Quelle société veut-on ?

Cormac Mac Carthy a écrit le roman le plus bouleversant de ces 20 dernières années, sur le lien entre le petit enfant et son parent déclinant, sur la peur viscérale de l’apocalypse, c’est “La Route”. Quelle tristesse, s’il n’est accessible qu’à un petit nombre…

I think that happened five years ago (at least). So really, book banning is already merely a ceremonial re-enactment of an old, time-dishonored ritual to celebrate a simpler and more willfully ignorant age.

Still, I think there’s a major difference between being disturbed and being truly damaged. And IMO the damage a book can cause (if any) is still going to be insignificant if compared to the ubiquitous constant onslaught of visual media using graphic imagery that leaves nothing to the imagination. At least you had to create the image of electrodes being attached to the character in the sf book you mentioned; on TV or in movies that image would’ve instantly appeared fully formed in your mind since it would’ve been depicted that way on the screen.

Besides, I don’t think most censorship advocates give a damn about kids’ minds anyway. I think they’re either just trying to strong-arm their belief system into other people’s heads or they’re desperately trying to maintain a doomed status quo and the actual kids are incidental.

Words that open minds are always the most threatening to the established order, but since totalitarianism is a parody of itself the book banners ironically save us the trouble of figuring out which books to read by putting them on the handy ‘ban’ list for us. It’s like the “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” labels on music; when that first came out I would seek out albums that had it over those that didn’t (I was kind of young at the time, and the stickers just screamed “forbidden fruit!” as they tend to to kids).

I gotta disagree with this, though. As a kid I didn’t have cable and we never rented violent movies so I was very sheltered from a lot of sex/violence/whatnot going on. What I did have was the public library, and the adult sci-fi section. Which apparently likes to throw in some graphic underage torture/rape scenes — those bothered me more than anything I’d ever seen before. One of the only books I’ve ever had to put down finally got me to quit when the kid started getting electrodes attached to him to make him more responsive… So yeah. To answer you and Andrew, I found some of that stuff pretty damaging as a kid. :p

Not that books like *that* are what get banned of course (and I don’t think they should be anyways) but books really can have more of an impact than “just a few written words” yanno?

And based on this *one* person’s complaint, it was expunged from the curriculum. Now that’s small-town Iowa for you…

Going to the sheriff and teacher suspension? Sounds like something Orwell would have written. But there is a lot of censorship that goes on at the purchasing level. Just try and find a library video/dvd about natural birth in Southern Ontario!

Most parents with a child who is 12 or older are delusional if they think their child hasn’t already seen it all. The kids will deny it (so will the parents) just like they’re supposed to so everyone can continue walking around pulling the wool over their own eyes about how fanatically degenerate the world has become.

Maybe a better approach would be to teach kids how to think critically about what they encounter rather than running ahead of them trying to throw black sheets over anything wicked, like nipples (Ashcroft took the lead on that one) or two men or two women holding hands, or criticisms of the Catholic Church?!? (huh? seriously? Since when is being “Anti-Catholic” a bad thing?).

Teaching kids how to deal with the world they actually live in instead of encapsulating them in the cramped, suffocating box of some hysterical Concerned Parent’s fear-based reality might just help them cope with this increasingly insane society. Don’t worry about Junior reading a library book about real or fictional characters having sex (even if it’s gay sex); Junior has most likely already seen plenty of double-fisted necro-bestial bukkake so I think Junior’s parents and teachers should be thrilled that Junior went into a library at all for something other than internet access. So it’s, like, whatever.

I’ll never forget the Banned Books Week poster in the library; in a time in which everything else in my world was censored, transparently commercial, or dumbed-down, the list on that poster was my lifeline. Like any adolescent, I wanted to know everything that “the man” seemed to say I shouldn’t, and my access to all those books too controversial for the classroom gave me the push to be the most well-read kid in class.

No 8th grade teacher would dream of assigning a book like “Another Country,” or even “The Color Purple,” but as a 14-year-old queer black kid, those books meant a lot more to me than anything served up in the classroom. When teachers were pleased my term papers, it wasn’t because anyone had bothered to teach me how to write, but rather because I’d learned to love modern prose from reading the age-inappropriate books that appealed to my curiosities. Imagine teaching “Lolita” or “Portnoy’s Complaint” to precocious youngsters – who tend to love both – and it seems like a very bad idea…but then imagine modern lit without them, and it seems even worse. And while the literary value of those works is undisputed, there’s still an enormous lost opportunity in graphic novels, by and large absent from schools, but well-loved by the brainy kids who find them.

Most kids, unfortunately, won’t take any kind of refuge in books, often because the most exhilarating, sexy, and fiery ones have been subtly withheld from them. With those on-campus libraries, schools have the chance to nudge kids toward the literary equivalent of all the hyper-sexual and violent media they’re bound to consume anyway, and maybe they’ll have a better chance of joining that small number of kids who graduate high school at adult reading level.

But anyone is welcome to convince me otherwise…just tell me how you were damaged for life by reading a grown-up book too young!