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| https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/20/15369396/hbo-fahrenheit-451-adaptation-ray-bradbury-dystopian-novel |
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2543 - CENSORSHIP WEEK: FARENHEIT 451: Book Bans are Getting Worse
"STOP THE STEAL!!"
Sound familiar?
And now, the BACKLASH to the Obama years and the runaway FOX PROPAGANDA NETWORK OF OCEANIA have fueled even more evil: book banning and censorship.
Book burning is next, and, actually, it may be already happening.
Book bans are wrong.
The fear must end.
Todd Anderson for The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/30/books/book-ban-us-schools.html
Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S.
Challenges to books about sexual and racial identity are nothing new in American schools, but the tactics and politicization are.
By Elizabeth
A. Harris and Alexandra
Alter
Jan. 30, 2022
In Wyoming, a county prosecutor’s
office considered charges against library employees for stocking books like
“Sex Is a Funny Word” and “This Book Is Gay.”
In Oklahoma, a bill was introduced in
the State Senate that would prohibit public school libraries from keeping books
on hand that focus on sexual activity, sexual identity or gender identity.
In Tennessee, the McMinn County Board
of Education voted to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus”
from an eighth-grade module on the Holocaust because of nudity and curse words.
Parents,
activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are
challenging books at a pace not seen in decades. The American Library
Association said in a preliminary report that it received an “unprecedented”
330 reports of book challenges, each of which can include multiple books, last
fall.
“It’s a pretty startling
phenomenon here in the United States to see book bans back in style, to see
efforts to press criminal charges against school librarians,” said Suzanne
Nossel, the chief executive of the free-speech organization PEN America, even
if efforts to press charges have so far failed.
Such challenges
have long been a staple of school board meetings, but it isn’t just their
frequency that has changed, according to educators, librarians and free-speech
advocates — it is also the tactics behind them and the venues where they play
out. Conservative groups in particular, fueled by social media, are now pushing
the challenges into statehouses, law enforcement and political races.
“The politicalization of the
topic is what's different than what I’ve seen in the past,” said Britten
Follett, the chief executive of content at Follett School Solutions, one of the
country’s largest providers of books to K-12 schools. “It’s being driven by
legislation, it’s being driven by politicians aligning with one side or the
other. And in the end, the librarian, teacher or educator is getting caught in
the middle.”
Among
the most frequent targets are books about race, gender and sexuality, like
George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” Jonathan Evison’s “Lawn Boy,” Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer” and Toni
Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”
Several books are drawing fire repeatedly in different parts of the country — “All Boys Aren’t Blue” has been targeted for removal in at least 14 states — in part because objections that have surfaced in recent months often originate online. Many parents have seen Google docs or spreadsheets of contentious titles posted on Facebook by local chapters of organizations such as Moms for Liberty. From there, librarians say, parents ask their schools if those books are available to their children.
“If you look at the lists of
books being targeted, it’s so broad,” Ms. Nossel said. Some groups, she noted,
have essentially weaponized book lists meant to promote more diverse reading
material, taking those lists and then pushing for all the included titles to be
banned.
The advocacy group
No Left Turn in Education maintains lists of books it says are “used to spread
radical and racist ideologies to students,” including Howard Zinn’s “A People’s
History of the United States” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Those who are demanding certain books be removed insist this is an issue of
parental rights and choice, that all parents should be free to direct the
upbringing of their own children.
Others say
prohibiting these titles altogether violates the rights of other parents and
the rights of children who believe access to these books is important. Many
school libraries already have mechanisms in place to stop individual students
from checking out books of which their parents disapprove.
The author Laurie
Halse Anderson, whose young adult books have frequently been challenged, said
that pulling titles that deal with difficult subjects can make it harder for
students to discuss issues like racism and sexual assault.
“By attacking these books, by attacking the authors, by attacking the subject matter, what they are doing is removing the possibility for conversation,” she said. “You are laying the groundwork for increasing bullying, disrespect, violence and attacks.”
Tiffany
Justice, a former school board member in Indian River County, Fla., and a
founder of Moms for Liberty, said that parents should not be vilified for
asking if a book is appropriate. Some of the books being challenged involve
sexual activity, including oral sex and anal sex, she said, and children are
not ready for that kind of material.
“There are different stages
of development of sexuality in our lives, and when that’s disrupted, it can
have horrible long-term effects,” she said.
“The bottom line
is if parents are concerned about something, politicians need to pay
attention,” Ms. Justice added. “2022 will be a year of the parent at the ballot
box.”
Christopher
M. Finan, the executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship,
said he has not seen this level of challenges since the 1980s, when a similarly
energized conservative base embraced the issue. This time, however, that energy
is colliding with an effort to publish and circulate more diverse books, as
well as social media, which can amplify complaints about certain titles.
