This Post Will BLOW. YOUR. MIND.

Hemant Mehta, the self-styled Friendly Atheist, has never impressed me.  He provides a useful service by tracking the Christian Right in his videos and blog posts, but it's hard to get a handle on his own politics.

In this video he reports on a youth minister-cum-junior high school basketball coach in Arkansas who told his church about the time he sowed the gospel to a student in the school library.  Someone apparently leaked a video of his performance to Mehta.

We had a student in our middle school library this last week and I overheard this and so I just jumped in. I was like, I don't really care, you can fire me. I don't care.  Right.  Where's Todd? He's on the school board.  Make sure it doesn't happen.  Um, but this girl was asking Miss Cheney. She's like, 'Hey, I'm looking for like a book. Uh, it's got mystery and suspense." And so I was like, "I got you, sister." And I said, "Are you looking for something that's romantic, something that has suspense, thrilling? There is some murders in there.  There's redemption, and there's a hero."  And she said, "Where do I find it?" Sits right over there. It's the Bible. And then I just walked out.  And I was like, I just teed off on that one, you know, and I was like, "Thanks, Miss Cheney, I'm so thankful."  Um, but right, seriously, like like God just provided that opportunity and I know the girl, but I mean I was like, "Are you kidding me? Yeah. Like if you're looking for a book, I can show you one, right?" And so I just want to encourage you. And are they always that easy?  Not necessarily, right? But I do want to encourage you.  The opportunities are there all the time.

Mehta then goes on a rant:

Hey kids, if you want to read a book with genocide and incest, have I got the recommendations for you?  What the hell is he doing?  Let the librarian handle that one.  That is not an opportunity that you need to tee off on. Like, no. No.  And don't encourage other people to take that opportunity.  No, that's not the proper time or place for that.

On the whole I agree with him - yes, the guy should keep his jobs separate - but one reason I included Mehta's video here was to let readers see his own tone and body language.  I think he sounds just like the Christian-right censors he usually opposes: The Bible has genocide and incest! It's filth! Don't expose our innocent children to it! I suspect that the kind of books the girl was looking for include some objectionable material too - if they haven't already been purged from the school library by adults who just want to protect kids.  I mean, I'm all for freedom of speech too, but next these Christians will have Our Children reading Shakespeare, the Iliad, Oedipus Rex and other Greek tragedies, Lord of the Flies, Maus, The Diary of Anne Frank, Twilight, and who knows what other obscenities?  I'd like to think that Mehta was deliberately parodying the style, but I can't see that here.  Even the sanitized retellings of Greek mythology I read as a kid in the Fifties included gory details such as Odysseus blinding the Cyclops with a burnt log and Procrustes torturing travelers to make them fit his guest bed.  These were available in the elementary school library, yet I seem to have survived.

Mehta goes on to ask if Logan McCourtney, the youth pastor and coach, tries to impose his cult on his junior high school basketball players:

But I do wonder if this guy's doing this to a random girl in the library. He said he knows her. Whatever. If he's doing this in the library, what is he doing as the junior high basketball coach? Is he telling them to pray before games?  Is he pushing his religion on those kids? Because we know what happened in the library cuz he bragged about it. We don't know what's happening when he's getting this team ready in a practice.

Fair questions, and someone connected to that school should ask them.  But you know, I'm not sure we do know what happened in the library.  We have only McCourtney's account, and braggarts shouldn't be taken too seriously whether they're secular or sacred.  Since he's a preacher, it's even more reasonable to suspect he's exaggerating; he might have made the whole thing up so he could puff up his chest and boast of his devotion to the Lord.  He dares the woke atheists to try to fire him (from the safety of a stage where they wouldn't hear him)!  He has a buddy on the school board!  Again, watch the clip: this is a stand-up comic at work, though there's not much daylight between a stand-up comic and a preacher.  If Mehta had talked to the girl or the librarian involved, it would be different, but it's odd for him to take the guy at his word.

Even if McCourtney's account is accurate, we also don't know what happened next, what the girl thought, what the librarian said to her.  As McCourtney tells it, he made a lightning intervention and got the hell out of Dodge. The girl might have rolled her eyes and said Geeyyyyy; the librarian might have rolled her eyes, told her not to be bothered, and made some helpful suggestions.  It would be different if McCourtney were her teacher or, goddess forbid, her coach, but he isn't.  Junior high students are already capable of independent thought, and we liberals want them to be exposed to possibly discomforting literature and ideas, even in class.  Don't we?

Mehta titled his video "A junior high basketball coach bragged at church about pushing the Bible on a kid."  I didn't think so right away, but after watching the video and reading the comments on it, I think "pushing" is an exaggeration.  Again, it's the kind of exaggeration I associate with Christian bigots (Woke teachers and librarians are pushing the trans agenda on our children!).  I'd already noticed this in comments on other videos and elsewhere, but a significant number of liberals consider any public advocacy of religion, whether directed at them personally or not, as 'having religion forced on them.'  (The same goes for booksellers offering recommendations online: that, to some people, constitutes refusing to sell any books they don't recommend.) Amusingly, they think that Jesus didn't go around pushing his beliefs on others, though that is exactly what he did according to the gospels, and he ordered his disciples to do the same.  (I've seen similar claims made of the Buddha; sorry, children, but Buddhism is also a missionary, proselytizing religion.)

