A Love Letter to Libraries

They're one of the few signs our species is worth saving...

To the untrained eye – especially if that eye needs reading glasses – the way a Republican gets elected these days is to show he’s more radical and unreasonable and batshit crazy than the next guy (unless the next guy is named Hitler and hangs around beer halls and then it would be a tie) and right here in Missouri we have a candidate for governor who posted a video of himself with a flamethrower burning cardboard boxes which sounds like really overdoing it when it comes to cardboard box disposal.

But according to The Human Torch of Missouri Politics, the boxes represented leftist policies and RINO corruption in the state capital and even though the boxes were actually empty the candidate said he’d be happy to burn the real “woke pornographic” books used to brainwash school kids on the governor’s mansion lawn if we’d just elect him and give him the opportunity and a military-grade flame thrower.  

Wait, that last sentence is a little confusing.

The kids aren’t being brainwashed on the governor’s mansion lawn (according to Johnny Storm – and yes, that’s a Fantastic Four reference – they’re being brainwashed in Missouri schools which means Missouri schools are way more efficient than I previously thought) the “woke pornographic” books would be burned on the governor’s mansion lawn, so my bad, but a little confusion is understandable when you’re trying to describe the ball of snakes in some dimwitted GOP candidate’s head.

OK, so some fruitcake politician is begging for attention by acting radical in a Midwest state most people ignore unless they happen to look out an airliner window as they fly over it.

If you don’t live here, how does that affect you?

Glad you asked because according to the Kansas City Star, the American Library Association has seen a big increase in requests to ban books and in 2022 they had more book-banning requests than ever and the vast majority of offensive books were written by people of color or the LGBTQIA+ community and don’t ask me what all those letters stand for because they keep adding letters when I’m not looking, but I’m almost positive the “+” is a cover your ass addition in case some overlooked group gets pissed off that they didn’t get their own letter.

Anyway…

Politically-correct labeling aside, what ought to concern you is that 58% of the banning requests involve books used in schools and arguing about what’s age appropriate seems legitimate, but 41% of the banning requests involve books in public libraries. (No idea what happened to that unaccounted-for 1%.)

One more time for the people in the back row…

Some nutjobs with a King James Bible shoved up their butts want to tell you what you can and can’t read and some of the books they want banned are classics like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Handmaid’s Tale and Brave New World.

Never mind that checking out a book at a Public Library is totally voluntary and nobody is making anyone do it; the Conservative Thought Police object to these books (and you’ve gotta assume they haven’t read them because they believe reading them will rot what’s left of their minds) so they don’t want you reading them either.

BTW: For a little while here in Kansas City we had some whacko on an anti-pornography crusade so the Star’s Editorial Board invited him in to hear his arguments because we could always use a good laugh. By the time we got done hearing all the disgusting stuff he’d seen while looking at pornography I pointed out that even though I had no objections to pornography as long as the participants were consenting adults, as someone who claimed to despise pornography he’d still managed to see way more of it than I had.

But I think we have to give him credit for being brave enough to throw himself on a huge pile of pornography to prevent the rest of us from seeing all the disgusting things he’d forced himself to look at, so it was kinda like those war movies where one guy jumps on a hand grenade to save his buddies except in this case the hand grenade was two hot chicks doing things most of us wouldn’t think were anatomically possible.

OK, we seem to have gotten a little off track here and as usual I blame you and your unhealthy interest in anecdotes involving naked women and reading material.   

And now back to libraries

My dad died when I was seven years old and my mom just had a baby so things were pretty grim around my house, but the Rocklin, California Public Library was a short walk away and I was a regular visitor and that’s where I discovered books like Treasure Island and The Three Mouseketeers and The Count of Monty Crisco all of which I enjoyed even if I didn’t always get the titles right.

I spent hours and hours and hours reading because it allowed me to escape into other, more interesting worlds because the one I lived in wasn’t so hot and my mom once told me she pretty much ignored me because I was always reading a book and seemed to be OK and her other kids were busy setting the house on fire.

My mom ignoring me partially explains my insatiable need for attention and that’s also why this blog exists so if you don’t like what I have to say here, I suggest you blame my mom.

I know I will.

After all, I left home at 18 so I’ve only had five short decades to become a different and better person which I’m clearly incapable of doing, so like a lot of people I’m going to keep blaming my mother for stuff that happened when I was nine years old and forces me to keep acting like an asshole even though I now have one foot in the grave and the other one on a roller skate.

