Chapter Seven Banned Books and Their Universal Availability

Annoyed Librarian

The American Library Association (ALA) has been ghting for our intellectual freedom for many decades, ever since they realized that ghting for libraries wasnt nearly as sexy or exciting. One of the ghts theyve often waged is the ght against censorship and for so-called Banned Books. Every September the ALA unleashes pompous propaganda about how great they are for ghting against the evil censors who seem to dominate the ALA worldview. The irony, of course, is that the ALA never mentions a banned book that isnt readily available just about anywhere in the United States. They have an I read Banned Books bracelet for sale that includes the cover of Alice in Wonderland. That book is available free online in both print and audio versions. Banned books, indeed. The ALA denition of censorship is narrow and self-serving. A censor for the ALA means anyone who argues that a library book is inappropriate for a particular audience, for example. So if you dont think your childs library should have pornographic novels, youre just a mean old censor, and the ALA and their minions will ridicule you. But lets take a look at the ALA and see if it has much of a case.

BANNED BOOKS PROCLAMATION

First, lets consider their Banned Books Proclamation (http://www.ala. org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bbwlinks/bbwproclamation.htm) the ALA trots out every Banned Books Week.
The Annoyed Librarian is perhaps the most successful, respected, and desirable librarian of her generation (E-mail: annoyedlibrarian@gmail.com). Journal of Access Services, Vol. 5(4), 2008 Available online at http://www.haworthpress.com C 2008 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved. doi: 10.1080/15367960802175067

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Banned Books, my word. The ALA acts like we live in some closed society where the government controls the ow of information. As everyone with even a modicum of intelligence has gured out by now, none of these books are banned in any ordinary sense of the term. Okay, so some sensitive soul doesnt want her child reading nasty racial epithets in Huckleberry Finn and asks that it be removed. Well, the ALA says its your god-given right to be forced to read nasty racial epithets, unless of course youre on one of those university campuses harassed by the old PC people and their war on free speech. Its also your god-given right to have your child stumble across illustrated copies of Heather has Two Very Excited Daddies. If you dont like it, go back to Nazi Germany where you belong, you fascist! Yes, Banned Books Week is the week of the year when librarians unite together to protect the one thing that makes libraries different from the mallfree books. The rest of the year we have to listen to nitwits tell us that we need to dissociate ourselves from books or well become irrelevant. The cognitive dissonance at ALA must be terrible. Which brings us to the Banned Books Proclamation. Lets examine the whole darn thing, why dont we. What comes rst? WHEREAS, the freedom to read is essential to our democracy, and reading is among our greatest freedoms; and Okay, Ill accept this. But is it just the freedom to read thats essential, or actually reading? Should we have people pass literacy tests before they can vote? How essential is this? WHEREAS, privacy is essential to the exercise of that freedom, and the right to privacy is the right to open inquiry without having the subject of ones interest examined or scrutinized by others; and Reading, yes. But why is privacy essential? Does this mean that if someone sees what book Im reading then I become illiterate? Whats wrong with scrutinizing peoples reading? You learn a lot about people that way. If I go to someones house, I always examine the bookshelves. If they dont have any bookshelves, that also tells me something about them. Access to information and the freedom to read is one thing, but this obsession with privacy is something else. How did privacy get thrown into this mix? Nobody knows. Its just another term that sounds good, so the ALA throws it in.

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WHEREAS, the freedom to read is protected by our Constitution; and Umm, no, it isnt, actually, at least not explicitly. Maybe thats one of those powers delegated to the states. Apparently the person who wrote this has never read the Constitution. Well, I have, and this freedom isnt in it. I nd this ignorance of our founding documents scandalous, and Im going to write my congressman about it, or perhaps Ill write someone really powerful, like my ALA councilor. WHEREAS some individuals, groups, and public authorities work to remove or limit access to reading materials, to censor content in schools, to label controversial views, to distribute lists of objectionable books or authors, and to purge libraries of materials reecting the diversity of society; and Interesting statement, no doubt true. Some groups do work to remove materials. However, I nd the scare quotes around controversial and objectionable interesting. Is the claim here then that theres no such thing as an objectionable book? Thats nice and morally relativistic of us and all, but is it true? Are all books appropriate for school libraries? The Story of O, to name a relatively mild example? And dont libraries automatically limit access to most reading materials by never buying them in the rst place? Does this mean that small libraries are banning books? WHEREAS, both governmental intimidation and the fear of censorship cause authors who seek to avoid controversy to practice selfcensorship, thus limiting our access to new ideas; and My goodness, where do they get this stuff? Limit our access to new ideas? First, how many new ideas are there really? Is there anything new under the sun? And are we limited? Were drowning in information. And someone would have to be pretty spineless indeed to fear censorship in this country, when you can put anything you want and read anything you want on the Internet (which you cant do in some countries). It also must be unforgivably easy to publish based on all the idiotic books out there. Who are all these timid geniuses afraid of censorship? Oh, and who is censoring? Challenging a copy of Harry Potter at the Bumuff, Alabama Middle School isnt censorship.

