Welcome to post number three!
Sorry it's a bit late, but this week (as of last Saturday) is Banned Books Week, sponsored by the American Library Organization. The ALA and various libraries around the United States have been using this week to agitate against the banning or challenging of books and their removal from public and school library shelves — usually because the material, whether sexually, religiously or socially objectionable, is deemed inappropriate for a younger audience.
We all know the uproar caused by the Harry Potter series. Famous obscenity trials such as that of Lady Chatterley's Lover are often familiar as well. But how about other examples? The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird have both been banned and challenged for racism and the use of the word "nigger", even though both books contain anti-racist messages. The Diary of Anne Frank was banned in one school district because it was said to be "a real downer". And sex education books and books which mention homosexuality are removed from libraries or restricted from children all over the US.
While it may seem reasonable to impose certain limits on what books children read (for example, you wouldn't necessarily want your elementary-school kid to read Lady Chatterley), but on what basis can you draw such distinctions of appropriateness? And should such decisions be left up to school administrators, religious leaders, librarians and community leaders, or should they only be determined by individual parents? Or should any restrictions be imposed at all?
I will impose an editorial comment just for a minute: celebrate Banned Books Week! Read a banned book! In the words of the button I've been wearing to school all week: "First they burn books, then they burn people."
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
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28 comments:
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has no social redeeming value at all. It is a viscious meme that incites violence and unreason. It was designed and created to attack Jesuits (with of course Jesuit in place of where one nowadays sees Jew), then to keep the tsarists in power, and was promulgated later are a reason to kill Jewish people. This is a book that deserves to die an ignominous death, and it's publishers need to be slapped every day.
But the problem is that definitions of what books are appropriate for public consumption are subjective. Someone else could just as easily say that Ulysses shouldn't be distributed because it's got sex in and is incomprehensible. So where do you draw the line, and how?
You are presuming that we don't have brains and that if we do we are just too too afraid to use them. It is not worth the cost of free speech to allow people to yell 'Fire' in a crowded theater, and nobody has a problem with that. Pragmatism, as the Supreme Court ruling says "we know it when we see it", always applies.
Like language, the line is a living thing. It can be drawn, and then redrawn as society grows and changes. Like life, the line is imperfect. Democracy is imperfect, but we like it just fine. So, why reject the line, just because it might be outside of someone else's limited imagination about where it happens to be just now?
To automatically assume that thinking people cannot tell that something has no redeeming social value when they see it, is to buy into that postmodernism relativism hooey that Universities are spewing nowadays. It also presumes that somehow people in the past were just too much stupider than people today, which I don't buy any more than the reverse.
I find Ulysses incomprehensible, and I find people who have claimed to have read it and understood it insufferable because they fail to explain it and it pleases them that they do. The Cliff Notes for it are equally bizarre (or at least I found them so 20 years ago). I'm actually not resistant to the idea that high school students could be profitably protected from highfalutin' obscurantist snobs.
There are always folk who get off on claiming to know what nobody else CAN know. It's also true that Eng Lit. is about exposing people to western culture, and western culture is full of blowhards. The time to force exposure of this to people is when they have an option to walk away, as opposed to HS which is required. So, libraries, bookstores and colleges OK, anybody can buy a book of stoner lit if they like. HS is all right by me it gets banned.
I double-dog-dare you to compare Protocols to Ulysses.
Well, you have to consider that the English class I'm taking this year in high school (as well as the one I took last year) are AP, and are supposed to be considered college classes (I get a form of college credit for it).
So it goes that the banning of books from the reading curriculum should be treated nearly the same way as colleges.
Another thing is that I don't think any English teacher is going to say "Damn, I wish my class could read 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion', but it's banned." Instead we should consider such books as The Catcher in the Rye, or 1984, and whether or not they should be banned in a high school setting. Can high school students afford to not read them? I'll defend either book against anyone who wishes to say that high school students should not read them in their English classes.
Just to play Devil's Avocado for a moment...do we really have much to worry about?
