Reflections From a Murky Pond

Democrats love their Big Lies, mostly because their entire political platform is founded upon them and the supposed correction of them. But, for this post, I’m going to focus upon the Big Lie of “Banned Books.”

Simply put, barring a very, very few exceptions based upon the content being ruled as fraudulent (The Federal Mafia) or being classified material (Operation Dark Heart), there are no legally banned books in America and haven’t been since the 1971 SCOTUS decision in New York Times Co. v. United States. In point of legal fact, most previously banned books were made available for general publication after 1959, when the SCOTUS in Kingsley Pictures Corp. v. Regents overturned the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act (Comstock Act) of 1873.

No, almost the entire extent of “book banning” in the US is limited to concerned individuals wanting to protect children by keeping certain sorts of reading materials out of our schools. And, this is something that both Americans and Democrats have regularly engaged in for many decades and for fundamentally the same reason – protecting impressionable children from materials that they deem to be damaging to their psyches. It must be said though that Democrats are more likely to remove material from school libraries because of the author rather than the content than Americans are, e.g., many works by Dr. Seuss – even beyond the limited set of his works that could be – in a few cases, quite easily – considered to be “racially insensitive.”

And please, do not be like the Dems and their media and equate challenging a book with successfully banning it. Among both Americans and Democrats there always has been, are, and always will be a minority that challenges the publication and dissemination of various and sundry works. They fail and, even when they seem to succeed at the local level, our court system as quickly as the wheels of law allow reverses that success due to the 1st Amendment.

So, Book Bans are just another Democrat Big Lie.

A Couple Of Additional, Personal Points

I’m just going to add a few bits of my personal opinions on related points to the core of this post, mostly because I don’t feel like doing follow-up posts to cover these tangential specifics.

Ratings & Grade Scales

In my opinion, America needs to “rate” some of these books for age appropriate content. What I’m OK with in elementary school is far more limited than what I’m OK with in middle schools. And, when it comes to high schools, there’s very little in the way of reading materials that I believe should be restricted. Blanket restrictions across all grades, just like blanket approvals, don’t make a lick of sense to me.

Parental Approval

While I’m all for opt-outs and requiring parental approvals, I can’t see how this would be effectively applied to books in school libraries. If the books can be checked out by any kid, they’ll be passed around if their made “forbidden.” All requiring parental approval would do in my opinion is create “cool kids” who got to read these and pass them around for social credit or actual monetary / material profit. The Penthouse magazines that somebody – 😉 – passed around my high school being a possibly extreme example of this.

To Kill A Mockingbird – WTF!

Just as a quick WTF sidenote, Democrats seem to hate and have tried to remove Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mocking Bird from some of their school districts, but Americans have never seemed to have a problem with it.

You’d think, given the anti-American propaganda of the ever-so-woke Left, that it’d be either the other way around or with the Democrats also having no problem with it. Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel does, after all, show stereotypical racism from Whites and fits near perfectly with the Democrats’ CRT curricula, since it showed what amounted to systemic racism and a lynch mob mentality. But no; they hate it because of problematical language and racial – that’d be towards Blacks – insensitivity.

Catcher In The Rye

I don’t believe that J. D. Salinger’s 1951 work, Catcher In The Rye should be banned from high schools. I do, however, think it should be removed from all required reading lists and school curricula. I would like to think that that book is despised by both Americans and Democrats as being harmful to minds of teenagers. In fact, I’m pretty sure that having to read and study it has tipped at least one at-risk teenager into serious depression.

For we honor and respect Bunhulud, for he is the Maker. It is by Him and him alone that the flayrah will flow.

Laugh all you want – and, in all truth, prima facie, this sort of thing is kind of funny. But, it’s also part and parcel of what the Left, especially the anti-normative #wokeists, have been doing to children’s books and such. They’ve been pushing and pushing hard to “mainstream” their postmodern fairy tales in order to warp the minds of our children.

How They Weaponize Fables

Step 1: Take any classic tale of Good vs. evil and add moral ambiguity to it

Step 2: Turn the Villain into either and Anti-Hero or actual Hero

Step 3: Have the Damsel or equivalent change sides and collude with the Villain

Step 4: Make the Villain, the Damsel, and/or the Hero all victims of society

Step 5: Sexualize the story

Step 6: Add the Gay

And that’s how these deranged and dangerous things do it. It’s a real-world example of the Boiling Frog pseudo-fable or apologue – one small step, one small corruption, one small degeneration at a time until we reach a point that is fundamentally unrecognizable. And worse, it’s all done in the name of “children needing stories about people like them” or “it’s important to breakdown current ideals and norms.“

And Yet, No Conspiracy Is Needed

That’s what makes this worse, more destructive to our children’s future, and harder to combat; there’s no real conspiracy needed. Each step down the road to perversion is specific and self-contained and it starts small, and almost reasonable. But then, each group who wants acceptance and privilege wants a little bit more. And they each, for the most part, only think of what they want, as if they were in a vacuum. And, then the next, more abnormal than the last group wants theirs…

And, Folks! We’ve been greasing the slope or allowing it to be greased for over six decades. It’s not a wonder that the slide to degeneracy has reached terminal velocity.

No, IMRHO, the closest there is or needs to be to a conspiracy is that the grifters from each group of advocates for the individual special interest groups need to keep manufacturing “oppression” in order to stay relevant and profitable, be it monetarily or in social capital. They literally can’t “win” because then they be done.. and then what would they do?

This why Feminists turned into vile things, when they originally had a real point. It’s also why Feminists allied themselves with as other special interest groups as they could and labeled it “Intersectionality.” They won, and rightly so back then. But, they needed to push the bar back or fade into history. It’s also why LGB turned into LGBT, then LGBTQ, and then into whatever alphabet soup it is now. They’re all in a state of perpetual war against normative society because they can’t afford to declare victory!

Really! This is sage advice. Don’t ever judge a book by the movie adaption of it. This is especially true of actual novel-length works since they contain far too much content for a single movie.

Oh! And yes, this holds true in both directions. If you liked the movie, you may still dislike the book, or even hate it – e.g., I know of very, very few people who enjoyed Starship Troopers as a movie who also didn’t hate Heinlein’s actual 1959 novel.

In case any of you were wondering, in the metaverse of science fiction universe’s space-time coordinates, you are here. You, I, and the rest of us poor schmucks are right at the nexus of pretty much every major dystopian creation of the last 100 years. 😉

Pedantic, Over-Thinking Note: My one issue with this venn diagram is that I would have put 1984 and Brave New World in opposing positions instead of next to each other.