“It’s this confluence of
tensions that have always existed over what’s the proper thing to teach kids,”
Mr. Finan said.
“These same issues
are really coming alive in a new social environment,” he added, “and it’s a
mess. It’s a real mess.”
Book
challenges aren’t just coming from the right: “Of Mice and Men” and “To Kill a
Mockingbird,” for example, have been challenged over the years for how they
address race, and both were among the library association’s 10 most-challenged
books in 2020.
In the Mukilteo School District
in Washington State, the school board voted to remove “To Kill a Mockingbird” —
voted the best book of the past 125 years in a survey of
readers conducted by The New York Times Book Review — from the ninth-grade
curriculum at the request of staff members. Their objections included arguments
that the novel marginalized characters of color, celebrated “white saviorhood”
and used racial slurs dozens of times without addressing their derogatory
nature.
While the book is
no longer a requirement, it remains on the district’s list of approved novels,
and teachers can still choose to assign it if they wish.
In other
instances, efforts to ban books are more sweeping, as parents and organizations
aim to have them removed from libraries, cutting off access for everyone.
Perhaps no book has been targeted more vigorously than “The 1619 Project,” a best seller about slavery in
America that has drawn wide support among many historians and Black leaders and
which arose from the 2019 special issue of The New York Times Magazine. It has
been named explicitly in proposed legislation.
Political leaders on the
right have seized on the controversies over books. The newly elected governor
of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, rallied his supporters by framing
book bans as an issue of parental control and highlighted the issue in a
campaign ad featuring a mother who wanted Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” to be removed from her
son’s high school curriculum.
In Texas, Governor
Greg Abbott demanded that the state’s education agency
“investigate any criminal activity in our public schools involving the
availability of pornography,” a move that librarians in the state fear could
make them targets of criminal complaints. The governor of South Carolina asked
the state’s superintendent of education and its law enforcement division to
investigate the presence of “obscene and pornographic” materials in its public
schools, offering “Gender Queer” as an example.
The mayor of
Ridgeland, Miss., recently withheld funding from the Madison County Library
System, saying he would not release the money until books with L.G.B.T.Q.
themes were removed, according to the library system’s executive director.
George
M. Johnson, the author of “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a memoir about growing up
Black and queer, was stunned in November to learn that a school board member in
Flagler County, Fla., had filed a complaint with the sheriff’s department
against the book. Written for readers aged 14 and older, it includes scenes
that depict oral and anal sex and sexual assault.
“I didn’t know that was
something you could do, file a criminal complaint against a book,” Johnson said
in an interview. The complaint was dismissed by the sheriff’s office, but the book was subsequently
removed from school libraries while it was reviewed by a committee.
At a school board
meeting where the book was debated, a group of students protested the ban and
distributed free copies, while counterprotesters assailed it as pornography and
occasionally screamed obscenities and anti-gay slurs, according to a student who
organized the protest and posted video footage of the event.
Johnson made a
video appearance at the meeting and argued that the memoir contained valuable
lessons about consent and that it highlighted difficult issues that teenagers
are likely to encounter in their lives.
A district
committee reviewed the book and determined it was “appropriate for use” in high
school libraries, but the decision was overruled by the county superintendent,
who told the school board that “All Boys Aren’t Blue” would be kept out of
libraries, while new policies are created to allow parents to have more control
over which books their children can access. Several other young adult titles
that had been challenged and removed were restored.
Jack
Petocz, a 17-year-old student at Flagler Palm Coast High School who organized
the protest against the book ban, said that removing books about L.G.B.T.Q.
characters and books about racism was discriminatory, and harmful to students
who may already feel that they are in the minority and that their experiences
are rarely represented in literature.
“As a gay student myself, those books are so critical for youth, for feeling there are resources for them,” he said, noting that books that portray heterosexual romances are rarely challenged. “I felt it was very discriminatory.”
So far, efforts to bring criminal
charges against librarians and educators have largely faltered, as law
enforcement officials in Florida, Wyoming and elsewhere have found no basis for
criminal investigations. And courts have generally taken the position that
libraries should not remove books from circulation.
Nonetheless, librarians say that just
the threat of having to defend against charges is enough to get many educators
to censor themselves by not stocking the books to begin with. Even just the
public spectacle of an accusation can be enough.
“It will certainly have a chilling
effect,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library
Association’s office for intellectual freedom. “You live in a community where
you’ve been for 28 years, and all of a sudden you might be charged with the
crime of pandering obscenity. And you’d hoped to stay in that community
forever.”
She said that aggressively policing
books for inappropriate content and banning titles could limit students’
exposure to great literature, including towering canonical works.
“If
you focus on five passages, you’ve got obscenity,” Ms. Caldwell-Stone said. “If
you broaden your view and read the work as a whole, you’ve got Toni Morrison’s
‘Beloved.’”
