~a column by Colleen O’Brien
This week — September 21-27 – the country celebrates Banned Books Week.
This does not mean we celebrate books that have been banned but that we celebrate the country’s freedom to read, to allow all books good and bad in their writing as well as all books good for us and bad for us in their content.
Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to requests from various complainers to ban books in schools, bookstores and libraries. According to the American Library Association, more than 11,300 books have been challenged since then. There were 307 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2013 alone.
In 1948, when George Orwell wrote the novel Nineteen Eight-Four, he envisioned a future of banned books.
In 1932, when Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, he feared a planet on which no one needed to ban books because no one wanted to read one anyway.
Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture in which we were told what to do at all times, including what we were allowed to read. Huxley feared that we would drown in too much irrelevance, in trivia, in too much of everything – words– Because all things are made of words.
There’s been plenty of banning in this country since Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and everyone’s favorite To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, to name just a few important books once banned. And there have been a zillion irrelevant, trivial books (not to mention TV shows, magazines, movies. blogs and websites) that never came close to being banned.
So, who do you think is winning? Those who want to ban the words and stories and information that they themselves don’t like? Or those who want to trivialize everything by an unending onslaught? Plenty of sexy stories have been banned, but who takes the time to ban the tedious? When it comes to banning, I think the banners have good taste, wanting to ban as they do the things that explain to us the human condition; never do they ban because of tedium. To ban, the banner must read the book in the first place.
Information that is banned can usually be found somewhere, if only in another country that never got around to denouncing the books that hold the info. It’s more difficult to ignore incessant information, the constant flow of info via books, ads, TV, movies, newspapers, websites and social media. The flow of words is now everywhere at all times, and even totalitarian leaders struggle with getting rid of the endless scintillation of the endless words on endless Facebooks and Twitters.
Watching film of Nazis burning books in Hitler’s Germany has always been chilling. But if I watched a movie of someone burning some of the crap on TV I’d clap. The problem with banning anything is in each person’s version of what is palatable, laughable, interesting; in other words, what is tasteful. Can’t account for taste, that’s for sure. Thus, we get a lot of the really bad boring trivial stupid and dumb as well the sexy and violent (the more common stuff of banning).
Apparently there are still folks out there trying to ban things. And just as apparent, they’re banning the wrong stuff. But, since we can’t have the Taste Cops because taste is so personal, it seems we get to live with the boring and trivial, the tasteless and nit-witted, as well as the sexy, the violent, the political, the fanatical. Banned Books Week is indeed something to celebrate, but can you imagine the party if we could all agree – at the least – that the “Butthead” part of “Beavis and Butthead” is tasteless and not funny?
You think it’s funny? Hmmm.
Just goes to show . . . the good part of Banned Book Week is that it works toward no banning at all, whatever I or you or he or she might think is tasteful. It means that all the good ideas and stories you have in you can be put out there for anyone to read. Or not. It means a buyer’s market, it means somebody else can’t do what they think is good for you. It means no one telling you that you can’t read something because he doesn’t like it. It supports the freedom to read any old tasteless thing we want.
This is the biggest freedom of them all.
Below are years of banned books, many of which I’m sure you’ve read:
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
Ulysses, by James Joyce
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
1984, by George Orwell
Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
Native Son, by Richard Wright
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence
Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence
The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
