Sarah Palin, Vice Presidential candidate of the Republican party and running mate of U.S. senator John McCain, seems to be a book banner. Well, a wannabe one. I don’t suppose it’s any surprise that a literature blog is against the banning of literature in a public venue. That a canidate for high office seems to have no qualms about threatening to fire a public service provider if she didn’t ‘support the mayor’ in her censorship endeavors is disturbing. In this case, Sarah Palin is both the former mayor of Wasilla, AK and the one who made the threat, to be clear.
Excerpt from this week’s “Time” magazine.
“”[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.” Mary Ellen Baker resigned from her library director job in 1999.”"
Courtesy of “The New York Times”,
“Shortly after becoming mayor, former city officials and Wasilla residents said, Ms. Palin approached the town librarian about the possibility of banning some books, though she never followed through and it was unclear which books or passages were in question.
Ann Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin’s first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Ms. Kilkenny said.
The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to “resist all efforts at censorship,” Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.
In 1996, Ms. Palin suggested to the local paper, The Frontiersman, that the conversations about banning books were “rhetorical.”
Ms. Emmons was not the only employee to leave. During her campaign, Ms. Palin appealed to voters who felt that city employees under Mr. Stein, who was not from Wasilla and had earned a degree in public administration at the University of Oregon, had been unresponsive and rigid regarding a new comprehensive development plan. In turn, some city employees expressed support for Mr. Stein in a campaign advertisement.
Once in office, Ms. Palin asked many of Mr. Stein’s backers to resign — something virtually unheard of in Wasilla in past elections. The public works director, city planner, museum director and others were forced out. The police chief, Irl Stambaugh, was later fired outright.”
Here’s a partial list (by no means comprehensive) of commonly banned books in the U.S. from Alderbooks,
I’ve taken the liberty to bold the books I’ve read. Please feel free to copy the list and highlight what you, your friends, your children or your students have read, then take a good long look at the list for the full affect of what would-be censors are happy to get rid of. It covers quite the area, no?
> A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
> A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
> Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
> As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
> Blubber by Judy Blume
> Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
> Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
> Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
> Carrie by Stephen King
> Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
> Christine by Stephen King
> Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
> Cujo by Stephen King
> Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
> Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
> Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
> Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
> Decameron by Boccaccio
> East of Eden by John Steinbeck
> Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
> Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
> Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
> Forever by Judy Blume
> Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
> Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
> Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
> Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
> Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
> Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
> Have to Go by Robert Munsch
> Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
> How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
> Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
> I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
> Impressions edited by Jack Booth
> In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
> It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me by Norma Klein
> James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
> Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
> Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
> Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
> Lord of the Flies by William Golding
> Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
> Lysistrata by Aristophanes
> More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
> My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher
> Collier
> My House by Nikki Giovanni
> My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara
> Night Chills by Dean Koontz
> Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
> On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
> One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
> One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
> One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
> Ordinary People by Judith Guest
> Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Collective
> Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
> Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
> Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
> Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
> Separate Peace by John Knowles
> Silas Marner by George Eliot
> Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
> Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
> The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
> The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
> The Bastard by John Jakes
> The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
> The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
> The Color Purple by Alice Walker
> The Devil’s Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
> The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
> The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
> The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
> The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
> The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
> The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
> The Living Bible by William C. Bower
> The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
> The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
> The Pigman by Paul Zindel
> The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
> The Shining by Stephen King
> The Witches by Roald Dahl
> The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
> Then Again, Maybe I Won’t by Judy Blume
> To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
> Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
> Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster Editorial Staff
> Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween
> Symbols by Edna Barth
Now, I’m not one to insult books as a general rule. I believe all books are interesting in some way, hard as that sometimes is to recognize. “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck, for instance, I couldn’t finish. Kept drifting off. I don’t, however, believe books are a danger. What are they a danger to, pray tell? I mean, “The Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary”? Stretched that one a bit far, didn’t they? Or what about “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, or “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman? Harry Potter? I thought we’ve been over Potter before, what with the absolutely ridiculous accusations of ‘Satanism!’. I’ve read the books myself and I’m chagrined to say that if people really need an example of Fact vs Fiction, Real vs Imaginary, I suppose I could come up with a few (hundred).
I’d be interested to know why some people assume other adults cannot look after themselves. I don’t require others to censor content, thank you very much. I’m quite capable of reading as I so choose and disregarding the rest. So is everyone else, for that matter. For children, if an adult doesn’t feel they can handle certain material (“Little Red Riding Hood” by the Grimm Brothers or “My Friend Flicka” by Mary O’Hara, for example) then you simply tell the child under your care that you believe it best to wait until they’re older to understand the material. You don’t pull the books so they’re not available to anyone.
Then again, there’s nothing quite like banning a book to get people to pick it up, is there?
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – Who will watch the watchers?”
– Juvenal
“You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.”
– John Morley
“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. “
– Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky, 1991, Russian-American poet, b. St. Petersburg and exiled 1972 (1940-1996)