In any case…

At some point it dawned on me that if you didn’t read books the only experiences you could learn from were your own and if you hung out with people of the same color and same economic class with the same politics, you could fool yourself into believing everybody with any common sense thinks the same way, but when my mom recently said “everybody’s the same” I said I could 100% guarantee her that wasn’t true and she only thought that because at 98 she knows a total of six people and four of them are dead.

In my opinion, it’s healthy to be exposed to other people and different ideas even though they might make you temporarily uncomfortable. Growing and changing is often unpleasant which is why so many people refuse to do it.

A book that expanded my mind about what other people experienced was Black Like Me published in 1961 and written by John Howard Griffin, a White Guy who dyed his skin dark and traveled through the Deep South to see what racial prejudice was like from a Black Man’s point of view.

Turns out, it sucked.

Also, in the early book-reading memory file: I vaguely remember somewhere around fourth or fifth grade I was reading A Tale of Two Cities and my teacher asked me to read a page to her and I thought she must really want to hear the story because maybe she hadn’t read the book herself and only years later realized she was checking to see if I could read at that level because she didn’t trust me or the book report I turned in so screw her and the blackboard she rode in on.

Google A Tale of Two Cities and one of the frequently asked questions is what’s the book’s moral and if there’s anything I learned from Sydney Carton it’s don’t let someone cut off your head just because you dig some chick. Yes, heartbreak definitely stinks, but it’s not like some of your heartier STDs; you eventually get over it. Also, meeting another chick ASAP helps.

That lesson alone is well worth wading through 448 pages of Charles Dickens’ 19^th Century prose.

But “enough about me” even though my mom’s parenting makes that extremely unlikely

OK, so I read a lot of books which would be way more impressive if I actually read great literature and semi-recently a friend I share books with remarked we had pretty much worked our way through all the fun stuff and if we lived too long we might be forced to start reading the “classics.”

I’ve got a big pile of unread books and Moby Dick is just lurking in the pile’s depths, waiting for me to summon up the will to read 427 pages about an albino whale with a shitty attitude.

Unfortunately, I agree with Mark Twain when he said a classic is a book that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

In any case, whatever the literary level, I never go anywhere without a paperback book because when you have a book you’re never bored so waiting for a restaurant table or a plane to arrive means you get to enjoy a great book like Elmore Leonard’s The Bounty Hunters in which a dickish cavalry officer with a secret to hide sends two men out to track down a renegade Indian in hopes they’ll both get killed which would be a big boost to his career.  

Hijinks ensue.

I got The Bounty Hunters from the Kansas City Library and I visit the local branch almost every day to pick up or return books and/or movies and here’s what I have to say about that:

Read enough science fiction novels or watch enough sci-fi movies and you’ll eventually run across a plot where really advanced aliens (they all recycle and drive Teslas) come to Earth and have to decide if Humanity is worth saving or they ought to wipe us out and start over again with an Intergalactic Start-Your-Own-Species Ant Farm.

Apparently, what with our wars and genocides and Adam Sandler being considered a movie star, Humanity’s Permanent Record doesn’t look so hot.

But on Humanity’s plus side there’s stuff like Don Larsen’s Perfect Game, Starry Night by Vincent Van Went, Rocky Road ice cream and the Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows which blew everybody’s mind in 1966 because back then a lot of people hadn’t heard Indian music or drones and were freaked out by the idea that a song could hit a chord and just keep hitting it because Western music mostly went somewhere – up and down, chorus and verse, beginning and end – and this drone-based song sounded a lot like being high felt which was totally intentional.

Tomorrow Never Knows was also one of the first examples of “sampling” which is using bits of tape from other sources (the “seagulls” are the manipulated sound of Paul McCartney laughing) and parts of the instrumental break is Paul’s Taxman guitar solo, slowed down and played backwards so you know the Beatles were smoking some really good shit and just in case you’ve forgotten how awesome this song is, here you go:

Those Tesla-driving aliens might listen to this and think OK, based on that achievement you guys get one more chance and also on the positive side of the Humanity’s Ledger would be one of our finest achievements:

Public Libraries.

That Humanity had the impulse to share knowledge and entertainment and not charge anything for it might mean we’re still worth having around even though about 7/8ths of us are pretty busy fucking up the Universe and doing stupid shit like getting attention by burning cardboard boxes with flamethrowers.

So in closing let me sum up:

Support Your Local Library Because It Might Save Us From Alien Extinction and Don’t Vote for Morons Who Want to Burn Books.

(Man, that’s never going to fit on a T-Shirt.)

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