Posted on 09/25/2014 12:26:51 PM PDT by EveningStar
If you read the article you’ll find a link to a letter that Kurt Vonnegut wrote to a school board after they banned and burned his book Slaughterhouse 5. Very cool:
November 16, 1973
Dear Mr. McCarthy:
I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.
Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.
I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?
I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.
If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.
After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.
I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.
If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.
Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.
Kurt Vonnegut
Ban all l Ron Hubbard books so Travolta can’t make anymore stupid sci-fi movies.
Was he the character in the heavy metal movie?
Taking a book off of a mandatory reading list is not a question of censorship, but of sponsorship. If a book is offensive to parents, that is reason enough that it should not be made mandatory.
The parents are morally responsible for their children's education: they have a right as well as a duty to determine the content of the educational program. Moreover, the parents are paying for the education; they ought to control the product they are buying.
"To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."
Vonnegut was assigned to the 106th Infantry Division, a green unit that took up a wide position on the front just before the Battle of the Bulge. Two of its regiments disintegrated as the Germans rolled over them. Vonnegut was taken a prisoner and sent to Dresden.
“Young people are not that fragile”
Isn’t that the truth-and leave it up to parents-if I hadn’t wanted my kid reading a book she got at the library, I’d just have taken it from her, just as my parents did, until about the age of 14 when I could make my own reading decisions.
That did not, however keep me from taking Peyton Place from my schoolteacher mom’s nightstand drawer in the hour between when I got home from school and when she did-or when she and my dad were out for the evening and the sitter was watching TV. I was 9 or 10, and careless with my bookmarker, and got busted-my mom asked me very casually if I understood what I had read, and I said not really, and she told me if I didn’t understand it I had no business reading it. I was shamed into not taking out the book again-but a few months later, I helped myself to Tropic of Cancer when she was reading it, and after that another detailed adult novel about some Italian businessman who was a womanizer...
I don’t think I’ve been emotionally scarred or anything like that by my exposure to adult-themed books at an inappropriate age...
Anybody who moves to ban Fahrenheit 451 deserves to be taunted.
Upon actually reading the article, you come to the conclusion the reason for the banning of said book had really very little to do with what was actually in the content of said book. This would be akin to a DUmper never coming to Freerepublic and wanting it banned because this website was against free speech and democracy. We see this attitude taken with other ideological demographies as well such as talk radio (especially left vs right-wing radio).
Anytime you tell anyone, not just a kid, not to do this or that, more times than naught they are going to want to do it. As I like to say, People are People. Over half those books shouldn’t be banned for the reason they were asked to be banned simply because the complainer never read the book.
Some of the comments were also engagingly interesting to say the least.
“By calling it “banned” and promoting it as banned, it makes kids want to read it.”
And when, exactly has that ever been any different at any time in human history? The banned, forbidden, or adults-only stuff has always attracted curious kids-it is just human nature-might as well try to stop the rain or the rotation of the earth...
I think it is better for parents to communicate with kids openly-answer all their questions, and don’t make them afraid to tell you anything-that way they don’t fall into the wrong hands...
Shiny!
Yes indeed.
Hey, was Den voiced by John Candy?
“Ban a book for all to see makes one reader, three”
Italian proverb.
CC
What’s different is that the school system is now an active participant in deliberately using the “banned” label to promote interest among kids.
The books are no longer “banned”, and in some cases never really were. But the school system is promoting the books to kids as “banned” books in order to get them to read them.
They could ban 451 Fahrenheit.....
Some say the Wizard of Oz himself was based on Bryan.
Interesting...
I was just visiting my cousin in Boston and we went to an book store and I joked about where the "Banned in Boston" shelves were. All I drew were very blank looks - I'm too old for that college town section of Boston that we were in. It is a shame, I think that publisher went to great lengths to get that award for the sales it gave them! Now Boston is probably the complete opposite in social mores!
Yyyep. David Ellis Norman (Den) was voiced by John Candy.
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