Yes, denying students access to works of literature is pernicious... but I'm not sure how widespread the idiocies of book banning are in the US school system. I have the impression that the examples quoted are rare enough to be noteworthy. The To Kill A Mockingbird example sounds like a thoroughgoing wrongheadedness. However...I'm not sure we need panic. In the UK there were scare stories in the 1980s about left-wing councils meddling in education, putting pro-gay literature in schools and - most famously of all - banning the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep. (which never happened: The story was completely fabricated by a right-wing newspaper. And yet the myth persists and is widely quoted as fact.). It culminated in the UK in the notorious 'Clause 28' (of the Education Act) banning the promotion of homosexuality. In theory this might have meant no mention of homosexuality in sex education, and even the banning of Oscar Wilde from English lessons. In reality, it meant no such thing. Business as normal until the law was repealed - as a matter or principle - about 5 years ago.
The banning of books in society as a whole...I belive that it's still possible for a book, poem or play to be prosecuted in the UK on the grounds of 'blasphemous obscenity'. The reality is that6 last time it was tried (late 70's), it was thrown out of court...and the National Theatre is currently staging a revival of the play concerned. I guess the legal position here is currently a bit similar to that in Turkey. In recent years, prosecutions have been staged against a series of writers (eg Orhan Pamuk) for 'anti-Turkish sentiment.' They've all been thrown out of court after about ten minutes and are simply publicity stunts by right-wingers.
Of course, you guys in the US have the advantage of a constitution. While your mass media tend to be less free and more one-sided than ours (yes, Fox obviously...but CNN is no great shakes either!)...at least you have legally enshrined protection of free speech. We have 'an unwritten constitution'...which is not worth the paper it's printed on.
Of course, the other 1st Amendment principle - separation of religion and state - doesn't apply. The Bible is taught far too freely for my liking. Now there's a book I'd like to see banned from schools!
Nakedkali:
It is not worth the cost of free speech to allow people to yell 'Fire' in a crowded theater
But can we shout 'Movie' in a crowded firehouse?
Also...
Last year my nation was gripped by the headline 'Schools Ban Romeo And Juliet!'
It was yet another attempt to spread the 'political correctness gone mad' myth. What had actually happened was that The Education Authority for Wales issued a memo reminding schools to be sensitive when placing adolescents in dramatic rolse where they might be required to kiss one another. Sounds sensible to me. Nobody had intended banning anything. Nobody had mentioned Romeo and Juliet.
One has to wonder what such manufactured stories are meant to distract us from. (See also sports, celebrities, royalty...)
Big Chief sez:
[snip] AP [snip]
__________________
Nakedkali responds:
EMR can tell you how thoroughly unimpressed I am by this. Wisdom cannot be bought from a forced curriculum, and high pressure doesn't necessarily result in correct extractions of the same from the experience. You-all gotses yourself some nice throbbing sweaty hormones, only you don't *realize* and *can't* because the biological imperative is ther and because they are so personal and integrated to yourself.
JdJ then continues:
Another thing is that I don't think any English teacher is going to say "Damn, I wish my class could read 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion', but it's banned."
_____________________
Nakedkali responds:
So you *do* agree with me that it's OK to ban Protocols?
You had such *nice* English teachers. How sweee-eeet! (heart-dotted letter 'I's, and warbling fluffy bluebirds float around that last sentence, you'll just have to imagine them). My school district had it's borders redrawn precisely to exclude folks who were born with their tans and didn't have to work for melanin enhancement.
If I hadn't gone to the HS that my older sibs went to (there was a family clause) I would have been forced to beat up on a lot more people in HS than I did. Freud was commonly interpreted in such a way that implied gays needed to grow up and a few attacks could only do them some hearty, masculine goodness, and in addition to the Communist Manifesto (which is quite interesting even if it is bogus) there were enough shitkickin' bubbas around from the rest of the country that Protocols were also in circulation.
Instead we should consider such books as The Catcher in the Rye, or 1984, and whether or not they should be banned in a high school setting. Can high school students afford to not read them? I'll defend either book against anyone who wishes to say that high school students should not read them in their English classes.
