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NEW YORK—In the deep-red Republican universe, apparently nothing is more toxic or dangerous than a book. Printed matter looms as an ever-present menace to the well-being of society, particularly to the impressionable minds and personalities of children.
Books are seen as so dangerous in Florida that all it takes to ban a book from a school’s curriculum is a single protest from a parent. According to PEN America, the 2021-22 school year saw 565 books banned in state schools, some permanently, others temporarily. The result? Students have no access to such books as Bluest Eye and Beloved by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, and The Absolute True Diary of a Part-time Indian, by Sherman Alexie.
In the state’s Marin County, Julie Marshall, a resident, filed most of the challenges. While admitting that she is “not a licensed teacher, librarian or media specialist, and have not had the time to consult with one,” she thundered, “How did these disgusting books get in the schools in the first place? If these librarians were doing their jobs and vetting the books properly, we wouldn’t even be here right now.” Marshall seems to be a character straight out of George Orwell’s 1984.
Books of course have long imagined the ways in which authoritarian attempts to assert dominion over how citizens think, feel, and behave, and what and whose cultural tastes should prevail. In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451, books are verboten, and when found, are burnt by so-called firemen. (The title alludes to the temperature at which paper will burn.)
Bradbury wrote his novel during the McCarthy crusade against Communism—a true witch hunt—, the senator taking his cue from the Nazis burning books in Germany and from the Soviet Union’ crackdown on literature espousing various non-Communistic ideologies.
In Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, the author imagines a fanatical US patriarchy, wherein women inhabit the Christian fundamentalist society’s lowest ranks, essentially as slaves and reproductive machines, prohibited from owning property or money, and more significantly, from reading and writing. The state’s Taliban-like theological rationale for this dystopian world is a narrow and literal interpretation of the Old Testament, giving rise to fascism, fanaticism, and the corresponding near-obliteration of women’s rights.
Books are dangerous—to closed minds. They can inspire and/or provoke the whole gamut of human emotion and belief. Words leap and join you on the street in protest, in your parlors to meditate, in the countryside to open your eyes and heart to the beauty, the bounty, and even the terrors of nature. Literature, whether prose or poetry, enable a deeper and more complex understanding of what it means to be human. Words matter.
Art works too can be banned as was the case with photographs of Michelangelo’s magnificent David being deemed pornographic. The principal of the Tallahassee Classical School resigned after parents complained about sixth-graders being shown photos of the statue. Given such an excruciatingly narrow mindset, it is surprising that no one has sought to have the Bible banned. Plenty of sex and violence in it.
In Philippine history, the most celebrated case of book banning was that of José Rizal’s 19th-century Spanish-language novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. These laid bare the corrosive moral rot and hypocrisy underlying Spanish colonial rule, especially among the friar orders. The novels were admired by the members of the Katipunan, the revolutionary movement, and helped inspire their 1896 uprising against Spain. Deemed an enemy of the state Rizal was found guilty of treason in a mock trial and executed by firing squad on the morning of December 30, 1896.
When it comes to firearms, however, Republicans believe these should be knelt before, garlanded, and all but granted divine status, rather than be looked upon as a genuine and terrifying physical threat to life and limb. In short, in this upside down reality, books kill, guns don’t, but people do. Given such predilections, these Republicans probably would like to see Lady Liberty holding not the torch of freedom, but an assault rifle—finger on the trigger, ready to aim at the huddled masses.
If we are to take Republicans at their word, then it seems logical that people should be banned as a menace to society’s well-being. Not all people, though, just Republicans, who by their canine and asinine devotion, particularly to assault rifles, the National Rifle Association, and to Trump, do kill people by washing their hands, like Pilate, off the spilling of innocent blood. We must work therefore to ban such Republicans.
Republiguns? That has a better and more meaningful ring to it.
Copyright L.H. Francia 2023
