the common-law tradition, censorship refers specifically to the government's prior restraint on publication. None of the sponsors claim this has happened; the acts they have in mind are perpetrated by private citizens. Yet the cases on the map almost all involve ordinary people lodging complaints with school and library authorities. Before Banned Books Week began in 1982, such behavior was known as petitioning the government for a redress of grievances.The problem of loose language aside, we can still ask whether books are banned in this country. The obvious answer is no, if banned means something like "made dangerous or difficult for the average person to obtain." Many books that have drawn critics' attention have been best sellers (the Harry Potter books and Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy), classics ("The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "To Kill a Mockingbird"), or the work of acclaimed authors (Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood). If a book isn't available at one library or bookstore, it's certainly available at another. Not even the most committed civil libertarian demands that every book be immediately available everywhere on request--though in the age of Amazon that's nearly the case.
The ALA would surely consider these objections irrelevant. Yet its case isn't very compelling even on its own terms. One doubtful sign is the censorship map's title, "Book Bans and Challenges, 2007-2009" (my emphasis). By this definition, censorship includes not only the actual removal of books, but complaints about books as well.
Sounds like the ALA is second only to Glenn Beck in seeing dark and dangerous conspiracies afoot. Here's the gist of the Muncy piece:
What inflames the ALA, in other words, are attempts by parents to guide their children's education. One of the "frequently asked questions" on the ALA's Web site is: "Can't parents tell the librarian what material they don't think children should have?" The Manifesto's answer is clearly "no."
Sure enough, on the ALA website, they admit that none of the books on their list actually were "banned," only challenged -- and then they go on to say that if not for Banned Books Week, the challenges might have succeeded (as Muncy points out, very few of these challenges ever succeed). I might have a problem with the substance of a parent's complaint about which this or that book ought not be on the bookshelves in the local school or public library, but surely it is wrong for the ALA to act as if parents have no legitimate right to have their objections heard, and taken seriously.
Incidentally, there was a really good piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education back in 2005, by a librarian named David Durant, who talked about how very far to the left the ALA is. Alas, the piece is for Chronicle subscribers only, and David has stopped blogging. But here's a wonderfully named blog for conservative librarians: Shush.
UPDATE: Since this column appeared in the Journal, the ALA has apparently removed Ellen Hopkins' Vogon-like, breast-beating poem "Manifesto" -- lines from which Muncy quoted in his piece's lede -- from its Banned Books site. Here's a Google cache of the poem as it appeared. Excerpt of the drecky thing follows:
You say you're afraid for America, the red, white and blue corroded by terrorists, socialists, the sexually confused. But we are a vast quilt of patchwork colors and multi-gendered identities. ...
OK, I stop there. Any verse that uses the term "multi-gendered" is not poetry at all, but jargony agitprop. Can you ban a poem for being artless? Can America withstand being terrorized by left-wing kitsch like this?
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Ethan C.
Please explain to me why the largest academic library in my state, at our flagship state university -- the library at which I currently work -- does not have such a volume in its collection.
Probably because it is not actually a published 'volume' in any sense. It barely is big enough to be a pamphlet, in fact, it's about twice the length of the comments so far on this page! And it hasn't been published by itself, non-critically, in English, in quite some time. Book publishers will not do it, at least not the big ones.
You're imagining a moral judgment was made. But, like I said, I already said, the judgment was made entirely based on reasons of demand and reasons of accuracy.
Libraries purchase books because they believe people will want to use those books. Sometimes they believe someone will want a general and accurate documentation about X, and thus purchase the best one they can find. Of course, they are usually not experts in the field, and so usually use one of the trade publications, like you said.
And sometimes they believe that people will want a specific book, not because of the accuracy in it, but because it is historically significant. For example, a replica of the first edition of Gray's Anatomy in a medical school library, not for people to get medical information from, but for people to see what the premier work on the human body first thought said about something. (And this is how they make almost their decisions about fiction, because people will want that specific book.)
It is, I believe, under that logic you think they should have a copy of the Protocols, but, in reality, the format of that is not well suited to a library, it is hard to find anyone publishing the straight text, it is easy to find online or in critiques of it, and no one actually asks for it at libraries.
The demand is negligible, the accuracy is zilch, and, being public domain, it can easily be found via the internet. That is why libraries do not carry it.
And it's even more important for the public that they serve to feel comfortable reminding librarians of those shortcomings, instead of worrying that they will be labeled "censors" whenever they criticize a library's own failings.
No one is complaining that people go to libraries and say 'Hey, you've got biased shelves. You have these books, but no rebuttal books.'. Despite that being a fundamental misunderstanding of what libraries do (Provide information, not 'equal presentation of ideas'), no one has a problem with that happening.
Usually if the slightest outcry is made about a library not carrying specific books, they will purchase said books. As the outcry alone demonstrates that people want to read them, or, at least, will now.
Even if they don't purchase the book, usually due to budget or space issues, they don't run around calling it censorship. No, people are labeled as 'censors' when they attempt to remove information that's already in a library.
