I know I said I was quitting American politics, but you can't expect me to break the habit overnight. Here, just in case you haven't seen it, is a (believe me) massively edited list of books Sarah Palin attempted to ban when she was a Mayor in Alaska.The truth, perhaps, behind the Mr Smith Goes to Washington act Palin put on so successfully at the Republican Convention. Prepare to be appalled.
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
My House by Nikki Giovanni
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil’s Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Addendum 10th September As Kim points out in the comments field, it seems there's a degree of uncertainty as to whether this list is accurate. I say seems because I wouldn't rule out the possibility of Republican fixers retroactively massaging the facts to make our favourite moose-hunting Creationist hockey mom look a little less appalling. What we know for certain is that when Palin became Mayor of Wasilla she asked the Chief Librarian how she would respond should she be asked to remove books from the shelves. The Chief Librarian said (and good for her) that she wouldn't. But whether or not the list is accurate (and I'd love to know where it came from if it wasn't), the principle is the same. Palin would be prepared to contemplate censorship of books that have been selected by reasonable and moderate people according to nationally-agreed criteria. Perhaps she should be Vice President in China. Of course, they don't have elections there, but given Palin's apparent disdain for democracy that probably wouldn't disturb her. Bruce.
14 comments:
I did a little research on this point and so far I've found that it seems she did pose a question to the town librarian concerning banning books back in 1996. She was just about to take office and posed this question to which the librarian did not respond to kindly. Go, librarian! But according to all of the "credible" sources, she never submitted a list. She did not name any one book in particular nor were any books removed. The list that is circulating on the net seems to be a list of books that have banned in the U.S. in the past. Anyhoo, she then issued letters for the resignation of not only the librarian but of other folks in public office who had been appointed by the old Mayor and who had opposed her during the election. The librarian stood her ground and kept her job. It was later revealed as a sort of "test" of loyalty. Some of the other officials DID in fact resign rather than follow Palin's lead. I have a HUGE problem with censorship in any capacity. I'm interested to see where all of this leads. I'm still just sitting here between this rock and hard place and collecting information on both parties.
Your position may be the best way to go in these matters, Kim. But how do you define "credible"? My source was extremely credible.Someone whose judgement I would trust way before my own. Let's not rule out the possibility that the many really ugly and morally suspect bruisers, brutes and fixers working for the Republican Party are massaging the facts of the candidates' history to make them more palatable to an America that is definitely moving towards a kind of right-leaning liberalism.
And how was asking people who hadn't voted for her to resign a loyalty test? That sounds a bit twisted and--well--illogical to me. And even if that is what she was looking for, any leader who requires demonstrations of loyalty is plainly paranoid and a control freak. As Lao Tzu says, "When a country is in disorder, there will be praise of loyal ministers."
Oh, and if the list is wrong--which I doubt--the fact that Palin even contemplated censorship proves that she should be shunned by all right (small r)-thinking people. I could argue my reasoning on that one, but if there's anybody who doesn't already understand why, I don't think they'd be convinced by my rhetorical powers, such as they are.
It probably is a bit of a myth, as forwarded emailed rumors such as these fly around the States all the time, both in reference to politicians of all types, and on many other popular topics as well. I usually factcheck things with Snopes, and they say it's false (http://www.snopes.com/politics/palin/bannedbooks.asp). I'm not a Palin fan, as I've had enough of nutty and fake Christians running the government into the ground for superstitious or fraudulent reasons (usually to cover up their making money by looting the public treasury for the already rich--see War Profiteering 101--but sometimes just because they're stupid), so it's not hard to imagine her wanting to ban books. So if she does take office, maybe she'll ban my new novel, Blog Love Omega Glee? It's currently being serialized on Wredfright.blogspot.com. Com. It's set in 2012, and about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart. Who's president of the United States then? Could it be Sarah Palin? You'll have to read it to find out . . .
Cheers!
Wred Fright
Wredfright.com
That's the funniest way of publicising your own book that I've ever seen Wred. You scamp.
Bruce,
By credible, I'm referring to the main news organizations in the U.S. American media is notoriously liberal and usually does a fairly good job of battering the conservatives. Also,like Wredfright, I consult Snopes dot com to debunk alot of things that seem a little suspicious to me. I do not, however, have a book or any of my own writing to publicize (winkwink). And liberals and conservatives both have hands. They're both capable of massaging the facts.
I think that asking for a resignation from officials who previously supported the other candidate was a terrible ploy. My boss and I may not have the same political views, either so I'm very glad I've never received one of those "tests". And as I said before, any mode or manner of censorship is detestable.
And I think you're doing a great job of presenting things as you see them. This exchange between the two of us has fueled many discussions among the people I care about.
FYI:
"friend of moose-hunting creationist mccarthyite hockey moms everywhere"
This made me laugh so hard and so long, I almost pissed my pants. I mean, my bladder may be a little weak but this was extra funny.
Palin rhymes with Stalin.
And she forgot to ban a classic like Crime and Punishment too. What a joke.
Kim,
Palin is an easy gift to left wing shit stirrers, isn't she? She either signals that the McCain campaign will collapse spectacularly and be cited for generations as the Way Not To Do It; or that he is about to storm into the White House on a landslide vote. After all, outside ofAmerica everybody was laughing themselves till they wet their pants over the Republican nominations for Ronald Reagan and George Bush 2, and look what happened with them.
Holl,
Yeah, and Dostoyevsky being a damn Russki as well.
But you're right, it IS a great novel.
Ever read "The Idiot"? I love Prince Myshkin.
That would be a negative Barry. I need to get back into that genre again.
(yes Barry is a term I use for everyone, it's not a typo)
The American media is far from liberal. There are liberal and conservative media outlets, but most major corporate mainstream media leans to the right. Conservatives like to yell that the mainstream media is liberal, but numerous studies (check out FAIR.org sometime) show the media is anything but. Timothy Leary's quip about Crossfire on CNN being the right wing of the CIA debating the left wing of the CIA still holds more or less true for most news shows. At best you might have a right of center Democrat debating a rabid conservative Republican. So you'd see stuff like during the buildup to the Iraq war where one side wanted to bomb them, where the other side just wanted to wait a couple more days before bombing them. That's the type of thing that passes for a debate on political television usually. You seldom ever see Noam Chomsky or even a Dennis Kucinich on television unless they're being made fun of by the hosts of the show. Trust me, you're better off with the BBC, even with all its faults. American media always wants to please the advertisers, even PBS, and the advertisers tend to be conservative. In America, they've made peace, a fairly normal condition I would think, controversial, while war is considered normalcy.
Yeah, I think the BBC is probably a good model for independent broadcasting. Its news service is pretty good at reporting objectively and giving a voice even to the people on the fringes.I guess the best measure of that is that the Conservatives think the Beeb has a liberal bias and the liberals think it has a Conservative bias. My only argument with the BBC is that it is moving too far away from its original mandate which was, I believe, "to entertain, educate and inform"--the public service angles, which some probably find rather patronising, justifying the fact that the Beeb takes over a hundred quid a year from every household in the country, whether they want to pay or not, to finance its programming. Now the serious arts and politics television is shunted off to the sides on smaller BBC channels that you have to pay extra money to get hold of, whereas when I were a young 'un, you could see actual plays by serious playwrights on in prime time slots. A few people's lives must have been affected for the better by THAT.
In Britain the media in general has a fairly neutral stance on Britain's military adventures. Or it has in the last few. The one we got really xenophobic and unpleasant about was the Falklands conflict. When we follow America into a war, the media knows that most British people are unhappy about it. When we go in by ourselves every second liberal on the street turns into a rabid conservative and thew news follows suit...
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