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WHEREAS, every silencing of a heresy, every enforcement of an orthodoxy, diminishes the toughness and resilience of American society and leaves it less able to deal with controversy and difference; and Oh, please. Every enforcement of an orthodoxy? What does that mean? Enforcement by whom? By the government? By a church? By your mother? And toughness and resilience of American society? Is this the same toughness and resilience that I see every day in the news when yet another victimized group starts whining about how theyre oppressed? Oh, I am not supposed to say that, am I? Should I have exercised self-censorship? WHEREAS, Americans still favor free enterprise in ideas and expression, and can be trusted to exercise critical judgment, to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe, and to exercise the responsibilities that accompany this freedom; and Ah, if only they favored free enterprise in economics. And can they really be trusted to exercise critical judgment and to recognize propaganda and misinformation? Were talking about ordinary people, you know, not brilliant librarians. These are the people swayed by mass advertising and political slogans. These are the same boneheads that vote Republican/Democrat (Please select the party you dislike the most). WHEREAS, intellectual freedom is essential to the preservation of a free society and a creative culture; and Okay, youve got me. WHEREAS, conformity limits the range and variety of inquiry and expression on which our democracy and our culture depend; and Why? Conformity to what? What a vague and loaded term. Thanks a lot, Henry Thoreau, but it really all depends, now doesnt it. For example, we should all conform to the norms of liberal democracy. Oh, and the mores of civilized society. Perhaps you need an example. You want to see a classic nonconformist, check out that guy that just blew himself up on the street in Baghdad. Now thats some nonconformist expression for you! Perhaps

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the folks at ALA who come up with this stuff should try to conform to the demands of rigorous thought. Just a suggestion. WHEREAS, the American Library Associations Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read is observed during the last week of September each year as a reminder to Americans not to take their precious freedom for granted; and I wont take this precious freedom for granted! I promise! WHEREAS, Banned Books Week celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express ones opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them; now, therefore, be it Im certainly in favor of protecting and expressing unorthodox opinions, having so many of them myself. But does this mean every library has to buy every book published to ensure everyone has access to every idea? RESOLVED, that the Library celebrates the American Library Associations Banned Books Week, September 24October 2, 2005, and be it further RESOLVED, that the Library encourages all libraries and bookstores to acquire and make available materials representative of all the people in our society; and be it further RESOLVED, that the Library encourages free people to read freely, now and forever. LibraryDateCity, State. Adopted by the Ill let you ll in the blanks.

YOU KNOW, FOR THE CHILDREN

Its not enough to have this pompous and poorly argued resolution. No, then the ALA has to engage in a smear campaign against concerned parents. As should come as no surprise, it turns out that most challenged books are challenged in school libraries as inappropriate for children. According to the ALA, which is the only group who even remotely cares about this

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subject, about 70 percent of challenges take place in schools and school libraries. Some fascists apparently are under the mistaken impression that there may be books unsuitable for children. Obviously those totalitarian idiots are wrong, or at least thats what the ALA implies. Because according the ALAs logic, there are no books unsuitable for children. Perhaps theyre unsuitable for children, but thats about as far as the ethically challenged ALA can go. To go any further, you might have to engage in some actual moral reasoning, and that requires a lot more brainpower than the ALA is capable of devoting to the topic. Plus you cant team up with Google to do it. Lets look at the evidence. Perhaps, like me, you were wondering: Why are Books Challenged? Well, the ALA has a nice packaged answer for you (http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/challengedbanned/ challengedbanned.htm#wbc). Books usually are challenged with the best intentionsto protect others, frequently children, from difcult ideas and information. Thats right, its usually to protect children from difcult ideas and information. At least they agree that the intentions are good, because they disagree with every action resulting from those intentions. That leads me to believe they really dont respect these intentions, and that theyre only saying this to sound like they actually care about protecting children. And then they claim that Censorship can be subtle, almost imperceptible, as well as blatant and overt, but, nonetheless, harmful. Now weve somehow gone from challenging books in libraries (and usually challenges to unsuitable or perhaps unsuitable books in school libraries) to censorship. How did we make that transition? They must have a special department of defective reasoners there in Chicago to come up with this stuff. I think there are at least a couple of colleges in Chicago. Perhaps the Defective Reasoning Staff could take courses there in logic or critical thinking. This is whats known in logic as a non sequitur. For the folks at ALA I just want to say, thats a real phrase. You could look it up! Nevertheless, defective reasoners or not, they now quote a very pretentious justication indeed for their already specious move from library book challenging to censorship. Check this out: As John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty: If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justied in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justied in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession

