Looking back, I've noticed that the previous Special Inserts have been about comic books, so I'll start this one in the same vein. Comic books have been around since the 1940's and were an offshoot of the pulp novels that preceded them. Since a picture is worth 1,000 words this made sense. At the time, they were mostly adventure, western, horror, and true love based but the Golden Age and the birth of the super heroes came quickly.
Unfortunately, in the early 1950's, someone took exception to the graphic violence and underlying sex of this form of entertainment - specifically the horror books as published by EC Comics - and created an uproar. There were comic burnings and bannings across the country, and it caused the industry to create the Comics Code and a regulating body to oversee content in order to survive. This regulating body and its "seal of approval" lasted into the 1990's when individual publishers such as Marvel and DC decided that they would regulate on their own the images, situations, and even words that they felt were appropriate to the story.
The point of this history lesson is that when the government doesn't like something - they try to ban it.
Welcome to Banned Books Week.
Banning books - even burning them - isn't new. It's gone on for centuries. The point is that it is usually carried out by totalitarian governments that suppress their citizens and regulate every aspect of their lives. This should not be done in a democracy like the United States of America.
And yet, it has been. What follows is a brief list of books that were banned at one time or another.
"1984" - George Orwell. Banned to teenagers for political reasons.
"Animal Farm" - George Orwell. Banned to teenagers for political reasons.
"To Kill a Mockingbird" - Harper Lee. Banned due to racial inequality and rape.
Slaughterhouse-Five" -Kurt Vonnegut. Banned to adults for religious reasons.
"Brave New World" - Aldous Huxley. Banned to teens for religious reasons.
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" - Mark Twain. Banned for social reasons.
"Of Mice and Men" - John Steinbeck. Banned for social reasons.
"The Grapes of Wrath" - John Steinbeck. Banned for social reasons.
"Leaves of Grass" - Walt Whitman, Banned for immorality.
"Ulysses" - James Joyce. Banned for obscenity.
You know what strikes me about this list? We now consider each and every one of these to be a CLASSIC.
Society changes. And its moral and ethical center varies from day to day. And every now and then, misogyny rears its ugly head. Salmon Rushdie wrote a book - and then had to go into hiding because his own people - his own religion - wanted him dead because of it. That is a sad fact, and a foreign country. This is America.
Not everything that is written is good. I'd guess very little of it is, percentage-wise. But what is is an expression of the writer, and here we have Freedom of Expression. Now don't get me wrong. Not everything that is written should be. There are laws against libeling someone by accusing them of things that can't be proven. And, I would like to think, a lot of a writer's output, upon second reading, gets trashed.
But what's written should stay written, and what's published should stay published. Even if no one ever reads it.
It takes an idea to write something. An idea so powerful in a writer's mind that he or she has to set it down on paper, has to try and share it. An idea - good, bad, or indifferent - makes us human. A shared idea makes us a community.
Keep reading!
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