The morality shouting of 'movie' in a crowded firehouse depends on which movie the public is actually being warned about.
If it were boringly horrible like "Speed II" or that Jackie Chan/squeaky black guy movie set in Tokyo (whose name I mercifully forget), it may very well result in a bunch of people dashing desperately for the exits in self-preservation.
Nakedkali, don't mock me. I'm sorry for whatever traumas you went through in high school, but don't imagine for a moment that they have given you any right to ridicule my high school experiences.
Not only are your responses so convoluted I can barely make sense of them, but your points are poorly made, and as far as I can see have nothing to do with my statements on the banning of books.
If you disagree with my opinions, feel free to attack them, but don't attack me, or insinuate that I don't know what I'm talking about because I've been so "sheltered".
Wow, a lot has happened since I last posted. Let me try to catch up and respond to everyone's points. (And exhort you folks to step back, breathe and not tear each other's throats out. No ad hominem accusations, please. Right, now that that's over with, back to the slaughter...)
I know I'm really not supposed to let my personal views enter into this, but what the hell. It is my blog.
Nakedkali, I personally am against any restriction of free speech, however slight and however potentially justified. Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre isn't exercising one's right to free speech, though. That's just inciting disorder, it's not proclaiming one's views on any sort of issue. It's your right of free speech to argue that you believe in segregation (though hopefully you don't!) but it could be argued that it's not your right of free speech to intentionally incite violence by proclaiming such in a crowded area and starting a riot.
Secondly, the US Supreme Court pornography decision with the "I know it when I see it" quote (unfortunately, I can't remember which case that is at present) seems really quite ludicrous. To suggest that there's no objective standard for determining objectionable content (that, one might presume, of insufficient artistic merit or something like that) and that it's subject to the whims of whichever judge happens to be presiding seems quite dangerous to me. On the other hand, it's my inclination to say that we really ought not to have any restrictions at all (citing the "free speech" requirements as above, though). Just because something has no "redeeming social value" doesn't mean it should be removed from print - and who determines "redeeming social value", anyway? Surely that's subjective? That's what I mean about Protocols and Ulysses.
In response to Jefe, though, this isn't just secondary schools we're considering — it's a wider idea.
Because (to Edward), my understanding is that England, with its wishy-washy Anglicanism/agnosticism, as Douglas Adams once put it, is a lot less forceful in book-banning matters than the Bible Belt of the southern United States. It's true that you folks don't have a written constitution, but on the other hand you are not ("yet!" she says with a doom-laden voice) ruled by the whims of right-wing Evangelist Christians (okay, I suppose there are some perfectly nice right-wing Evangelist Christians out there... I just haven't met them yet). It depends on the book, of course, and while you hear about famous cases concerning classic literature, the Christian right has also had their crusade against Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code, in addition to pretty much any sex ed book that doesn't preach "abstinence only" and mentions homosexuality, or such children's books as Heather Has Two Mommies and King and King, the recent challenges of which are extensive. (A list of frequently challenged and banned books can be found at http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bbwlinks/topten2000to2005.htm
Nakedkali, I'd appreciate it if you would not put words in my mouth with regards to AP classes. I do think they're a load of bollocks (though I take them nevertheless), but I don't think Jefe was meaning to imply anything conceited by his remark.
The Communist Manifesto? Bogus? You've shattered my idealistic, youthful dreams of a utopian state.
Right, back to discussion moderator mode now. I predict it won't last; I suck at not rising to bait.
I just realised I completely contradicted myself in my third paragraph. Abject apologies. I suppose what I meant to say is that while such vague definitions of "objectionable" content make you want to laugh, maybe they're all we've got, cause it's hard to objectively define artistic merit - and therefore, maybe we shouldn't be imposing any restrictions at all.
Yes, as I said, I was playing Devil's Avocado. I agree that even minor idiocies of censorship need to be challenged. They are insidious. Even if they haven't already...they can get out of hand.