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of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benet, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. For a moment I was so stunned by the dense prose of John Stuart Mill that I forgot what hes saying here has nothing to do with challenging books in school libraries because they are inappropriate for children. The school library is not the world. Every opinion does not have to be represented. This should be obvious to any moron. The people who quoted this dont really understand what Mill was getting at. They just want someone authoritative to buttress their sagging beliefs. Then the smear tactics begin: According to the The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books, Challenges by Initiator, Institution, Type, and Year, the top three reasons, in order, for challenging material are the material is considered to be sexually explicit contain offensive language, and be unsuited to age group. Again, note the scare quotes. A book isnt sexually explicit, its sexually explicit. And no book can be unsuited to an age group, just unsuited. They are poisoning the well against the challengers before the debate really begins. The ALA doesnt believe a book is sexually explicit. Thats just a matter of opinion. And even if it is sexually explicit, theres no reason little Johnny shouldnt be reading it in his middle school library. We should just be thankful he can read! The very clear implication of this is that the ALA allows for no distinction for what is suitable or unsuitable for children and is defending the idea that all books are suitable for children. After all, if it is attacking all challenges, then any challenge must be misguided. I wonder if anyone at the ALA really believes this. Surely some of these folks must have children. Do they think all books are suitable for their own children? Dont they think there are at least some books that are unsuitable for all children?

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Because if they think there are some books unsuitable for any children, as I and most reasonable people do, then theyre terrible hypocrites and poisonous rascals for foisting this idiotic ALA reasoning on the world. But AL, you say, I want an example of material that wouldnt be suitable in a school library. What about a childrens book about a school librarian who is raped and tortured by potty-mouthed neo-Nazi middle schoolersand learns to like it! If it were written, someone would probably publish it, and then the school libraries could buy it with the ALAs blessing. Heck, ALA Editions might publish it just to show what freedom lovers and cultural innovators they are. See, I would think this book would have offensive language, be sexually explicit, and be unsuitable for children, but the ALA would just put quotes around those phrases and defend it as a bold provocative work that challenges childrens perceptions about the acceptability of librarian torture by fascist adolescents. Fortunately we rely upon school librarians not to buy this sort of stuff for their libraries. In other words, we rely upon them to be decent and reasonable human beings who understand that children are not adults and that there is material inappropriate for children. Fortunately most school librarians either t that description or else have inadequate budgets, because I doubt any school libraries would buy or own a book like Hank the Junior High Nazi Tortures the Librarian. But if some sociopathic school librarian set up the new pornography approval plan and the books started owing in and some parent or teacher dared to criticize the materials and to ask that they be removed, all the critics would get from the ALA is abuse about how theyre trying to silence opinions and to censor thought and in general to act like totalitarians. Are the Banned Books folks at the ALA really this stupid? Can they really not see the illogical and morally unsound ideas theyre promoting? Im not sure, but I know one thing. If I had any children, I wouldnt want them around those folks at all.

THE SCROTUM CONTROVERSY

Even the smallest challenges can bring out the furor of angered librarians. Some of you perhaps have read about the Scrotum Controversy, which I think is the title of the latest Ludlum novel. If you havent heard, some Newberry Award winning childrens book called The Higher Power of Lucky has the word scrotum in it and a couple of childrens librarians refused to order it for their libraries under the strange impression that the