Some of these people had strict religious upbringings, which did involve forcing religion on them.  I sympathize with them and understand why encountering missionaries makes them uncomfortable, but they are adults now, they often claim that they have left it behind and now think for themselves, and so on.  Like it or not, and they don't, they live in a country with constitutionally protected freedom of speech and freedom of religion. That means that adults have a right to try to persuade other adults, even to convert them; it also means that they have the right to tell missionaries to take a hike, or to argue with them and try to persuade them to give up their religious beliefs.  (Even more ostensibly open-minded Christians don't like that.)  Schools are different in degree, which is exactly what the struggle over library censorship is about; where to draw the line is always up for negotiation, not only on religion but on history, sex education, "race," and other issues.  Adults want to "protect" children, but they also want to control them. (You say "tomato," I say "tomahto.")  As students get older, the more discomfort they should be exposed to.  As the educator Deborah Meier wrote:

There are plenty of liberal-minded citizens who are uncomfortable with Central Park East's stress on open intellectual inquiry and would have us leave young minds free of uncertainties and openness until "later on" when they are "more prepared to face complexity."  First, some argue, "fill the vessel" with neutral information and easily remembered and uplifting stories.  But such compromises will neither satisfy the Right nor prepare our children's minds for "later." *

It was funny at first to watch liberals and the Right switch sides on "discomfort."  First Culture-of-Therapy liberals declared that no one should ever be made to feel uncomfortable; then they declared that if you're not feeling uncomfortable (mostly but not always about American history) then you're doing it wrong.  Then the Right decided that no one should be made to feel uncomfortable about American history.  But it's not really funny, because there are serious real-world consequences in these disagreements.  

One especially telling comment under Mehta's video was this one (all punctuation sic):

"Free will is gods greatest gift"
"Really then why do you all always want to take it away from people?"

A fair question, but in context the writer seems to think that simply declaring one's beliefs, or trying to persuade someone else to adopt them, is trying to take away their free will.  It isn't.  It's essential in a free society.  I understand why many people want to take away that freedom, but they mustn't be allowed to do it.  I think one problem is that they never learned to say "No, thank you" to such people.  It's not surprising, because school is largely based on the assumption that saying "No" is intolerable disobedience; at some indefinite point adults are supposed to learn otherwise, but that point never arrives.  Just this week I read another Miss Manners column where she explained that it is permissible simply to turn down unwanted or inconvenient invitations; "No thank you," amplified as "I'm so sorry, I can't," is all that needs to be said.  (It's a mistake to invent excuses, which will encourage attempts to persuade you.)  The other night a couple of Mormon elders knocked at my door; I said "No thank you," and they gave up gracefully. Not all missionaries are so agreeable, but they can be resisted and dismissed.)

Did I mention "safe spaces"?  I've written about them too, often, but I don't think I've heard about them as much lately.

It's good that Hemant Mehta objected to this pastor-coach's obnoxious conduct.  But what does he want to protect children from?  Does he want them to learn to think for themselves in a messy world? Or does he think it's enough if adults like him keep away any ideas that might make them uncomfortable?

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* The Power of Their Ideas, Beacon Press, 2002, page 81. 

Hey, Censors! Leave Those Kids Alone

Authoritarians often try to present themselves as reasonable, common-sense types who just want to be left alone by all the woke leftists.  Google News referred me this morning to an excellent example of the pattern, a letter to the editor of the Sarasota Herald Tribune.  It's semi-paywalled, and the site nagged me to shut off my adblocker, so if you click through be prepared to deal with that.

The writer was indignant that the Herald-Tribune had run an op-ed opposing "book bans."  The headline, he declared, "shows your paper's dislike of the USA."  According to him there are no book bans in Florida, only restrictions on materials in middle-school libraries.  This is a distinction without a difference, aside from being dishonest: as far as I can tell, the activists involved don't merely want to "restrict" access to materials, they want to remove those materials from the shelves.

"Young people should be shielded from harmful material, be it in books, films, audio or on the internet."  Here we have the faux-reasonable stance.  Who decides what is harmful?  The most reactionary, authoritarian elements of a community, of course. 

"Parents are the people responsible for their children, not the state or activist college students." If the state shouldn't be involved, then why is the state of Florida intervening to decide what materials children should not be allowed to see?  The reference to "activist college students" is a nice evasion.  Activist adults want to decide not only what their children will see, but other parents' children as well.  

And not only children, but other adults: "If the parents want their children to read something, they can easily purchase it on Amazon or at another location (i.e., a flea market)."  Here the underlying agenda peeks out: this writer's illogic, followed to its conclusion, would eliminate public libraries altogether.  If I want to read something, I "can easily purchase it on Amazon or at another location (i.e., a flea market)", right?  One of the reasons public libraries came into existence was because people couldn't afford to buy everything they wanted to read.  It's why public libraries and other public services are so popular with most people, even when they're a bit uneasy about some of the content they provide; it's also why authoritarian scum hate public resources - those who can't afford to pay should just go without.  Censors of literature have always been happy to shield adults from "harmful" material, though as far as I know there's never been any good evidence on what is harmful, or how, or why. 

"Columns like this one by Emily Bowlin do not add to the educational process; they merely mislead individuals. I did not read 'Slaughterhouse Five' in middle school – I read it much later – and I seem to have turned out mostly OK." That last bit is open to question.  The writer is the one who wants to mislead, by confusing material available in school libraries with material assigned in class. Is Slaughterhouse-Five really being assigned in middle schools?  I admit I've been surprised as I've followed the controversy, to see what apparently is being assigned at that level.  

Maus, for example, Art Spiegelmann's graphic memoir about his parents' experience in Auschwitz, was attacked for showing in drawings the nakedness of mouse-headed human beings in a concentration camp.  Supposedly it was assigned reading for middle-schoolers in some districts, and that brought even me up short - not because of the nudity, but because of the overall disturbing subject matter.  I wouldn't forbid a middle-schooler who wanted to read Maus, but it's not a children's book any more than Slaughterhouse-Five. Not because it's "harmful," but because it is upsetting; I'd encourage such a kid to talk to me about his or her reaction. 