Actually, in recent UK history (btw...I forgive you the error of refering to my location as 'England'. It's Scotland. We're less tolerant when the English make the same mistake, as they so often do), censorship has been a very real phenomenon. Up until the late 60s we had The Lord Chancellor's Office that was responsible for 'passing' books and plays. Within is net fell various examples such as the plays of Joe Orton. It's death kness was probably sounded bt the famously unsuccesful attempt at prosecution of Lady Chatterly's Lover.
Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me)/ Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP.
(Philip Larkin - Annus Mirabilis). But even thereafter there have been the Oz magazine prosecutions...and even seizures of the Sex Pistols' album for its 'obscene' title. Also, in the 1970's, local authorities had control over cinemas so that even films which had a certificate could be locally banned. My headmaster, a CofE canon, was instrumental in failed attempts to ban A Clockwork Orange (before Kubrick himself banned it from the UK), Straw Dogs, Last Tango In Paris and...get this...The Life Of Brian.
Our current situation on cinema is...confusing. I understand that your system of certification is voluntary. (btw this movie is meant to be good. Ours is statutory...and we have different boards for cinema and DVD/VHS. The boards are actually quite liberal and are happy to pass violent or sexually explicit material on the grounds of artistic merit. What we don't have is freely available explicit pornography...as available in the US, all other European countries apart from Ireland...and, indeed, in much of the muslim world. (I saw a documentary about Libya in which a guy in DVD rental store expressed amazement that filmed erections were banned in the UK...and you should see Turkish news stands! Or look at hotmovies.com under the genre Ethnic/Middle-Eastern). Pornography is now available in 'licensed sex shops' - but few authorities grant licences. (In Glasgow, it's also widely available via several illegal outlets...as is pirated software. It makes no odds in these days of broadband).
So...it's all very complex and paradoxical. In the UK, the fight is to retain our unwrittten liberal consensus. In the US it's to ensure the continued application of your constitution. By and large, the UK is becoming increasingly liberal. By and large the 1st amendment is being upheld. But there will always be cultural tension.
I shall leave you with two definitions:
Q: What's the difference between pornography and art?
A: Pornography is in focus.
From John Mortimer (author of the Rumpole books and a barrister at the Lady Chatetrly and Oz trials)
"Pornography is anything that will give an erection to an elderly High Court judge."
I'd like to point out that there's a vaaast difference between:
1. printing a book/volume and making it available.
2. making it publically available to all library patrons, including children.
and
3. posting it in public space.
When I couldn't get a hard copy of the Protocols at the library I could understand - a library is a public place and is therefore subject to rules of propriety and decorum. Like staying dressed in the street.
If the bookstores weren't carrying the Protocols for the same pc reasons, I'd wonder.
I certainly wouldn't object to their being available online.
Oh yeah, and don't forget #4:
forcing someone to read it for class.
Elementary and high school is mandatory, so everyone has to go. It is therefore *wrong* to force someone to read something they object to for moral, religious, or lifestyle reasons.
College is optional, and there are Christian colleges for those who prefer it, and for the most part people choose their courses. So there's more freedom there.
In other words - yeah, there has to be restrictions on what you study in high school. And I survived high school without reading Catcher in the Rye. Still haven't gotten around to it, actually. (It's somewheres down the list). I'm sure I don't know what I'm missing, but it hasn't made me a deficient human being.
As for 1984 - it was written as a warning against a regime and political system that is defunct. What's the point in reading it, except in history class?
EMR, I have reread what I wrote, and I didn't say *anything* about your own opinion of AP. I only said you know my opinion, and you do in fact know this, because of things I have written on H2G2 in the PR thread of the AP article you submitted for the Edited Guide.
JdJ, you supposed not any English teacher would say something that I know that some of my teachers (including ones in control of reading curriculum) have said similar when they thought they wouldn't be quoted. Racism is alive and well and it is obviously so, so it is shamefully naive or disingenous of you to suppose that all of us on this blog would also suppose that it is not. There's a logical fallacy here on your part, and I leave it as an exercise for you to figure which one.
