GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #695: BOOK BANNING BANNED

 Yeah, I know, I'm playing a lot of catch up on these columns. I was gone for, what, three weeks I think?

Anyway, while I was gone my home state of Illinois did something pretty fucking remarkable. They banned book banning. I cannot tell you how much this pleases me. The reasoning is pretty sound, too. According to WBEZ, there were 70 ban attempts in IL alone last year. That's fucking insane. Guess how these cocksuckers tried to rationalize their attempts? Oh yeah. We need to protect the children!

Apparently not from gun violence, though, right? Right? *awkward collar pull*

(Which reminds me, people who say that we can't fuck with gun laws because of the Second Amendment really seem eager to throw the First Amendment under the bus . . .)

Setting aside that it's probably a lot easier on children to make them survive books rather than bullets, this comes at a critical time in the country when people want to deny rights to other people, and the most important thing they can do is to make sure no one empathizes with those people who can't have rights. Because if you learned their plight, you might not be so eager to deny them said rights. It's intellectual fascism of the highest order. Strangle the thought of "the other" in the cradle before it can grow up to help others learn compassion.

I'm sure this will surprise no one, but guess if any Republican voted for the bill. Just guess.

Right, zero. Which is funny because they're usually the ones bitching about the Thought Police, never stopping to think for one fucking second that they, themselves, are the Thought Police.

One of them, an asshole state senator by the name of Jason Plummer, tried a different approach to argue against banning book banning. He said it should be in the hands of local residents because they pay the taxes that support the libraries. "None of your constituents voted for this random organization," he said. "And you're taking their powers away from them simply because you may not agree with their beliefs."

It sounds almost reasonable. It's like people who don't have children complaining about paying taxes for schools. I have no offspring in need of education. Why should I pay for local schools? Like I said, almost reasonable.

But it's horseshit. Libraries exist so people can learn things. Not so they can jerk off in their little echo-chambers. When you pay local taxes, you're paying for the betterment, not of society as a whole, but your specific corner of society. That's why non-parents pay for schools, for example. Do you feel ripped off if your taxes, used in local law enforcement, never pay off because you made it to the end of your life and never had to call the police? That's stupid.

So is the idea that a library must contain only ideas that a group of people like. I'd prefer, for example, that no young and impressionable minds have access to something like Mein Kampf, but do you see me requesting that it be banned? I'm a hetero white guy, so you'd think I'd be on the banners' side, because let's face it, most challenged books are in that spot because they represent LGBTQ and POC people. But the fact of the matter is, if you stick to what you know, in my case the hetero white man experience, then how do you grow as an individual? How can you be more helpful to the rest of society? I am currently reading a John Ridley book called Those Who Walk in Darkness, which is actually pretty spot on for our topic tonight. In a world where people have superpowers, and one of them (ONE!) detonates an entire major city, all of them are outlawed in America. Those who stay have no rights if the authorities find them. Most cops take a shoot-first attitude in cases like this.

Sound kind of familiar?

I'm getting ready to go off on a rant, and I really don't have that much time for that. This is really starting to get away from me, and I have to be up early for work tomorrow. Suffice it to say, those who want to control thought need go no further than book banning. That is step one in making sure The People think only the thoughts you want them to. I'm glad that IL, the state where I was born and where I live, made banning books illegal. They did give libraries an out. If they want to ban books, that's fine, but you lose your funding if you do.

Suck on that.

One more thing. Just because it's the law of the land now doesn't mean it's the law forever. We all thought Roe v Wade was set in stone, and look what happened to that. So we must remain vigilant to make sure assholes don't overturn this law. Just remember that.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #618: NAZI PUNKS (AND ALL NAZIS, REALLY) FUCK OFF

American Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden circa WWII

 

Did you know that a significant amount of Americans supported Hitler during the WWII era? They kind of leave that out of schoolbooks because, and I know this sounds strange, but once upon a time almost everyone agreed that Nazis are bad, and they didn't want kids reading about how a lot of the US actually supported Hitler back then. It really shouldn't come as a surprise, considering two of the most famous Americans at the time, Walt Disney and Henry Ford, were not just fans of Hitler but were also his friends.

A while back I used to work at the Elmhurst Public Library, and I did something there that I used to think about often because I acted against my ethics this one time. I believe that people should read whatever they want to because I used to think that people who read were smarter than most. I never had any illusions about Nazis disappearing. My illusion was that they were a fringe society far from the mainstream.

Here's what I did. I was working the drive thru window late on a Friday night when I heard someone shove a bunch of books into the book drop. It was my duty to check those in, so I went into that room and discovered that they weren't library books. They were propaganda pamphlets, some book-sized. And there were a lot of them. A sticky note said they were a donation.

I didn't know what they were yet, so I eagerly took them back to my desk to look them over. Once I saw that they were celebrations of Nazism and denigrations of who they deemed as inferior people, my enthusiasm deflated. Ordinarily I would put these by the donations shelf, but I took them home instead. I doubted that they would have wound up in circulation. We have Mein Kampf in the collection, but that's an historical document. These pamphlets were attempts to convince people that Hitler had it right. Still, I didn't want to risk it.