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word isnt appropriate for childrens literature. My contention is that any word appropriate for polite conversation is appropriate for childrens literature, which leaves the burden of proof up to you. Would you start talking about scrotums to your work colleagues? If so, Im glad you dont work with me. The scrotum may be the least attractive portion of a man, if we exclude excessive back hair, and I dont want to discuss it in the break room. The author of this little gem of a book is a librarian, and she responded to the clamor: I was shocked and horried to read that some school librarians, teachers, and media specialists are choosing not to include the 2007 Newbery Medal winner in their collections (http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6416836.html). Shocked and horried? My word, we are easily shocked and horried, arent we. I guess Im not that easily shocked. But then again, I dont get any royalties if a library buys the book. But her pseudo-outrage goes further: If I were a parent of a middlegrade child, I would want to make decisions about my childs reading myselfId be appalled that my school librarian had decided to take on the role of censor and deny my child access to a major award-winning book. So we can tell from this that she is not a parent of a middle-grade child, which might be important to note. But what I most note is that shes appalled. Now shes shocked, horried, and appalled. How unpleasant it must be to be her. The other thing to note is the claim that she would want to make decisions about her childs reading herself. Thats exactly what the folks who challenge books want to do. They dont want school librarians peddling violence and porn. Im conicted, youre confused, and that other person is just a hypocrite. And of course shes taking an idiotic line right out of the idiotic ALA playbook and crying censorship. So some librarian doesnt purchase this book and its censorship? Has the word censorship become so debased in our society that were supposed to take this seriously? Or is it only ALA-inspired librarians who seem to have such a poor grasp on the term? Whos being denied access to this book? The books published and publicly available. You can buy the stupid thing on Amazon. How is this censorship? What sort of bonehead thinks that a librarian has the power to deny a child access to this book if the parent wants their child to read about scrotums? As with all the banned books nonsense emanating from the ALA, weve entered into some parallel universe where the library is the only place where books are available and where a librarian not buying a book is somehow the same as government suppression of information.

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Ill put this in simple sentences. Libraries dont buy everything. They cant afford to. They dont want to. Librarians make choices. These choices are not censorship. These choices are called selection. Perhaps youve heard of it. My favorite quote from the author is in the New York Times story on the topic (2/14/07), where the author says of the allegedly offending word that the word is just so delicious. She was probably licking her lips at the time and thinking of a bag of Rocky Mountain Oysters. The offending word comes in the second paragraph: Sammy told of the day when he had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked 62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum. This is the allegedly offensive term in context, and what a context it is. If I were going to not get this book for a child, it wouldnt be because of the one word, it would be because based just on this paragraph it sounds like a trashy book. If I were the parent of a middle-grade child (two can play this game!), I wouldnt want my child reading about some trashy people in some tiny, trashy town getting drunk and falling out of their cars. I dont read stories about trashy people as an adult, so why would I want that for a child? Of course I havent read the book, and it might not be about trashy people getting drunk and falling out of their cars. That might be an exception. I am as puzzled as anyone by this jumped up controversy. Im not a childrens librarian, obviously, and I dont read childrens books. Im a grown up, so I read great big grown-up books. If someone wants their child to read about people getting drunk and biting their dogs on the scrotum, ne. Then perhaps they and their children can sit around and smoke dope and bemoan all the puritans in the world. I couldnt care less. What puzzles me isnt so much the dubious literary taste of some librarians or parents, but that people claim to be shocked that librarians arent buying the book. Obviously, a tiny handful of childrens librarians who havent been through the ALA reeducation camps, and probably a lot of parents, think this is an offensive book, so theyre not buying it. And then comes the pseudo-outrage. How dare they exercise some judgment! How dare they not buy a book that has some stupid award! How dare they be so intolerant! We cant tolerate that! Theyre censors! This is a matter of intellectual freedom! Its a childs God-given right to read about scrotum-biting drunks!

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The ALA considers this another example of evil censors challenging these poor banned books. Its a question of intellectual freedom, they tell us. But is anyone willing to die on the barricades of intellectual freedom for this book? If some poor child doesnt get to read this book, will the republic crumble? Dont these people have anything better to do?

