Just say any crazy thing you like

In case you’re unaware, we are in the midst of Banned Books Week. Sponsored by the American Library Association, this really celebrates the principles of the First Amendment: the right to free expression.

If you can pick up a copy of Tom Sawyer, The Great Gatsby, The Naked & the Dead, Animal Farm, The Satanic Verses, Slaughterhouse-Five or In Cold Blood—thank a librarian, because they’ve been on the front lines of the war against book killers pretty much as long as there have been libraries.

It’s astonishing the reasons the thought police come up with to forbid you and me from reading something.

Two California school districts banned an edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales’ “Little Red Riding Hood.” Communist, you ask? No—there was a picture of Red carrying food and wine to Granny and the nannies were worried about promoting alcohol use.

(Look, I can understand having problems with the brothers Grimm. Those stories are full of all the viciousness, vindictiveness and venom that humans are capable of. Plus—as I recall, there was a whole lot of the other side of life, too. Just off the top of my head I recall Rapunzel, whose prince had his eyes poked out and went wandering in the forest until she showed up some time later...with her twins. As a child I never blinked at this. Now, I do kinda wonder.)

Huckleberry Finn has been under attack by the politically correct because it uses “nigger” and “injun”; the bowdlerizers are out with their hedge clippers, ready to clean everything up. To their standards, of course.

Lest you think that this sort of thing is history, think again. In 1999 a Georgia school board required student get written parental position to read Hamlet, Macbeth or King Lear. “Adult language,” sex and violence were the rationale. And Texas continues to ban all kinds of things, just because it's Texas.

Here’s a list of the most-challenged books between 2000 and 2009. Harry Potter is at the top of the list.

Of course forbidding books is completely anathema to the operation of democracy, which depends on the free exchange of ideas to even get off the ground. (This partially explains the difficulties nations trying to transition from dictatorships big on censorship to democracies. No one knows how to share and evaluate new and different ideas.) Understanding this, our Founding Fathers made it the very first Amendment clarifying the basis of what the new nation was going to be about.

And, in the end, the whole concept of book banning—whether it’s the Roman Catholic Church’s Index, an Islamic fatwa against writers/cartoonists/film makers or Nazis burning entire libraries in the Berlin night—is rather counterproductive. You tell a kid not to put beans in his nose, sure as sunrise, he’s going to start stuffing haricots verts up his nostrils. You ban a book or put a contract out on its author, the world and his wife are going to rush out to score a bootlegged copy and find out what all the fuss was about.

Not that there isn't plenty of offensive, badly written crap out there; ratcheted up exponentially by the platform the Internet has given to any bozo who wants to blog. (Oh, wait...) But what I say is, if you don't like it, leave it on the shelf.

In the meantime: God bless librarians. And you—I’m looking at you, now—go read a book!