Why did I take them home instead of throwing them out? I thought I'd read them to maybe understand the kind of horseshit these dickheads have in their heads to be spouting such garbage. I never got around to it, though. I put them in my closet, and there they stayed until recently, while I was packing up my things.

I decided then that I didn't need to understand them. Fuck 'em.

I'd taken it upon myself to make sure those books didn't wind up in the hands of impressionable readers, which kind of sounds like banning books, something I'm absolutely against. That's why it bothered me over the years. It no longer bothers me, though. And maybe that makes me a hypocrite, but fuck Nazis.

Because since I took those books I've learned that Nazis aren't just fringe. They're mainstream. Back when Trump was running in 2016 and all these cocksuckers came pouring out of the woodwork? That was a surprise. And guess what: it's no longer obvious to society as a whole that Nazis are bad.

I threw out those shit rags on a rainy day, and I'm certain that they've reverted to the cheap pulp they were made from. I'm glad no one else got to read them because people are stupider than even I thought, and that is saying a fucking lot. If I stopped even one person from nodding along while reading this tripe from saying, "Huh, Hitler isn't so bad after all," then it was worth it. Because I made the world a better place.

A lot of book banners seem to be of the same frame of mind. "I'm making the world a better place by making sure children don't read whatever the fuck I don't want them to read." Here's the difference: the books they're after aren't promoting the idea of killing "inferior" people en masse. To Kill a Mockingbird dares to suggest that maybe, just maybe, a Black man is a person, too. For example. Or The Great Gatsby hints that rich people are decadent and depraved and might just be horrible and untrustworthy people. Don't get me started on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

So yeah. I did the right thing. I will sleep like a baby tonight. And one more thing: Nazis (punks, surfers, whatever their flavor) need to fuck off.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #456: I READ BANNED BOOKS

 

So the most recent news in banning books is that a school board in Tennessee voted unanimously to ban MAUS from their school. I'm sure it's not the first time MAUS has gone through this, and it certainly won't be the last, but I can't think of anyone who isn't a Nazi who would want to ban this book. But if you want to know the finer details, here is the transcript of that meeting.

Fair warning, it's a difficult read, not because everyone involved is an asshole (they are), but because no one cleaned up the transcript. I suspect they ran the recording through a program and didn't have an educated (ha!) human being go over it. There are typos and missing words, etc. But it's worth reading if you have the time (and I know some of you are insomniacs, so you probably do).

Anyway, they're trying to do their best to make it about a nude image and eight naughty words and not about the Holocaust. So they're not entirely batshit crazy. But still. If they're willing to chuck such an important book because of those things, then they're probably being disingenuous. There is talk of redacting those things, but they don't sound all that serious about it. They seem to be looking for copyright excused not to do that. And those things shouldn't be redacted, anyway.

It makes me somewhat grateful for the way I was raised. I mean, I was forbidden to experience a lot of art. If an album had the Parental Advisory sticker on it, I couldn't listen to it. I remember when I was a kid in Coconuts begging my grandmother to buy me Undertow by Tool, and she examined the cover art and tried to get me to confess that it was something dirty. She eventually bought it for me (reluctantly), but she asked a lot of questions about how it might be vulgar. And if I was twelve years and 364 days old, I was still forbidden from seeing a PG-13 movie. Renting an R rated movie from Video Magic? Don't even think about it.

Which made me glad to hang out with Dad when he had me for a weekend. He'd let me watch R movies, and if boobs showed up? He wouldn't make me close my eyes. And I hung out with friends who didn't have such domineering authority figures in their lives, so I was able to watch awesome and grotesque horror movies while sleeping over at their places.

BUT! When it came to reading? Nothing was forbidden. If Wrath James White had a book out when I was, say, eight years old I'd be allowed to read it. I could read anything I wanted, and that went a long way toward making me who I am today, and for that I'm very, very grateful. Not even my grandmother would have stopped me from reading MAUS as a kid. I didn't know about it at the time. I read it in college while working at the library. It should be noted that it was shelved in the 940's. For those unfamiliar with the Dewey Decimal System, that's a nonfiction section for history books, particularly WWII. So it's impossible to underestimate the importance of this book.

More to the point, the Bible has a lot more offensive scenes in it than MAUS does, and you never hear about an American school board so much as thinking to ban it. So if you're reading that transcript, keep that in mind. You'll note that one guy talks about being a sinner and a hypocrite, so religion is an important factor to at least his decision making.

I forgot who said it first, but when authority figures ban books, you should go out of your way to read them and find out why. It's almost never really about offensive language and sexless nudity. You'll see a very obvious pattern, and it's always about trying to prevent people to think about things in a particular way.

I didn't take a critical thinking course (fuck the word "module") until college. There are two reasons for that. The first is that I'm paying for that course, and I didn't pay for public school. The other reason is that no one wants you to think critically when you're not eighteen yet. If you did you'd realize how fucked things are. Why eighteen? Traditionally speaking, that's when they can send you off to get killed in some war, but we don't have the draft anymore. But what the hell? Tradition is all that matters to most people. We do things because our ancestors did them. I'm glad to see that attitude finally changing, but it needs to be outright killed.

Do new things. Think things through. Read banned books.

Don't you know the Dewey Decimal System?!