When Sarah Palin, as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, asked the town librarian about banning certain books from the collection, she claimed hers was merely a "policy discussion." Palin told the Anchorage Daily News at the time that this was "about understanding and following administration agendas."
Here's the real story. Palin wanted to ban books because "some voters" had complained about "inappropriate language" in them. She had, as the right-wingers like to say, "an agenda." She made this request about book banning on three separate occasions to the town librarian, Mary Ellen Baker.
Baker said she would not go along with a ban, that the collection had been carefully selected from national librarian guidelines. This was not about banning porno, which any public library would do. This was straight out of George Orwell—who was, one imagines, one of the authors that Wasilla's Junior Comstocks wanted to ban.
Because Baker didn't budge, Palin "terminated" her for not providing "full support" to the mayor's office. Due to public outcry at the time, Baker was rehired the next day. As far as can be determined, no books were actually banned. Given her love of John Birch literature, affiliation with a Creationist church, hatred of science and love of "aerial wolf gunning," one shudders to think what the approved reading list of a Palin administration would be.
This week (September 27 to October 4) is the perfect time to ponder such a terrifying prospect, as it's the 27th annual "Banned Books Week." Banned Books Week is sponsored by the?American Booksellers Association,?American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression,?American Library Association, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Association of American Publishers, and National Association of College Stores, and endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. Banned Book Week "celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one's opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular, and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them." As Orwell himself once wrote, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear."
In other words, we tolerate your wretched Left Behind series and Ayn Rand back catalog, so you must tolerate our Kurt Vonnegut and Toni Morrison (the latter two authors are among those most regularly banned or "challenged" in America, according to the ALA).
The Pioneer Valley has a grand tradition of fighting the banning of books. In fact, the first book banned in the New England colonies was written by William Pynchon, who founded Springfield.
In 1650, Pynchon published a religious tract which was given the decidedly un-sexy title The Meritorious Price of our Redemption, Justification & c. The book challenged Puritan doctrine, and he was accused of heresy. Adding to the hysteria, a day of "fasting and humiliation" was proclaimed to allow the residents of the Massachusetts Colony to think about how Satan had drawn "away some to the profession and practice of strange opinions."
For information about events planned to commemorate Banned Books Week throughout New England, check the American Library Association's website: www.ala.org/bbooks."