Elizabeth
A. Harris writes about books and publishing for The New York Times. @Liz_A_Harris
Alexandra
Alter writes about publishing and the literary world. Before joining The Times
in 2014, she covered books and culture for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to
that, she reported on religion, and the occasional hurricane, for The Miami
Herald. @xanalter
A version of this article appears in print on Jan.
31, 2022, Section A, Page 1 of the New York
edition with the headline: Politics Fuels Surge in Calls For Book
Bans. Order Reprints | Today’s
Paper | Subscribe
They
Tried to Ban Fahrenheit 451 and Replace It With. . .
My Book
David Williams Gets a Troubling Endorsement from Florida Woman
January 5, 2018
As a writer and an avid reader, few things trouble me more than efforts to ban literature.
Year after year, some of America’s greatest authors seem to be catnip for the censorious. Mark Twain. Toni Morrison. Jack London. John Steinbeck. Ray Bradbury. I feel all of these, but right now, banning Ray Bradbury is what hits me hardest.
I grew up reading Bradbury, and he’s one of the reasons I both love and write science fiction. As a boy, I must have read R is for Rocket a dozen times, curling up with the book on a sleepy Sunday afternoon. His short story “Sound of Thunder” is a work of lingering genius. Given the way 2017 has gone, I’m not sure some panicky time-traveling hunter didn’t trample a butterfly somewhere in our past.
And Fahrenheit 451? I read that book in seventh grade, checking it out of the library on my own because it was Bradbury, absorbing his vision of a world gone sour. That was in 1981.
Now? In 2018? It’s increasingly, terrifyingly prophetic. Bradbury’s imagined dystopia revolves around the story of Guy Montag, a “fireman.” In a deliciously perverse twist, his job is to find and burn print books, as well as the homes. . . and the persons. . . of their readers. Reading is viewed as inherently subversive. Reading is upsetting, making people think upsetting thoughts, which are to be avoided at all costs. It is disruptive of the order in what has become a trivialized, post-literate, manipulative culture.
Back in 1953, Bradbury imaged an impossibly horrific future world where humanity has become obsessed with ever larger screens, which are constantly on in homes defined by omnipresent media. That media, as Montag’s wife Mildred experiences it, is populated by braying, buffoonish characters who act as surrogates for actual human relationships.
Bradbury imagined a world where corporate-authoritarian politics maintain the shallow mask of democracy as a gullible populace is spoonfed candidates. He visualized insurgents and criminals being hunted and killed by the “hound,” an unstoppable drone. He cast a vision of callow selfish brutalism as an endless war burns, far away from a populace willingly subjugated by distractions and banality.
Information, in the society of Fahrenheit 451, is an endless cavalcade of trivia, tightened and shortened until every mind is filled with a blinding, churning nothing. At a key point in the narrative, Montag’s boss Beatty visits him, and in a monologue gives the reader a vision of the way information was presented in this strange and nightmarish future:
…speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending […] classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. [….] Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!
Bradbury may not have actually used the word “Twitter,” but this 1953 description of the low-attention-span “future” cuts rather too close to home.
Fahrenheit 451 has never been more relevant. And as Beatty knew, relevant critiques are dangerous. Unsettling. Unsafe.
*
So it was no surprise when from Santa Rosa County in the panhandle of Florida this past month there came familiar news. A parent, discovering their child was reading something they found problematic, approached a school board and asked that Fahrenheit 451 be removed from the curriculum.
“Filth,” that parent called Bradbury’s work, as she pressed for it to be removed from an eighth grade reading list. The concerned mom leading the banning effort didn’t see its prophetic relevance. All she saw was a vulgarity, the word “bastard,” which she felt was inappropriate for her 13-year-old daughter. “I’m just trying to keep my little girl a little girl,” she said.
This kind of book-banning effort isn’t unusual, but this one was a gut punch. Why? Because the parent organizing the banning effort suggested that Bradbury’s work should be replaced with something more acceptable to her.
Among her suggestions for more “suitable” material: my own dystopian novel, When the English Fall.
I cannot imagine receiving a more troubling and heartbreaking endorsement.
Sure, my Amish protagonist and narrator doesn’t use vulgarity in the face of the world’s collapse. Because he’s Amish. Old Order Mennonites don’t tend to swear like sailors. But my story contains its fair share of death and murder and human horror, at least as graphic as anything you’ll find in Bradbury.
The mother bringing the complaint was concerned at the violence in the book, and worried that the book wasn’t “safe,” and suggested that kids might read about murder and violence and become murderous and violent themselves. As a pastor, I preach the Bible every Sunday, and teach it in classes. My gracious, I can’t imagine a less “safe” book than the Bible. Try reading Genesis sometime. That’s a rough, rough book. My Adult Ed class has been discovering this last month as we’ve been reading it together. Murder? Rape? Betrayal? Incest? Ray Bradbury’s got nothing on the Word of God.