You are making a claim to maturity by dropping the AP name, that is to say by making the Logical Fallacy of Argument from Authority. And yet right after you made this claim, you ended up saying something really really stupid.
If you weren't aware of it, and you didn't post right afterward that you reread what you wrote that you didnt mean it that way so I am guessing that you weren't, you are now.
Your nickname, which translates to "the boss of bosses" is inherently agressive and arrogant. If you can't take it, don't imply you can.
And yes, I AM older and wiser than you.
JdJ, you have ignored my question. Is it OK with you if Protocols get banned?
EMR, you acknowledge that speech acts can actually not be intended for actual benign communication by your redefinition of "Fire in a Crowded Theater", and could be understood as invocations for mayhem and murder.
There are some books that are disguised as if they were benign speech acts, but they are not. Protocols is one of them.
Much in the way that "Fire!" is intended to invoke a strong unreasoned response, so is the rhetoric in Protocols, and deliberately so. Protocols has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked, and yet it constantly gets republished. It 'speaks' loudly to the lizardparts of our brains, every bit as strongly as that the word Fire causes us to really really want to get to the exits.
Point by point rebuttals in the interest of defending myself:
I never said that racism wasn't inherent in our society. I did make an assumption based on the experience of my English classes and education that The Protocols weren't high up on the reading list. You tell me they were in the case of your English teachers and I concede that point. I think you took that particular point way too far, and completely changed what I meant, which was that I think that we shouldn't be as worried about the banning of The Protocols as the banning of literary classics, to me saying that racism didn't exist and that it would be foolish for anyone to think that it does.
Secondly, you are making an assumption that I was trying to show how mature I was by saying that I was in AP classes, which is completely false. I'm sorry if I gave that impression, and again what I meant was that in some high school settings, reading curriculum should be treated as it is in college settings, not that I'm in AP classes, which proves how smart I am.
My name is simply a nickname that has developed over time, you can ask EMR if you wish confirmation that it is not a self-proclaimed title in any way, and I do not mean it aggressively. It does mean "boss of bosses", which I thought as sort of cool, but it's simply a play on my name, Jeff.
Furthermore, I do not agree with you that The Protocols should be banned because that would deprive me of the chance to read it, and I don't think people should be deprived of the chance to read anything.
Again, I would like to point out that you have mocked me, belittled me, and flat-out insulted me on several occasions, and I'd like it to stop if we are to discuss any further posts on this blog. I have done my best not to insult you (and I apologize for my angry post, I said it while a little heated at the remarks made about me), and I'd like that favor returned.
Lastly, I'd just like to say I think this whole feud has resulted from a grave misinterpretation of what I was trying to say, and I'd like to apologize for anything I may have said to offend you, and hope that in future discussions we can talk things out without going for each others throats (for which I am as guilty as you).
To respond to Leo, I'd definitely have a problem if a public library flat-out didn't carry a book, because it's a government establishment, therefore books that it bans are equivalent in my eyes to books that the government bans. And the governments should not have to power to ban books.
I do agree with you, however, that high school education is forced, and that no one should be forced to read something they find inherently offensive. But I also believe that the most intellectually stimulating books can usually be found being challenged one way or another, and that one bias should not make a book unavailable to teach to a class.
And I did say I'd defend my precious The Catcher in the Rye and 1984. Well, I will agree with you that you're not missing a VITAL aspect of life for never reading The Catcher in the Rye, but I will also say that I don't think that the opportunity to read it in a learning environment should be barred in a high school. As for 1984, I think it can still be applied to many instances of government policy today. Orwell was warning against an unlikely extreme, but by recognizing what made it a hellish society we can recognize smaller instances of it in our own government.
Also, to Nakedkali, I think the inherent difference in yelling "Fire!" in a croweded theater and reading The Protocols is the aspect of choice. If you yell "Fire!", everyone hears you, and panics. You never give them a choice to close their ears. Whereas with The Protocols, one can choose not to read it, which I think makes the banning of The Protocols by the government unreasonable.
