Book-burning mentality sears society's soul

Ombudsman

By Paul McMasters
First Amendment Ombudsman
First Amendment Center
pmcmasters@freedomforum.org

09.28.98

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In the movie "City of Angels," the angels' home away from heaven is not a church or sanctuary but a library. After a painful day of collecting souls, the angels gather at the library to renew their own souls by watching mere mortals find a piece of heaven in books.

Now that is a movie with a message.

Unfortunately it is a message lost on too many in our society today.

While lovers of books and freedom around the world took heart from last week's agreement by the Iranian government to lift the death sentence against novelist Salman Rushdie, they all knew that the war on books and reading continues unabated.

Here in the United States, of course, authors do not worry about a price on their heads, but their works continue to be targeted for banning by those who find in books something to fear and dread.

As part of Banned Books Week this week, the American Library Association reports that it received 595 reports of calls for books to be removed or restricted in public and school libraries during 1997. ALA president Ann K. Symons estimates the actual number of challenges to books at four times that, at least.

Great works are not immune from these challenges. This summer, the Modern Library released a list of the 20th Century's 100 best novels. The library association points out that of those 100 books, more than a third have been the targets of attempts to have them banned from bookstores, libraries and schools.

Classics the book-banners have attacked include Ulysses by James Joyce, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

Today Ulysses is a top candidate for anyone's list of the great literary works of all time, yet shortly after it was published in the United States in the early part of this century, it was burned and wasn't published here again until two decades later.

And though the days of book-burnings may be past, the banners still roam bookstore aisles and library stacks in search of books to ban. They rip books to shreds in parking lots. They force librarians to defend themselves against lawsuits. They haul bookstore owners into court.

The fact that they object to works that may become great literature gives no pause to the book-banners. They are not embarrassed that they have put on the latest list of most frequently challenged books the likes of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, It's Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris, the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine and such perennial targets as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

Perhaps it is inevitable that there are so many would-be banners in a nation that so values books and reading. The United States is the fastest-growing market for books in the world. Each year, publishers offer us 50,000 new book titles and we buy 1.5 billion books. Each week, 14% of American adults visit a bookstore; 60% of all Americans pursue their reading interests at our libraries. And there are a lot of libraries to meet the demand: 15,946, including branches, across this country.

To most of us, this is great news: more opportunities to read. But to too many others, it just means more books to ban. They believe they know best what others should read or not read.

Who are the book-banners? They are your relatives, your friends and neighbors, your colleagues at work, the person at the next desk, and, sometimes, the person sitting in your chair. Would-be censors come from every ideological persuasion and attack books for every imaginable reason. They go after novels, textbooks, dictionaries, even the Bible.

More and more, what we can read is influenced by the sanctimonies of sensitivity from the left, the self-righteousness of certainty from the right, and the maunderings of the muddled in the middle. These diverse constituencies are united in one goal: to challenge any and all expression that does not fit their particular views of the world. So they call for boycotts, or burning, or banning.

While book-banners insist they only want to protect the rest of us from taint and temptation, they ignore the reality that to write or to read a book is to focus on the best in all of us, while to ban one is to focus on the worst.

Words are curious things. An arrangement of them in a book can offend, provoke, comfort, or inspire, depending on what the reader brings to the reading. Even more curious is the reader — or often non-reader — who would label a book good or bad.

Words are innocent. They have no innate capacity for good or ill. They do not deserve to be stained with the evil thought or deed that follows their consumption. Even when words are beyond our grasp they are never beyond our imaginings.

Words also are precious things. One should lift a book of words from the shelf with awe and anticipation. Books are the witnesses to the human struggle to distill meaning — that is to say goodness and worth — from life and living. The life of thought, the spirit of reason resides there — in books. They comfort. They excite. They move.

Lord Byron wrote: "Words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think."

As we read books, we should marvel: Someone, somewhere, sometime had the strength of spirit to overcome the uncertainties of the moment and to reach beyond himself, to try to bridge the chasm between the known and unknown, between that time and this time. In so doing, the writer committed an act of sublime confidence, daring to speak to strangers unmet living in a time not yet.

That exquisite act of will deserves our respect and our reverence.

That is why, perhaps, there are those among us who quake in the presence of such generosity of spirit. They suffer a malady of the mind that leads them to believe they can make a distinction between good speech and bad. To fail to understand that even bad words can result in good thoughts and deeds is worrisome, but to establish arbiters of thought in our midst is to send our society down the road to an excruciating cultural madness.

We are what we put in words. We live through words. We die a little every time a word falls prey to the arbitrary sensibilities of the censor.

As perverse, as sick as the arrangement of some words can be, we must rise to their defense with as much passion and conviction as we would for the words we hold most dear. Given the opportunity to face the evil described by words, we have the chance to change it, to make good even more real, more desirable, and more attainable.

As surely as misanthropic expression attracts the weakened mind and panics the fearful mind, it quickens the civilized mind. It informs reason, fires the spirit and focuses our resolve.

Even so, the unrepentant censors remain among us. We must put to them some harsh questions:

• Who are they to deprive the individual intellect for the community's comfort?
• Why do they quake and quiver in the dark, clinging like infants to the safe and familiar?
• Who are they do challenge the First Amendment's guarantee against such ignorance and arrogance?

What a tragedy to yearn for a darker time when we cowered like brutes in our caves, snorting and stamping in fear as we watched words and ideas dance outside in the sunlight.

We cannot allow ourselves to take the torch to books, literally or figuratively. It is perfidy to embrace the darkness of ignorance and shun the light of learning.

"Books are the carriers of civilization," reminds historian and author Barbara Tuchman. "Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."

Every book, regardless of its content, has something to offer. As civilized beings, we should have something to offer in return — that is, besides the boycott, the burning, or the banning.

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