Or the news. Lord have mercy.
In a culture that is as harsh, uncaring, and profane as ours, I do feel the siren song of keeping all of that away from our kids. With my own boys growing up, it was hard seeing them encounter some of the less pleasant parts of our society. I know that temptation, to wrap them in bubble wrap and keep them children for as long as we can, and maybe it’ll all work out.
But that solves nothing. Nor does it prepared them to be adult participants in a healthy democracy.
And that’s why engaging with great books like Fahrenheit 451 are so important for adolescent readers. They are vital specifically because they are not written for young readers. Instead, they prepare a young person for adulthood a nation that requires both our critical attention and our hopeful imagination. Great literature matures us, and opens our eyes to the real. That’s why it was such a threat to the homogenized, mindless horror of Guy Montag’s culture, and why it’s so necessary for us now.
It’s an essential part of growing up. Encountering writers like Bradbury teaches young adults to become thoughtful, engaged citizens, aware of the preciousness of our God-given liberty and how easily it can be taken away by people who want to keep us “safe.” That’s the whole point of public education in our republic. . . not to keep children forever in childhood, but to help their minds grow.
Thankfully, the school board in Santa Rosa made the right choice. Bradbury will still be taught. I, thank the Maker, will not be brought in as the “safe” alternative to drown out his voice.
We inhabit a time where truth itself is denigrated by those in power, obscured by our media-driven obsession with the trivial and irrelevant, and when propaganda created by malicious autocratic powers tears at the fabric of our republic.
There has never been a more important time to read—and protect—the books that challenge and teach.
WHAT THE BOOK?! | FAHRENHEIT 451: A WORLD WITHOUT BOOKS?
By Remi Trovo
“IF YOU CAN’T SOLVE A PROBLEM, BURN IT” – CAPTAIN BEATTY
magine a world where the fire brigade start fires rather than put them out. Imagine a world where all four walls of living rooms in every house are replaced by giant TV screens, bombarding people with a constant stream of television and radio, 24 hours a day. This is the world inhabited by Guy Montag, the protagonist of the dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
Fahrenheit 451 is a potent reminder of the power of books and a thoughtful discussion about the meaning of happiness which, although not light-hearted, I found fascinating and well-worth reading.
FAHRENHEIT 451 IS SOMEWHAT A WORLD MUCH LIKE OUR OWN
Although Bradbury’s world is a fictional one, it contains many elements which can be found in our own. The most obvious one is the almost suffocating presence of screens, which Bradbury vividly describes.
On these screens, a never-ending schedule of programmes is broadcasted every single day, much in the same way that we receive constant news coverage and a continuous feed on our social media. In Fahrenheit 451 screens provide a dazzling spectacle that keeps the population in a dreamlike trance. This same stupefying symphony of sound, light and colour is there for all to see in many different parts of our own society.
WHAT BOOKS MEAN TO THE POPULATION
Books have no hold at all over the general population in Guy Montag’s world. Indeed, they are illegal. Teams of firemen are dispatched all over the city to burn them, along with whatever buildings they happen to be in. Montag himself is a member of one such team.
It is a chilling reminder of how those who seek absolute power have attempted to control the circulation of information and even the course of history itself in order to bring the general population into line. “The Burning of the Books” in Nazi Germany and Mao Zedong’s attempt to obliterate all symbols of Chinese culture during his “Cultural Revolution” are stark examples of this.
Yet in Fahrenheit 451, books are not burned with the sole purpose of obtaining power. They are also burned because they are a source of unhappiness to the population. More specifically, they require people to think. Yet the more people read and think, the more they realise how little they know about the world, making them feel stupid, useless and depressed. In order to avoid having to face up to this reality, the source of more information is disposed of. As Captain Beatty (Montag’s commander) bluntly declares: “If you can’t solve a problem, burn it”.
A DESTRUCTIVE HUMANITY
The burning of books, along with the population’s ignorance which allowed it to happen, shows just how destructive humanity can be.
Nelson Mandela once said: “It is so easy to break down and destroy. The heroes are those who make peace and build”. In Fahrenheit 451 the type of heroism described by Mandela emerges from the gloom. An example of this is when Montag and a group of outcasts plan to save books from extinction by storing the contents in their memories before eventually rewriting them. It shows that mankind has the ability to create and preserve life as well as take it away; just like how fire can be a source of warmth and life as well as destruction. It is just one example of the many issues Bradbury explores from multiple angles in this novel, making it both fulsome and fascinating.
Fahrenheit 451 is a book in which Guy Montag and his team of firemen will never be able to burn. Bradbury asks the question of what truly makes a person happy. Is it the ability to shirk all responsibility and to profit from life without thinking as the people of Montag’s world do? Or is it the process of learning and self-fulfilment? Reader, I leave it to you to make your own conclusions.
Graphic courtesy of Molly East
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