Edward:
Apologies for having thought you were in England! Most terrible of me.
It's just like when the Americans tried to ban Life of Brian for being anti-religion. I'm surprised that happened in the UK too.
Heh, there's a long story behind my inability to see This Film is Not Yet Rated. Basically the fact that it has NC-17-rated sections means that I wasn't allowed to see it. I'm quite surprised about the porn, though. One gets the impression over here of the UK and Europe being far more tolerant of anything sex-related, though on further consideration I suppose it would be more accurate to say that it seems Europeans are less likely to put a sexual spin on things — hence acceptance of nudity in movies, on beaches, etc which may not necessarily be intended as sexual.
But Leo, a child could just as easily come across an "inappropriate" book in a library as in a bookstore! It's fine to remove a book from the children's section if it's not intended for children, or to create a "young adult" section for borderline books, but to restrict the free access of adults to books they should be mature enough to read seems just as "inappropriate" as said literature.
All right, so if you're a kid in high school and you object to reading The Catcher in the Rye, the teacher can devise some alternate assignment for you. But it's unreasonable for your parents to then demand that all the other children be prevented from reading the book as well, as has happened before. Actually, it's a pretty good book; I recommend it.
As for 1984: having just written a school essay or two on the subject, if you don't think 1984 is relevant to 2006, you're being a bit closed-minded, frankly. Doesn't it concern you that the FBI could be tapping your phone and monitoring your internet usage and what books you check out of the library? Such violations of civil liberties do occur in this country and 1984 should still serve as a warning to us of how far such atrocities can be taken. It's not such a huge leap from the current situation to Big Brother.
nakedkali:
Apologies for having misunderstood your AP comment.
But note that, in the States, under the First Amendment, the Ku Klux Klan and Christian evangelist anti-gay groups, for example, are still allowed to disseminate their messages of hate. And so they should be. If the "right" side gets to agitate, so should the "wrong" one (under the circumstances, I think the obvious bias is appropriate). It's a difficult line to draw, yet we have to draw it somewhere. It's not really a question of "disguise" — if someone actually has a point to make, no matter how ridiculous it is, they should be able to make it. Yelling "fire" isn't making a point; it's just yelling a single word basically for no reason (well, yes, to incite panic, but I think you get what I mean).
One last point:
And yes, I AM older and wiser than you.
I find that comment pretty annoying, I have to say. While I grant that you're certainly older and have more life experience than Jefe or me, one of the great features of the internet is that it affords us the opportunity to all converse on an equal footing, and to bring our different points of view to bear on the situation. Our point of view, if "younger", is no less valid and I'd prefer you not to dismiss it on the grounds that we've lived for fewer years.
Sorry for repeating some of Jefe's points. I hadn't finished reading the backlog at the time I posted.
Point well taken about libraries - almost. bookstores are not free, and you can't plunk yourself down and read something straight through while in the store.
As you mentioned, the library is government funded, so stocking The PRotocols on its shelves is tantamount to supporting anti-semitism. Stores are commercial, and everyone knows they only stock their shelves to make money.
I don't agree that libraries should ban anything with sex in it, but they do have to put their foot down somewhere, simply because a library is supposed to be a hall of literature and learning, and not all publications suit the bill.
1984 does fit the bill. Probably Catcher in the Rye does too. I'll have to get back to you on that. ;-)
I don't think anyone needs to read 1984 to realize the dangers of unrestricted wire-tapping. But I'll retract my statement because 'Big Brother' is part of the lexicon, and a very handy phrase too.
Also, I object to 'The Americans' tried to ban anything. I wasn't aware that the federal government did book banning. Usually the banners belong to the Bible Belt, and that is often a library-by-library or state-by-state thing.
Which is another point, though I may sound like I'm contradicting myself here:
Though libraries are government funded and therefore can't support virulent anti-anyone stuff, choices in the gray areas usually fall to the individual states or libraries. You'll find many books in NYC libraries that would horrify the denizens of, say, Webb City, Missouri.
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