I wondered if Maus was being assigned, if it was, because of an assumption that it's a "comic book" and therefore kid stuff.  I wouldn't be surprised, though that very question was discussed amply when it first appeared in the 1980s.  I'd like to think that teachers and librarians would know better, but I'd never assume that.  The bigots and frothers who are at the forefront of book restrictions do not know better, though: they simply want to control what others see.  Significantly, they never seem to recognize that in reviewing these materials, they themselves have been harmed.  It's only weaker vessels they pretend to worry about, and let me stress again that they want to keep other adults from having access to these and other materials.

I was lucky.  At my request, my parents gave permission for me to explore the grown-up section of the public library when I was in second grade.  I wanted to read an encyclopedia, as I recall (this was more than sixty years ago), and I didn't venture beyond that for a long time.  I didn't read Slaughterhouse-Five in middle school because it hadn't been published yet, but I did read Nineteen Eighty-four in sixth grade.  That was on my own initiative; I'd already read Orwell's Animal Farm.  I didn't understand the sexual parts, but I did understand the parts about controlling one's own memory, about the misuse of language, and about resisting political authority - which is more than can be said of many adults.

The role of parents is, I admit, difficult to define.  By custom and law they're given a great deal of power over what their children can read or watch or do.  This isn't always good for the children.  Even today there are parents in the US who don't think girls need schooling past the sixth grade, and not all of them are Amish.  Many parents try to exert authority over their kids even long after they're adults.  The older children grow, the less of a veto their parents should have over their lives.  Material about sex/gender and sexuality must be available once they reach puberty, because their parents can't be relied on to give them accurate information, and it is definitely harmful when a middle-school kid gets pregnant or catches a disease because they don't know how to protect themselves.  Right-wing religious parents are no help at all.  They'd rather children - their own, or other people's children - die rather than get the information they need.  An informed child is a threat to adult authority; that's why right-wing Christians have opposed laws against child abuse, it's not because they want to protect children - very much the opposite.

Let's Go, Bunnies!

I've complained before about the quality of public discussion, and I'm going to try to go a little deeper this time.

The historian Seth Cotlar linked to this article about a 1959 controversy inspired by a children's book, The Rabbits' Wedding by Garth Williams. (The article is paywalled, but as a subscriber Cotlar could share it on Twitter.  If the link from here doesn't work, try clicking through to his tweet.)  Williams is most famous as the illustrator of E. B. White's Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, the Little House on the Prairie books and many others; but he also wrote the text for The Rabbits' Wedding. The book is out of print, shamefully enough, but maybe the article will spur enough interest for a reissue.

According to the article, The Rabbits' Wedding is about a black rabbit and a white rabbit who meet, fall in love, and marry.  Unsurprisingly, the White Citizens' Council organized a nationwide campaign against the book, trying to get it removed from libraries in Alabama, which (just as unsurprisingly) boosted its sales.  The author played coy:

Williams’s wide-eyed innocence mimicked that of his rabbit characters: “I was completely unaware that animals with white fur, such as white polar bears and white dogs and white rabbits, were considered blood relations of white human beings. I was only aware that a white horse next to a black horse looks very picturesque.” He averred that his motivations were innocuous, just craft and thrift: A black-and-white book, with occasional pops of yellow, would cut production costs.

His biographers told the Times

that the artist was gregarious, well connected and vaguely progressive, but no activist. “His first response to attacks on ‘The Rabbits’ Wedding’ is ‘I’m just an artist,’” James Wallace noted. He added that Williams also said he “hopes children enjoy the book and that the voices of hate will never overcome the kind of togetherness ‘The Rabbits’ Wedding’ represents.”

"No activist" and "vaguely progressive" is praising him with faint damns.  "Just an artist" reminds me of the Noble Engineer Robert Heinlein, who liked to claim that he was just an entertainer, a hard-working hack who wrote for money, and that art shouldn't contain a Message - when he wasn't feuding with his publisher to keep the militarist and rugged-individualist messages he'd put into his juvenile SF novels.  He had, he insisted, a right and a duty to educate the young. (He was also anti-racist in his way, so I imagine he would have sided with Williams if he heard about this controversy.)  As the SF writer and critic Joanna Russ wrote, "it seems absolutely impossible to write anything without immediately making all sorts of assumptions about what human nature is, what good and bad behavior consists of, what men ought to be, what women ought to be, which states of mind and character are valuable, which are the opposite, and so on."  Just about everybody who says art should be message-free soon shows that they don't mean it; their messages aren't really messages at all, just Common Sense.  And to be fair to Garth Williams, he initially reacted by "rage-writing a 30-page response to criticism of his picture book," before "settl[ing] on the high road in a statement" to the effect that we should all love each other.

In the climate of late 1950s America, taking the high road was probably a smart move.  Anyway, opinion pieces fought the battle for The Rabbits' Wedding openly and enthusiastically.  But that was then and this is now, and what unsettles me just a wee bit about the article and Cotlar's commentary is that it feels disingenuous.

One commenter on Cotlar's tweet said it out loud: "It was an innocent child's book. They saw what they wanted to see. The hatred that they harbored distorted everything. Unfortunately, that still hasn't changed." This is an example of doublethink that would qualify for the 1984 Hall of Fame. Of course the book was "innocent," whatever that much-abused word means. "(Decades later, Williams would dryly remark, 'I didn’t say that they went to bed together.')"  Children's publishers especially were always hypervigilant about the content of their products, so it's not plausible that they didn't know that they were publishing an allegory about "interracial" love and marriage. (That hypervigilance makes it all the more revealing about the kind of content that they allowed, such as the racism in some of Dr. Seuss's children's books.)  The racists who attacked the book didn't just imagine it: The Rabbits' Wedding was a slap at their beliefs and values, and that was a noble and proper gesture, then and now.  Why pretend otherwise, especially now?

