Dem
47
GOP
53
There is a clear theme running through today's concluding items: Censorship may sound easy in theory, but it's difficult to impose in practice.
It is very, very hard to wrap one's mind around the logic of book banning. OK, maybe if the book contains information that could be used to do harm to people—bomb-making instructions, or how to synthesize meth, or something like that. But with 99.9% of books that are banned, it is because of the ideas they contain (or, at least, the ideas that the censors THINK they contain). And in nearly all of those 99.9% of cases, the book in question would sit on the shelf, and would be read fairly rarely, if ever. But once that book is banned, it becomes dangerous and rebellious and cutting-edge and so forth. And in the literary version of the Streisand effect, the ban serves to drive interest in acquiring and reading the book(s).
Such is the case with a trio of high school students—Alice Gooblar-Perovic, Aahana Gupta and Lydia Cruce—in Iowa. That state's legislature is pretty red and pretty MAGA, and so passed a law last year that led thousands of books be removed from the shelves of the state's schools due to "sexual content." Among the books that became verboten were such erotic works as To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, A Farewell to Arms, Fahrenheit 451 and Captain Underpants and the Sensational Saga of Sir Stinks-A-Lot.
Enter Gooblar-Perovic, Gupta and Cruce. They did not particularly like being told what they could or could not read, and what ideas were or were not WrongThink. So, they founded the Banned Books Club at their school, and would meet regularly after classes to discuss various banned works. The books might not be available at their school library, but they are still available at bookstores and public libraries, not to mention a little thing called amazon.com.
In a delightful irony, the school initially refused to recognize the club. That means that the three young women now had an "against the rules" club dedicated to "against the rules" books. If you think that double-helping of transgressiveness helped spark interest among a bunch of teenagers, then you are absolutely right. Information about the club spread through word of mouth, and the ranks of the club (and the number of students reading banned books) swelled. Eventually, in part due to a court decision, the school backed down and allowed the club to become "official" (so, they could put up fliers and make announcements over the school intercom, etc.). Meanwhile, local libraries have invited the trio to curate exhibits of "Books Behind Bars."
We don't know which effort at censorship failed more spectacularly; the one in Ohio (see above) or this one. In any case, we congratulate these three young women for standing up to The Man, and for realizing, at an early age, that you should be the change you want to see in the world.
Have a good weekend, all! (Z)