Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Fahrenheit 451

This is, one must note, a map of book bans in schools. Texas has the largest number of such bans; then again, Texas has (I have no doubt) the largest number of school districts. 1026, according to Google. Yeah, that could mean there's been a book ban, at some time in the past year, in almost everyone of them; I'm not proud of this.

But it's curious there are no book bans reported in Louisiana; or New Mexico. Or Mississippi, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, California, Wyoming, North Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, Kentucky, or West Virginia.  Do people just not care in those states?  Or does nobody read?

I hate book bans; but I think the craze is already fading.  My local school district, hardly a hotbed of liberalism, is already showing signs of weariness over the subject.  Houston ISD, the biggest district in the state and the whale in the pond in local school news coverage, has had no news reports on book bans.  Some of the outlying, smaller districts where you expect more scared white people (let's be honest!) to dwell, are reporting them (some on national news!).  But I think it's the blush on the cheek of a dying age.

This report, by it's own admission, is not comprehensive.  I'd also note it's for last year (July 2021 to June 2022).  And it covers this:

From July 2021 to June 2022, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans lists 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,648 unique book titles.

The 1,648 titles are by 1,261 different authors, 290 illustrators, and 18 translators, impacting the literary, scholarly, and creative work of 1,553 people altogether.

That sounds like a shit-ton of books, but having worked in a bookstore with a large YA and children's section, I can tell you it's hardly every YA or child's title in existence.  Not good, but not the end of literacy as we know it, either.  If I underreact to this, it's not because I have a soft spot for controlling books.  If anything, I'm too lenient.  I've read very widely, from French porn to French philosophy (and that's just the French side!).  I don't find any book verboten.  Boring, maybe, or poorly written or, more commonly, poorly thought out; but I'm all for everyone having access to everything.  And as "exciting" as school book bans are, and as terrible as they are for school librarians (who are lovely people.  Like firemen, I've never met one I didn't admire.), we're not exactly talking the sacking of the Library of Alexandria here.

By the time I had read my way through the elementary school library and the junior high library and the city public library, I was discovering books for myself, and without Amazon or the internet, in a small town with one small bookstore (where I worked in high school).  I got hold of Dick Gregory's Nigger (found another copy recently in Boulder and replaced the one lost to history), and John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.  There wasn't a "YA" book category at that time, nor any titles on gay/lesbian/transgender experiences, real or fictional.  Had there been, I know the town would have been scandalized by them (probably not so much anymore, to be honest; except in public in certain circles).  Then again, kids today have Amazon for those books they can't get at the library.

Which means, yeah, the kids without money for books are being cheated.  That's where I truly get angry about book bans.  Then again, I just watched Rhys Wilkerson do a stand up routine on Netflix which was largely about the experiences of a gay man, so taking books off shelves is not the security blanket scared white parents whose kids by and large CAN afford Netflix and Amazon think it is.  As I've said before, in my sophomore year in high school every boy in my class in school knew what page the first sex scene was on in The Godfather (and pure pulp stuff it was, too.  That scene is the only part that remained for the movie; the rest of that subplot disappeared and good riddance.) There was never a copy of that book in the school library; probably still isn't today.

This is ugly shit, but people gotta have their panics.  Besides, the crest of these bans has been reached.  That statistic for Texas, for example, is for books banned at one time or another in 12 months.  Many districts reviewed the books and returned them to the library shelves.  That map doesn't reflect 12 months of book burnings, or the permanent removal of titles in virtually every school district in Texas.  If anything it was a byproduct of covid and lock downs and fights over masks and social distancing.  Yes, I know Abbott made an ass of himself over all of that, but the fight in local schools ignored him completely.  Parents demanded masks, virtual classes, return to classes, no masks, every child vaccinated, no vaccine mandates, throughout the entire period.  It wasn't mass hysteria, but it was a kind of mass anxiety, and you don't turn that off with a switch.

I think the anxiety is ebbing, and the last gasp of it is hard-core right wingers on school boards determined to protect all school children from what they don't like.  That's not proving to be a popular position, and while they all have terms on school boards for now, it's not likely they all will for long, or that they'll stay in the majority for long.  One or two places, maybe: and I really feel for those kids.  But I grew up in a town where I sincerely believed if people understood what I was getting from Kierkegaard in high school, they wouldn't want their kids to associate with me (afraid the damnation would be contagious.  No, I'm not kidding.).

You learn to survive it.

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