"Innocent" in this context presumably means an absence of explicit sexual content. Think of the critic Joan Acocella, who wants more than anything else to believe that Willa Cather was "innocent," meaning that she died a virgin.  Or the online movie reviewer who wrote a few years ago about Disney's The Fox and the Hound 2 that

In these post-Brokeback Mountain days, it is hard to see Copper and Tod's friendship—their playful wrestling, their longing looks at one another, their efforts to create satisfying relationships with other characters to substitute for their inability to be together—in a completely innocent fashion. But that is neither here nor there.” Is it? Pinsky was saying that because of Ang Lee’s successful film, he could no longer see the frolicking of two talking animals in a children’s animated cartoon as “completely innocent.”

The racists who called The Rabbits' Wedding "salacious" weren't the only ones who saw what their personal obsessions drove them to see. Considering that some adults today are adamant that a marriage is "innocent" -- meaning no exchange of bodily fluids, even in theory -- sexuality clearly makes them uneasy.  I'm reminded of an exchange in the IU student newspaper a couple of decades ago: they published a letter from a bigot fulminating about sodomy, and then a reply from a young woman who cried, "My gay friends would never do something like that!" I've always wondered how she reacted when she learned that in fact they do. Attempts to stir up antigay revulsion by describing our disgusting sexual practices continued into this century, as did indignant denials that respectable Homo-Americans would do such things. And at least one compassionate Christian divine prefers the word "homosexual" to "gay" because the former word "has the advantage of speaking with sharp particularity to the actual issue at stake", probably meaning buttsex.

There's a lot less anxiety around "interracial" relationships than there was sixty years ago, but it hasn't died out altogether. I was surprised by how much it was in evidence in a famously liberal and diverse city like San Francisco. (Which is not to say that all San Franciscans are racist, only that I found more racism than I expected.)  People may talk blithely about color-blindness and not judging others by the color of their skin, but actual differences are another matter.  The same goes for straight liberals (usually male) who are fierce supporters of gay marriage but are pruriently horrified by sodomy.

This curious inability, in 2023, to face the brute reality of controversies found a recent echo when a high school in Howard City, Michigan required two students to remove sweatshirts bearing the motto "Let's Go, Brandon."  Their mother filed suit in support of their First Amendment rights.  For those lucky enough not to know, "Let's Go Brandon" become a "not-so-secret handshake" among MAGA Republicans after a reporter misheard NASCAR fans at Talladega chanting "Fuck Joe Biden."  As a secret, it's on a par with "420," but I suppose that's part of the appeal.  The ACLU and FIRE are on the kids' side, and rightly so.  I might say more about that in another post, but I mention in this one because this time the Right is taking the position of The Rabbits' Wedding's partisans - Hahaha, it's just an innocent allegory! -- and the liberals are fuming that though seemingly clean, the sweatshirts are "salacious"! Think of the innocent children being led astray, their minds polluted by filth! 

I think a better response to "Let's Go Brandon" is to congratulate the MAGA in question for supporting Chicago's new mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, a progressive black Democrat of the type that makes right-wingers foam at the mouth.  The real question ought to be how people in a free society should respond to deliberately provocative expressions, whether they be children's books or t-shirts, and I'll try to take that up soon.

I May Not Know Cancel Culture, But I Know What I Like

The gay men's discussion group I attend (virtually nowadays) took up the subject of "cancel culture" this month.  I considered passing on this one, but it turned out not to be as bad as I'd feared.  It was pretty bad, but I learned something from it.

The organizer/moderator began by sketching out the media flurry over "cancel culture," referring to Dr. Seuss, J. K. Rowling, Potato Head, and some other high-profile examples.  He immediately disavowed any knowledge about any of them, declaring that he was just going by the headlines he'd seen.  Well, great: that discredited him totally - which upset me, since we're personal friends. 

The rest of the group accepted his account, which could be called the official account as framed by the corporate media.  It quickly emerged that all they knew was what they'd picked up on the fly from headlines.  That was significant, but it's notoriously Donald Trump's approach to the news; and ironic, because some of them lamented that other people never read past the headlines of news stories.  These men ranged from about 40 to 70 in age, all are articulate and educated, some are professionals  (The two non-whites in the group were Asian.)  But though all of them agreed that "cancel culture" (or CC) was a big problem, none of them knew much about it -- and I'm being generous there.  They agreed that CC is an existential threat to American society, to democracy, to freedom of speech.

I waded in recklessly, arguing that none of the victims they were concerned about had actually been cancelled, if that means losing their jobs because the Twitter mob had jumped on them.  J. K. Rowling is still rich, still has her social media accounts (in fact she's part of a Twitter mob, labeled TERFs, trying to cancel transgender people), her books are still in print without let or hindrance.  Dr. Seuss is dead, but not because of cancel culture; his estate decided not to keep six of his forty-odd books in print, but they are still in libraries and private collections, no one is breaking down doors to keep these men from reading If I Ran the Zoo to their nephews and nieces.  In fact, the most prominent victim of cancel culture is Donald Trump, who lost his job and his social media accounts as a result of it.  Several of the other men protested at this, but they made no arguments against it.

Some men bravely acknowledged that CC is not a totally new phenomenon; some were aware of "political correctness," though they accepted the prevailing media account of PC as well.  I was increasingly baffled that these intelligent guys knew virtually nothing about the society they live in, including its history, that they didn't get from scanning headlines and listening half-attentively to the TV.  Maybe "baffled" is the wrong word, though.  "Frustrated" is more like it; it was like trying to reason with Trump supporters.

I mentioned the House American Activities Committee, which had cost people their jobs and fostered -- or benefited from -- a social hysteria about Communists and other dread perils.  Some of the others nodded, because everybody knows McCarthyism is bad and cancel culture, like political correctness, is the New McCarthyism.  One man protested that it wasn't the same, because HUAC was about politics and principles, about anti-Communism not cultural stuff.  I pointed out that among HUAC's targets were homosexuals and Soviet Jews who'd taken over Hollywood and were subverting the minds of the young.  I'd wanted to bring up how major newspapers used to print the names, addresses, and often the employers of gay men caught up in bar raids, but couldn't fit it in.  I should have mentioned the contemporaneous attacks on comic books and Negro music, both depicted as Communist plots to break down Christian morality and foster race-mixing and juvenile delinquency.