That is why the ALA is talking about 'banned and challenged' books, not talking about 'books people requested to put in the library that we didn't want to'.
Now, like I said, the ALA is just flat out wrong when it comes to children. I entirely agree that children should not have access to any information they want.
That doesn't mean all challenges involving children make any sense, though. In fact, almost all of them, and I read the whole list on the ALA's site, are just patently stupid, involving things things well within the maturity level of the children involved.
It is one thing to say a middle schooler should not be reading an explicit sex scene, or some violent death scene, or something telling them to experiment sexually.
It is another to say they should not read about someone having had sex, or someone who talks to ghosts (That's 'occult', you know.) or that someone might have an unconventional family structure, or that people were kept as slaves, or that people use swear words, and stuff like that.
The first list up there already don't end up in school libraries or in children sections. The challenged are not books encouraging people to do immoral things, they are not explicit books.
The challenged books are mainly of the second sort, books that people seem to mainly be objecting to ideas in them...ideas that anyone who lives in society, including children, have long since been exposed to.
Andrea wrote:
"Well, Ethan C., I agree with the ALA on that. I don't think libraries should be required to turn over library records to parents or issue special library cards for teenagers. If a parent is doing his job, he'll see what the kid is reading or talk with the kid enough so the kid will ask questions about whatever material he's run across that he doesn't understand. The library is there to provide information."
You seem to be willing the take that which you've extrapolated merely from your own experience, and impose it through policy on every other parent. This, interestingly enough, is exactly the same sort of action that Banned Book Week was supposedly set up to oppose.
It isn't that the ALA wants to give you the power to be a hands-off parent. It wants to force everyone to be a hands-off parent. It wants to restrict the options of parents to only the subset that fits within their ideological prism of an absolute right to privacy.
You should read the ALA Bill of Library Rights.
The ALA's Bill of Rights doesn't hold that parents should have the right to treat their children as though they were exactly the same as adults, if they so choose. It holds that no one should have the right to treat any children any differently from adults, no matter what.
me, please forgive my ignorance in advance: despite reading far more than was probably good for me as a child, I'm not the brightest bulb in the shed. And I'm suffering a mad case of pregnancy brain these days…
But would you explain to me why exactly the fact that books were banned from school libraries (rather than other kinds of libraries) is pertinent to this argument?
I had a childhood reading experience roughly like Andrea's. Maybe why on this subject my opinions are similar to hers. I had a tenth grade teacher take Voltaire's Candide away from me, and my parents made her give it back, also. Or rather, they wrote the letter she demanded saying I had their permission to read it. Laughing as they did so.
I did once tell a librarian a certain book was trash and that the library shouldn't carry it. I suppose I was acting not in accord with my principles because I was really upset by the book. It was called "The Capuchin" and it was actually a mostly pornographic book masquerading as a religious story, and it had lured me in by those pretenses. I still don't think there was any good purpose served by the library's having that book. For all I know the librarian who chose it was fooled the same way I was. But the door opened by what it would have taken to remove it could also let in much that I would not want let it. By the way, the librarian said to me, "Susan, are you being JUDGEMENTAL?" I looked at her for a minute and said, "Yes, absolutely. I judge that this book is evil trash. "
The thought of a parent scrutinizing a child's library take out list kind of makes me feel sick. My kids never hid their books from me as far as I know, and I read a lot of what they brought home and offered my opinion, including my critical opinion,both literary and moral, about some of them. They didn't all turn out quite as I would have wished although they are all competent productive adults. I don't know if restricting their reading would have changed the outcome, but I couldn't bring myself to do it even if I had things to do over again.
M.B. this is a nice thought:
teaching kids to exhibit a certain level of civility and perhaps even understanding towards other kids whose family structure may look different than their own. Is that really such a terrible thing?
But we are all walking a fine line here. I am reminded of someone I used to work with who was lesbian, and who had a daughter (her own, from a prior heterosexual liaison, it might even have been a marriage) who was heterosexual, and perfectly comfortable with her mother being gay. But her playmates were simply unaware of it. When she casually mentioned it, in the course of a conversation where it was relevant, they were at first dumbfounded. It simply didn't compute that the mother of their friend might be such a thing as gay. But, that lasted a minute or less, and never really affected their child friendships, or attitude toward said mother, whose interactions with them had nothing to do with her sexual orientation.
That's the way it should be. And I know there are times children are raised in a context which makes them more rabid at vicious name-calling, or even ostracizing a playmate. Adult intervention to chill that out is quite in order. However, I still draw the line at contriving stories to put on bookshelves to inculcate the lesson "this is a normal, acceptable part of life that everyone should pay attention to." Its not. There is a curious narcissism about wanting everyone else to pay attention to whatever makes you different. I don't really care that much about such books, but I don't entirely write off that some parents do care, and don't want them set in front of their children, at a public school, which the children are required by law to attend. It is not part of the essential socialization process which all citizens should share in common.
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