In the story about the national candidate who once tried to bully the town librarian, the details about censorship proved to be only partially true.

With the first mention of how the one-time mayor of Wasilla, Alaska tried to use her moose-bagging brawn to get some books banned, the internet immediately spat out a list of titles that were alleged to be on the mayor’s hit list.

For those already alarmed by this person’s politics, it was a tasty, outlandish list which included Harry Potter and Huckleberry Finn. But the doomed titles proved too bad to be true. There was no list. The story remains, however, that the mayor did indeed ask the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books. Seems that for some time a group of social conservatives in town had been pressing the library to remove books they considered immoral. Sometimes library books would be returned with pages defaced or ripped out.

The librarian said no way would she be all right with that. And a few months later the librarian got a letter from the mayor telling her she was fired. The mayor didn’t say it was because she’d been scarred by Judy Blume or Margaret Atwood, but because she doubted the librarian’s support, like she’d failed some type of loyalty test. Fortunately this sent enough shivers through the book-loving townspeople that they rallied behind the librarian and she kept her job.

A banned books list is a sure way to get many people inflamed. We don’t DO that in this country. Or at least we are surprised when we find out that some people actually try to do that. The idea of banning books is so un-American that every fall the American Library Association puts on Banned Books Week. This year, from Sept. 27 to Oct.4.

I always find the displays of books that someone once wanted to ban not only ludicrous but shocking. Imagine. “The Diary of Anne Frank” considered “a real downer”!! And Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” challenged for encouraging premarital sex???

Don’t these people know about choice? As in, if you don’t like a book, choose not to read it.

In the story of the mayor versus the librarian it’s clear who turned out to be the hero. It’s also clear that the person who would want to maybe some day be leader of the free world doesn’t think a whole lot of free speech.

In Sonoma County we are rich in many things. Wine, olive oil, lavender, goat cheese, designer chickens and the like. Plus a healthy community of writers and thinkers of all persuasions. Every year for the past eight, there’s been a book festival in downtown Santa Rosa. The Sonoma County Book Festival is one of the few remaining book fairs around, the only one of a general nature in the San Francisco Bay Area. It happens this Saturday, a day long gathering in Courthouse Square, with author readings and panels on everything from memoir to mystery to the environment and football. I’ll be there, along with writers like Julia Whitty, Adair Lara, Noelle Oxenhandler and David Harris, at various venues, including, of course, the library.

Celebrating the art of writing and the joy of reading is a good way to counter the anti-intellectual fervor being stirred up in this election. Pick up a book, wave it high and say, “I vote for free expression.” It’s also a good opportunity to thank your librarian.

Listen to the Vote No on Book Banners Podcast at Another Voice on KRCB-FM

Tags: Add new tag, Banned_Books, Juicy_Tomatoes_Banned Books_Librarian, Librarians, Susan_Swartz

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Books and Movies, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.