The moderator agreed, but declared that what was new was that this time the intolerance was coming from the left, instead of the right.  That is how it's being depicted, I agreed, but that was also true of Red Scares and Political Correctness: the Jewish Communists had taken over Hollywood and the media and wouldn't let Real Americans have a voice, they silenced everyone who tried to be patriotic. The same went for Political Correctness, which was denounced by liberals and the right alike as left-wing intolerance of normal American culture.

Another proposed difference, of course, is social media, and some of the participants were aware that it's been argued that CC represents a democratization of public pressure on certain people and institutions.  I agree with this take up to a point: certainly numerous Establishment media figures have been outraged that the rabble dare to disagree with them directly, in larger numbers than they're accustomed to.  But I think it's at most a difference of degree rather than kind.  Hate mail, including organized campaigns, has been around for a long time.  Think of the millions of postcards the FCC received, imploring them not to ban religious broadcasting as the notorious atheist Madelyn Murry O'Hair had petitioned them to do (except that she hadn't).  As I was mulling over this post, I also remembered the South African novelist Alan Paton's last novel, Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful, which included a subplot about a South African anti-apartheid writer receiving a long series of racist hate mail.

It could be argued that the difference social media makes is that the mob can see each other at work, whereas the individual writers of hate mail couldn't see what their peers were writing.  (Except that often, as with the FCC matter, they were writing together, copying prescribed messages.)  That could be relevant, but it can be managed by blocking and reporting.  Discussion isn't really being suppressed in these cases; the targets usually are no more interested in real discussion than their critics are.

The real problem, and possibly the real difference, I argued, is not the Twitter mob but institutions: corporations and others that choose to deal with criticism and bad publicity by throwing those who excited the controversy under the bus.  I reminded the group of Shirley Sherrod and Van Jones, whom Barack Obama had ditched when right-wing media attacked them, even though the accusations were false.  As some in the group pointed out, it doesn't always work that way: the corporate media loved Donald Trump and gave him huge quantities of free airtime.  The CEO of CBS said that Trump had made the network millions of dollars.  Whatever else is going on, the power lies not with the Twitter mob but with the institutions, the elite few who decide who gets the lucrative platforms.  They're the ones who cancel, and they're the real threat to freedom of expression, because they are largely unaccountable.  I mentioned Noam Chomsky's famous remarks about concision in corporate media, and someone asked me to post a link to the video.

The discussion quieted down after the first half hour (the meetings last about an hour and a half).  Someone brought up Amy Cooper, the woman who lost her job after calling the police on a birdwatcher who'd asked her to put her dog on its leash in Central Park.  He was quietly irate that she'd been punished simply for being afraid.  I challenged this: I'd watched the video numerous times, including once in the past week when I happened on it again.  It's not possible to be absolutely sure, but I pointed out that she didn't retreat or cower, she stalked right up in his face, despite his request not to approach him; and she lied during the call, claiming that he was threatening her, though he was not.  Fear can make people behave oddly, but I don't believe she was afraid; she was the aggressor.

Should Cooper have been fired?  I don't have the answer, and that's exactly the trouble.  We don't have any consistent criteria for people losing their jobs for racism or other bigotry, and corporations (she worked for an "investment firm") can fire employees for bad reasons or no reason at all.

We didn't get around to discussing Dr. Seuss.  I'd looked forward to pointing out that children's books have always been heavily censored, with input not only from parents but from librarians and teachers.  Theodore Seuss Geisel worked with his publishers and with educational consultants as his books were in production: he was not a free-spirited artist following his Muse hither and yon.  You might think that the system of children's book production and publishing is a bad one, but you need to have some idea how it works.  It was not the Twitter mob but Geisel's estate, which manages his work, that decided to stop publishing six of his books, which are not only problematic in content but no longer sell very well.  The estate had consulted with numerous academics, psychologists, and child development experts before they concluded that racist caricatures of African tribesmen should be retired.  

There's a postscript to this discussion.  My friend the group moderator is Korean-American, and he posted on Facebook today about J. Mark Ramseyer, Harvard's Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, who has come under fire for publishing his claims that Korean "comfort women" were not brutalized victims but prostitutes who had voluntarily contracted to supply sexual services to Japanese troops in the service of the Emperor.  My friend indignantly demanded accountability for Ramseyer. I pointed out, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that the attacks on Ramseyer were a clear example of cancel culture: a left-wing Twitter mob dogpiling a conservative academic because he expressed Politically Incorrect opinions.  My friend retorted that it was not, because the accusations against Ramseyer were backed with evidence.  I replied that the same is true of Dr. Seuss: the images in those books are racist, and were declared to be so by academic professionals after long study.  It's also true of Rowling, who is an anti-transgender bigot comparable in hatefulness to antigay bigots, whose bogus arguments she recycles for use against transpeople.

Personally, I'm wary of the professionals who vetted Seuss's work.  The New York Post article I just linked reports of their study of the books:

“Of the 45 characters of color, 43 are identified as having characteristics aligning with the definition of Orientalism,” the study stated, including 29 wearing turbans.

“Only two of the forty-five characters are identified in the text as ‘African’ and both align with the theme of anti-Blackness,” they wrote, adding that every character of color is also male.

And so on.  It's typical bad academic prose, with a dubious theoretical framework.  "The theme of anti-Blackness"?  I think we have to bear in mind that such professionals in past decades often blocked the publication of children's books that are now regarded as classics (E. B. White's Charlotte's Web is a famous case, but there are plenty of others), and today's academics are just as culture-bound as their predecessors.  Much of the academic work on "race" and "ethnicity" today is just as bad, just as distorted in its assumptions, as ordinary discourse on those subjects.  None of this means that I disagree with the decision to withdraw those six Seuss books, only that I might disagree with some of the reasoning behind it. 