LOCAL LIBRARIES, CENSORSHIP, AND INFORMATION

The Scrotum Controversy highlights one aw with the ALAs argument about censorship. Sometimes its just selection. I should say right out that I really dont care what kind of ction, childrens or otherwise, public libraries buy. I think most ction, and for that matter nonction, is garbage anyway and not worth reading. I should also say that I dont really care what kind of ction public libraries dont buy, and thats one issue here. From my jaded and snobbish perspective, I see two important issueslocal control and censorship. I put that work in scare quotes the same way the Banned Books folks would put offensive in scare quotes. My local library system has numerous copies of the scrotum book, and I dont care tuppence. All the poor little children who want to read about scrotums can just ILL it from my system. Ill return my ve copies once theyre recalled. I make fun of all the protesters because it always seems that people are protesting what some other people are doing in some other community, never their own. This is one problem with any ALA censorship protest. Okay, so some librarian doesnt want to buy a book because she thinks its inappropriate for the local collection, which is there to serve a particular community. Why are we to believe that the intellectual freedom folks at ALA know more about what books are appropriate for a given community than the people who actually live there? I guess the people who believe this are also the ones who believe that some politician in Washington is better able to run their lives than they are themselves. If this had been a protest from a local that the library wasnt buying a requested book, Id feel differently about it. But it wasnt. The protests in the scrotum controversy were from people who were outraged that the library in a community they dont even live in wasnt buying this book. I guess some people havent heard of minding their own business and cultivating their own gardens. The other issue is censorship versus selection. I nd both it amusing and bizarre when anyone talks about censorship of books in this country considering that there seems to be no limit on what can get published

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and what information is available. When librarians started complaining about censorship and intellectual freedom decades ago, the situation was different, and I think librarians have played an important role in the struggle for intellectual freedom. But things have changed, and the ALA still seems to think its the 1940s and that theres a danger we wont have competing sources of information. With the relaxation of moral standards in the last 50 years and the increasing availability of sources of information on the Internet as well as in print, this argument isnt viable anymore. It just looks like some librarians are desperate to live in a repressive society so they can have something to protest. Well, we dont live in a repressive society, and if, for example, youre a progressive and you hate living around the conservative evangelicals in your tiny Southern town, then move to civilization. No, our society is far from repressive. Watch TV and movies, listen to music, surf the Web. How could a repressive society produce this stuff? I also think the claim that one or a few or even many libraries not buying a book (for whatever reason they choose) is the same as censorship is wrong. I guess my standards are repressive regimes that keep books from being published, imprison authors, burn books, etc. My opponents standards are that some library in Bumap, Oklahoma doesnt have the scrotum book or Heather Has Two Very Excited Daddies, so our intellectual freedoms are challenged, as if theres anything intellectual about reading this childrens book. Obviously different standards. When the government tries to censor information, then the ALA should jump all over it, but some library not buying a book is not censorship. Some might say that because libraries dont have a particular book, its no longer freely available, but I disagree. We dont really provide things for free, for one thing. Somebody has to pay, and the people paying should get what they want. Isnt that what public libraries are for? To give the people what they want, not to give them what somebody in some other place wants. Is it really the case that a library without some banned book both wouldnt order the book if requested by a local AND wouldnt allow interlibrary loan? Even if they wouldnt, its still not censorship, but it would be irritating even for me. Another quibble I have with the scrotum controversy and similar banned books is classifying them as sources of information. The scrotum book is not a source of information at all in any important way thats worth defending. Its a childrens story. The only information it provides is its own storyline and the cataloging information on the verso. This is another bone I have picked with the ALAmaking everything into

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information is intellectually and morally sloppy and makes it impossible to rationally defend or to criticize anything. If its all just information, then why do I need any particular book? Not everything is information, and if it is, then there is no argument that a library should get any particular book. In the intellectually sloppy and morally relativistic world inhabited by the Banned Books folks, they have no grounds whatever to argue that a particular book, or even a particular class of information, must be made available. Information is the great equalizer. If everything is information, then everything is equal, and theres no reason to choose one thing over another, but librarians do make choices. The obvious fact is that libraries cant buy everything even if they wanted to, and they wouldnt want to even if they could. Thats why we have selection. Even the Library of Congress or Harvard or the NYPL doesnt have everything. Since we cant buy everything, we have people to select what will be bought based on local criteriathe local population, the student population, the curriculum. The only time selection metamorphoses into censorship is when somebody outside that local population doesnt like the way a library selects for its local population. The Banned Books folks with their sloppy word information deny that librarians engage in selection and also deny that local librarians know better than some non-librarians at ALA headquarters. But I ask the intellectually and morally relativistic people who get so worked up over these bookswhat positive reason could you provide that this book should be purchased by any given library? You cant make an argument, because youve forsaken any intellectual standards of judgment when you collapsed everything into information. So-called banned books are universally available in America, and the banned books rhetoric emanating from the ALA is a way to make the ALA seem like righteous warriors on behalf of our intellectual freedom. Im sure it makes the folks at ALA headquarters feel good about how righteous they all are. Pity they have to resort to smear tactics and poor logic to make their case. Received: 9/30/07 Revised: 7/29/07 Accepted: 9/4/07