I live in Springfield, Missouri. Republic isn’t exactly one of our suburbs, but it is the next town over, and just a few minutes away if I should want to visit. My brother used to live there, before moving to St. Louis. So I feel a little remiss in not having commented on the Republic school decision to remove two novels from their libraries in the wake of a Fundamentalist MSU professor objecting to their inclusion.
Cory Doctorow posted about the whole thing earlier today on BoingBoing. Essentially, this professor objected to the books being available on the basis that he feels they are inappropriate for young people to read. He was able to get two out of the three books to which he objected removed from the school library and curriculum.
I find it regrettable he did so, and brought another black eye to my geographical region. (Not that most people here would particularly mind, I suppose. If we’re not the buckle of the Bible Belt, we’re at least the first belt loop.) But it occurred to me today that this sort of removal is not necessarily the evil it might have been in bygone days. Indeed, thanks to the Streisand Effect, it might actually end up being counterproductive from that professor’s point of view.
After all, today the world is electronic. If a school student starts wondering just what it is about these books that this Fundy doesn’t want them reading, all they have to do is type “Slaughterhouse Five” into Amazon and find it’s available for less than $5 for them to read instantaneously. Or if they don’t even have that much money, they could Google “Slaughterhouse Five torrent”. (And, of course, it will still be available from public libraries, too.) All that MSU professor is really doing now is saying to students, “I feel like I’m better-qualified than you are to judge what you should be reading, and I don’t want you reading this.” It’s been a while since I was a kid, but I seem to recall I wouldn’t have responded well to that kind of thing at that age.
Even Mark Twain recognized that the surest way to get someone to do something was to tell them you didn’t want them doing it. I feel confident that a number of Republic-area teens are just about to discover Slaughterhouse Five (and the other book Republic banned, Sarah Ockler’s Twenty Boy Summer), for themselves in a way they would not have if the books had not been removed from the libraries.
“That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.” — Heinrich Heine, 1821 Yes, I know no books have been burned in this particular case. But anytime a group starts defining an “other” and decide to go after things that they believe define that other, things can get nasty. Definitely agree with article, though…nothing would get me to read a book like some self-appointed guardian of morality trying to keep me from doing so. What’s even more amusing is that a central idea of Slaughterhouse Five is “war is idiotic”; certainly wouldn’t want impressionable high school students (AKA cannon fodder) to get a hold of THAT idea.