I certainly agree that much public discourse is terrible: not only uninformed but hostile to factual accuracy, driven by emotion and personality cults rather than critical reason.  And I agree that freedom of expression is always under threat, often from those who claim to be its champions. That certainly describes my friend, alas, and most of the men in Sunday night's discussion: on the current controversy they haven't bothered to inform themselves beyond skimming headlines, and on the history of the problem they know very little except cliches.  (Democracy good, McCarthyism bad!)  In these respects they're typical of commercial media and the people who consume them without looking at alternative sources of information.  It's not necessarily dishonesty, it's more ordinary human laziness.  But once again I'm startled to learn that though I feel inadequately informed because I'm too lazy to read widely and deeply enough, I'm still much better informed than most people.

But as I said at the beginning, the discussion helped clarify my own position.  Though many people on the left are as sloppy and (worse) impatient with, even hostile, to rational thought as the right or the center, I'm now sure that "cancel culture" isn't a phenomenon of the left.  The danger to freedom of thought and expression comes from centralized power in corporations, government, and other big institutions, who are hostile to the left but are perfectly happy to use us as an excuse to stifle freedom of thought.  "Cancel culture," like "political correctness," is a term used not to defend free discourse but to stifle it: once you say "cancel culture," no further argument is needed.  Ellen Willis explained it three decades ago, discussing CBS pundit Andy Rooney's dismissal for bigoted commentary:

Yet the real reason Rooney got into trouble was that he violated the media establishment's bland, centrist criteria for acceptable speech.  In demanding Rooney's removal, lesbian and gay activists appealed to precisely those standards of "civility" -- that is, niceness -- regularly used to marginalize their own speech ... Rather than pressuring CBS to throw Andy Rooney off the air, GLAAD should have demanded time on 60 Minutes to rebut him.  In choosing instead to define his speech as an intolerable threat, they merely reinforced the basic assumption of the dominant culture that we can't afford freedom, that all hell will break loose if we relax controls.

And as more recent commentators have argued, the Dr. Seuss fuss has enabled right-wing media to pretend that they care about freedom of expression while distracting attention from issues like Republican attempts to block important legislation in Congress, preserve the filibuster, and suppress voting rights at the state level.  It looks to me, happily, as their tactics aren't working as well as they used to, but it still bothers me that so many liberals and centrists find their siren song pretty effective.

The Freedom to Have the Correct Opinion

A friend, I'll call her A, who worked with me in the dishroom when she was a student, and who now is semi-employed in the public library of her home city,  reported on Facebook today that she "just found the eighth religious propaganda pamphlet hidden away on her library's shelves this week. She hates it when people not only decide to preach to those who perhaps do not want to hear it, but also to litter all over library shelves."  (She generally posts about herself in the third person.)  We got into a little dispute, she and I and some of her other friends.

I don't object to A's annoyance over the material, nor to her removing and disposing of the pamphlets.  As a library employee she's entitled and probably expected to do so.  I did object to her use of the term "littering" (which in later comments she confirmed that she meant) and her complaint about those who "decide to preach to those who perhaps do not want to hear it". 

"Litter" is certainly the wrong word.  I like Wikipedia's definition:

Litter consists of waste products that have been disposed [of] improperly, without consent, in an inappropriate location. Litter can also be used as a verb. To litter means to throw (often man-made) objects onto the ground and leave them as opposed to disposing of them properly.

But Merriam-Webster's definition 4a will do as well: "trash, wastepaper, or garbage lying scattered about."

Those religious tracts were not dropped carelessly in the library stacks instead of being "disposed of properly."  They weren't even "scattered about."  Someone left them there deliberately and probably placed them with some care.  Whatever one thinks of their contents, and I'd probably agree with my friend about that, they aren't litter.  A was using the word to express her dislike for their content: compare this article from the Bloomington newspaper, which shows people using the same word about matter that was also placed deliberately and carefully.

As the discussion proceeded, some commenters argued that the library has the right to decide what is on its shelves.  One declared that a library "is a fragile ecosystem and should be treated as such."  This is difficult, though I think the "fragile ecosystem" claim is patent bullshit: libraries are tougher than that.  My initial response was that I'd like to put atheist tracts in the hymnal racks of churches -- but no church may be responsible for the tracts A found; they may have been distributed by a free-lancer, as it were.  But I'm not sure how outrageous it is that someone should leave pamphlets around the shelves of a library.  In practice it would present problems, as the stacks were piled with material from competing viewpoints, so it makes sense for library policy and practice to forbid it.  But I don't believe that A would have been as offended if she found pamphlets expressing views more congenial to her: on young women's health issues, gay and lesbian youth, riot grrl politics, and the like.  She might have collected and moved them, but I don't think she'd have been as indignant.  She might even have moved them to a place in the library where such outside material can be put for people to pick up.

But I was more concerned with her general assumption that neither she nor other people should have to encounter material that offends them in a library.  A lot of people object to public preaching and missionary work, and that's admittedly a problematic case of freedom of religion, which has been much debated over the years.  So has the question of public political speech that is offensive to many people.  But these situations tend to be double-edged: the people who want to eliminate from their sight public speech and text that offends them, generally don't even think about who might be offended by publicly visible material that they agree with, but which offends others whose sensibilities they don't care to shield.

The matter of being preached to is something I've thought about before.  In the first post I noticed that some secularists posted about their desire to deface religious billboards; in the second I noticed that liberal Christians and secularists threw hissyfits about seeing expressions of the beliefs of their more devout Facebook friends.  (I'm sure those liberal Christians and secularists post a lot of their opinions, on politics and religion and other matters, without worrying about whether all their friends agree with it or want to be preached to by them.)  I certainly share and sympathize with their fatigue, but I also recognize that being exposed to beliefs and statements I abhor is the direct result of living in a society which safeguards freedom of speech.  I can only insist on my right to express my opinion because I grant others their right to do the same.  I also insist on my right to talk back to people who express opinions that offend me (while acknowledging their right to talk back to me), and that really bothers many people from all over the opinion spectrum.  Whether they be Tea Party Republicans, Obama Democrats, fundamentalist Christians, liberal Zionists, New Atheists, or really of any affiliation, they believe that "debate" means that they state their opinions boldly and no one may disagree with them.  They often accuse me of being surprised when other people are bothered by what I say, but I insist they're projecting.  I am not surprised when people disagree with me, even vehemently; I answer them back, and that pisses them off even more.

One thing I'm sure about: a tract left in the stacks of a library is not an infringement of my religious or intellectual freedom.  If I notice it, I don't have to pick it up; if I pick it up, I don't have to read it; if I read it, I don't have to believe it.  This is one of the pillars of the whole idea of freedom of speech, press, religion. The paternalistic objection raised by my friend's defenders is the same as the objection raised by people who want to censor library collections: they want to make sure people aren't exposed to the 'wrong' ideas, because of course people are just sheep who will inevitably, helplessly be led astray by them.  They seem to ascribe immense power to material left lying around that even exceeds those of the official collections.  (Interestingly, some of the defenders declared that Christianist and anti-choice material is already available in the library, while saying that the librarians must closely vet and restrict the kind of material that is allowed into the fragile ecosystem of the official collection.  This kind of incoherence is a warning flag that they aren't thinking.)

In my comments I hinted that I was concerned about A's intolerance of views she disliked, and one of her other friends accused me of crying "censorship."  I snapped back that I hadn't said anything about censorship, but I admit it was on my mind.  Would I really trust A not to impose censorship if she could?  Frankly, I wouldn't.  I remember a young woman who told a gay student group meeting that when she found a right-wing newsletter left for free distribution in the Student Union, she collected the whole pile and threw it in the trash.  Or tried to; at this remove in time I don't recall if she complained that someone stopped her.  The thing is, that newsletter was in a location of the Union that was intended for distribution of handouts for all kinds of organizations.  Wouldn't she have screamed bloody murder if someone had thrown out the gay group's handouts?  Of course she would.  (Something much milder: when A was working in the dining hall, she had to be told not to set up her laptop to play music while she worked.  That other people might not want to hear the music she liked not only didn't occur to her, I'm not sure it ever sunk into her head as a consideration she had to respect.)

Some years later numerous earnest young gay people (and some older ones) tried to shut down the blog of a right-wing, fundamentalist Christian, antigay business professor; they failed, because the University stuck by the First Amendment, but they continued to insist that it was wrong for people to be exposed to "hurtful" opinions.  There was also some talk about prospective students needing to see that the University is supportive of its gay students and "diversity" in general, or they wouldn't come to IU.  I rather doubt that any school anywhere is uniformly supportive of all minorities, but IU has a lot of official material online declaring itself pro-diversity in general and pro-GLBT in particular.  A blog, even a professor's blog, doesn't negate that.  If I were an incoming freshman now, I don't know how I'd feel, but I think that at that age I recognized that it is important to me that the University doesn't shut down views that some people dislike.  I knew from early on that I was a dissident and annoyed other people with my opinions.

In fact, these events made me wary about speaking up in public around the university; when I started this blog, a few years before I retired, I was nervous at first about using my own name, and of course I put it on a service unconnected to the university.  I quickly got bolder again, but any attempt to silence unpopular opinions has a chilling effect.  Before I started blogging, other gay people tried on more than one occasion to remove me from Speakers Bureau, or to get the student newspaper to drop the opinion columns I wrote from time to time.  Some such efforts came from raw undergraduates, but others came from people with positions in the University bureaucracy.  This never had much effect on me, but it made me aware that I can't trust my fellow queers to respect diversity of opinion in their own community.  So I have personal reasons, as well as principled ones, for my strict views on freedom of speech, press and religion.  They protect me as well as you.

This common self-centered inability to see or care that one's own views might offend others, or that they have the same right to be offended as oneself has, is extremely widespread.  In my part of the opinion spectrum it's rationalized with such notions as that "hate speech" or "stereotyping" or "demeaning images" aren't protected under the First Amendment; but in fact they are, and it's my opinion that they should be.  The First Amendment guarantees your right to be offended.  In other societies you may be "protected" from ideas or texts that hurt your feelings -- but you might just as easily be silenced, to "protect" the delicate feelings of others.

Exactly where to draw the boundaries is another question, difficult and impossible to settle finally.  I concede the library's power to keep uncatalogued material off its shelves, but only as long as it welcomes an offensive range of opinions and positions into its official collection.  I was bothered, not by A's removal of the pamphlets, but by her self-righteousness about it.  As she replied to me, she was entitled to be annoyed by them; I agreed, but I was also entitled to disagree with her.

The Taste Test

I've seen this mentioned a couple of times in the past few days. Band of Thebes covered it yesterday. Some comedian published a calendar based on gay male stereotypes, and as a result of many complaints, both Amazon and Barnes and Noble have removed it from their sites. I agree with BoT:

The product is ignorant, unfunny, in bad taste, and steeped in tired stereotypes about effeminate men. It does not libel, defame, spew false facts, or incite violence. At heart, the problem appears to be the silly and mean-spirited attempts at humor are offensive to some people. We are in for a world of trouble if the criteria for removing a product is that some people say it fails their personal taste test. As with the Hide/Seek debacle, I think the best response against offensive work is to make one's case articulately, and shun it, but not censor it.

After all, a lot of material produced by gay men is silly, mean-spirited, unfunny, ignorant, and steeped in tired stereotypes about gay men, whether nelly or butch. Much of this same material is considered to be an integral and precious part of our heritage and culture. If tastelessness were the criterion for removing material from the market, every drag show in America would have to be shut down, along with Mr. International Leather contests. Queer as Folk could never have been cablecast. All the little storefronts in gay neighborhoods displaying t-shirts bearing the legend "This Face Seats Five" would have nothing to sell anymore. The works of Tom of Finland would have to be locked away -- and that would only be the beginning. I've got a little list ... Why, this very blog would at least be hidden behind a warning label that declares it potentially offensive and off-limits to readers under 18.

[P.S. Now that I've seen it, I can add that Ru Paul's Drag Race also is silly, mean-spirited, unfunny, ignorant, and steeped in tired stereotypes about gay men.]

People have such short memories. Just a couple of years ago there was a huge kerfluffle because the Amazon search engine wasn't returning any results for GLBTQ material, except for titles like A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. I'm not sure we ever found out what caused the problem, which was fixed in a few days. But many dark conspiratorial speculations went around: Amazon was hacked! Amazon was capitulating to pressure from antigay organizations! Amazon had secretly been antigay all along, but now it had revealed its sinister true colors! Boycott Amazon!!!!

I expect that now, many of the same people will trot out the same kinds of arguments that they rejected two years ago. Like this person, commenting at BoT:

The calendar has not been censored (no change or editing to it's offensive content). There was a market protest against it being sold in the public market. Good. I'm glad this happened like this. Did you want a calendar using the "n" word etc?

Oh, so much stupid in so little space! I'm a little in awe. First, censorship does not mean only "change or editing to it's offensive content": it also means suppressing material from being sold in the "public market", whether by legislation or publisher's or vendor's fiat. Would the commenter feel the same way if Amazon refused to sell, say, Heather Has Two Mommies after a "market protest"? Second, the proper "market" response to offensive material is not to buy it. You can even speak out against it, as BoT suggested, urging people not to buy it. Attempts at censorship have been known to backfire: I've heard that the banning of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791) made it a bestseller, because people who wouldn't have bothered before wanted to know what they weren't allowed to read. At the very least, censorship allows even the author of tacky, tasteless material to present himself as a martyr, and who wants to give Joe King that kind of status?

Finally, "Did you want a calendar using the n word etc?" the commenter asks indignantly, perhaps imagining that she has trumped every possible objection. Perhaps she doesn't realize how much material available on Amazon contains the "n word", especially hiphop music but probably a lot more than that: fiction by black authors, movies by black directors, at the very least. So, no, I didn't want a calendar with the "n word," but if someone wants to produce and sell one, that's their lookout. Depending on who made it, and for what kind of audience, I might denounce it, or I might not pay a lot of attention. A calendar analogous to King's, but deploying similar stereotypes about African-American males, I'd denounce, but I'd be inaudible in the chorus of denunciations it would inspire. A calendar featuring pinups of sculpted "thugs", for a black female or black gay audience, would be another story, even if it referred to them by the "n" word.

Did I want, say, a calendar using the d word? As a spinoff from her long-running comic strip, Alison Bechdel put out several Dykes to Watch Out For calendars in the 80s. I own most of them, along with all her books. The calendars are probably collectible by now. But I find that commenter's remarks offensive; I demand that they be removed from BoT forthwith! And that's not censorship, since no change or editing to it's [sic] offensive content is involved.

It's a Small World After All

I was poking around the web for information about Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's pamphlet Counter-Revolutionary Violence, which was suppressed by Warner Communications in 1973. Because of contractual obligations, Warner couldn't destroy the stock, so some copies were distributed; I read a copy from the university library in 1980. The full text is available online here.

It's not all that common for books to be suppressed in this way in the US, after they've already been printed and published. While I was looking for more information about Counter-Revolutionary Violence, I came across this account of the pressures that limit the range of material that's published in the US. Notice the phrase I put into boldface:

This understanding of the ideological limits of mainstream publishing firms is not far-fetched conspiracy theory. There have been instances in which books were refused publication for strictly ideological reasons. Such was the case with Counter-Revolutionary Violence, a critique of U.S. foreign policy by Herman and Chomsky that was to be published in 1973 by Warner Modular, Inc., a subsidiary of Warner Communications. According to Claude McCaleb, after Warner Publishing president William Sarnoff read an advance copy, he "immediately launched into a violent verbal attack . . . saying, among other things, that [Counter-Revolutionary Viloence] was a pack of lies, a scurrilous attack on respected Americans, undocumented, a publication unworthy of a serious publisher. . . . He then announced that he had ordered the printer not to release a single copy . . . and that the . . . [book] would not be published" (qtd. in Bagdikian 33-34). Sarnoff had ads for this book cancelled and the Warner catalog listing the Herman/Chomsky book and the entire 10,000 copy press run destroyed. Christopher Hitchens narrates the fate of Counter-Revolutionary Violence: "The twenty thousand copies might have been pulped if it were not for a legally binding contract. Instead they were sold to an obscure outfit named MSS Information Corporation, whereupon Warner . . . washed its hands of the entire deal and of all responsibility for advertising, promotion, and distribution." Similarly, in 1979, McGraw-Hill published Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran, an account of the overthrow of Iranian premier Mohammed Mossadegh written by former CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt. Roosevelt asserted that the coup had been undertaken at the behest of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Upon complaints from British Petroleum, successor to AIOC, McGraw-Hill recalled the book from stores and reviewers (Bagdikian 39). Another example of corporate pressure affecting a book’s publication is Marc Elliot’s Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince, signed by Bantam in 1989 and dropped in 1991. (It was eventually published by Birch Lane Press/Carol Publishing.) Jon Wiener speculates that Eliot’s book was killed because Bantam had contracted with Disney to publish children’s book versions of Disney movies (744).

As you can see, BP's unsavory history goes back quite a ways.