The Book Banners

In which we ask if Dr. Dolittle was demon-possessed…

According to the internet the 15 most-commonly banned books in schools include:

• To Kill a Mockingbird

• Of Mice and Men

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• The Catcher in the Rye

• 1984

• The Color Purple

• Animal Farm

• Catch-22

• The Great Gatsby

• Brave New World

And pretty much any book that has words like “gender” or queer” or “gay” or “Little Richard” in the title.

It’s amazing how many Conservatives are willing to tell you homosexuality is abhorrent and repugnant while simultaneously thinking it’s such an attractive lifestyle that anyone who reads about it is immediately going to start dressing like Ru Paul and lip-synching to “It’s Raining Men” at the first opportunity.

As Shakespeare would have said if he lived long enough:

“Methinks thou dost protest too much and maybe thou havest some urges thee don’t want anyone else to know about, which thou mightest get away with right up until thee get caught handing out blowjobs in an airport men’s room.”

Feel free to disagree and I’m sure some of you will, but I believe a lot of homophobia is based on the fear that you just might be a homosexual yourself or at least have occasional homosexual urges and you don’t want to think about that, so you ban anything that reminds you that you found one or more members of The Village People kinda hot.

If you’re not afraid a book or a drag show or a Brad Pitt movie will turn you gay, why would you care what two dudes and/or dudettes get up to?

Think about it: if two guys are gay, that at least theoretically means there are two more women available for straight guys (which sounds like a good thing if you’re actually a straight guy) and it’s just that kind of insightful male logic that makes gay women sure they’ve made the right choice.

And don’t tell me you’re opposed to homosexuality because the Bible says it’s wrong unless you follow every other rule in the Bible (and there are some really strange ones) so if you wear clothes made out of two different kinds of material or enjoy the occasional BLT or you sit where a menstruating woman has previously sat, then you’re just picking and choosing the rules you like and ignoring the ones that make you uncomfortable or seem like a pain in the ass.

(OK, there’s an off-color joke available here and I think we should all ignore the opportunity and move on.)

Now here’s an article that lists some of the weirder rules from the Bible that we all ignore while simultaneously claiming the Bible is our Owner’s Handbook and Guide for Living a Christian Life:

https://nextluxury.com/interesting/weird-rules-in-the-bible/

It seems to me if you were to put together a list of books everyone should read by the time they graduate high school, the above list of banned books would be a pretty good start.  

But wait, there’s more.

While reading about banned books I came across an item that said a group of parents in Kansas also wanted to ban Charlotte’s Web because it deals with death and the main characters are talking animals.

I’m guessing those parents were Christians and you’d think dealing with death is way up there on the Christian To-Do List, but let’s move on to the second part of their objection because I have more jokes about it.

The parents argued that talking animals are “unnatural and blasphemous as human’s are the highest level of God’s creation” a position which seems to indicate they haven’t watched even one Tag Team Steel Cage Death Match because I’m pretty sure after watching Haystack Calhoun put the Sleeper Hold on Flying Red Bastien (and I’m really mixing up my half-remembered professional wrestling names and terminology here) they’d be hard pressed to continue insisting human beings are at the very top of the Best Shit God Created List.

Fortunately for kids who want to read good books, the LPA (Lunatic Parent’s Association) did not prevail in their efforts to ban a children’s classic, so the misguided parents immediately left the school board meeting, drove a rusted-out van to Orlando, Florida and burned Mickey Mouse at the stake.

Also…

If talking animals are verboten I would have missed out on Saturday morning Warner Brothers cartoons and if you’re looking for the highest level of God’s creation you could do a lot worse than watching Elmer Fudd sing “Kill da wabbit!” to the music of Richard Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries in the classic cartoon, What’s Opera, Doc?

If you’ve never seen it and don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a video and I can pretty much guarantee you won’t spend a more enjoyable two minutes and 11 seconds all day:  

According to the following article at least two states have also banned the dictionary because it had “inappropriate entries” and let’s hope those two states didn’t take a look at medical textbooks because anything about South of the Border medical issues would have been redacted and being a gynecologist would involve a lot of guesswork, coin flips and a wide variety of spelunking equipment.

Ban parts of medical textbooks because they’re “inappropriate” and this might be what a prostate exam would look like.

While growing up in an overly-religious household (which oddly enough didn’t seem to do all that much to cut down on our family sinning) I was warned about the dangers of being over-educated and as an adult belatedly realized my mom and our church’s pastor were worried about people being “over-educated” because if you read too many books and learned too much about the world you might not buy into the religious bullshit they were handing out by the bucketful.   

https://readingpartners.org/blog/five-more-childrens-books-you-didnt-know-were-banned/

While it’s easy to pick on Conservatives (which is about 92% of why I do it) some Overly-Politically Correct Liberals are also at fault because they want to prove how “woke” they are by banning Huckleberry Finn for using the N-word which ignores the fact that Mark Twain used it to make a point and the most noble character in the entire book is Jim.

As the following essay points out (it’s actually pretty interesting and worth reading) Huckleberry Finn can be a difficult book to teach because so many people struggle to understand irony and sarcasm and I’d explain the difference between the two, but there’s really no need because on so many occasions The American Public has already demonstrated its brilliance when it comes to grasping subtleties.

(I’m not sure if that last part was “irony” or “sarcasm” and I’d look up the difference in a dictionary if they weren’t banned.)     

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/teachers/huck/essay.html#

OK, so where were we?

Right, I originally intended to explain the cartoon at the top of this rant, which makes the point that Conservatives and Republicans want to protect America’s children from words and ideas, but not bullets.

It may have already come to your attention that the World As We Know It is ending and the polar ice caps are melting and penguins are vacationing in Acapulco and Killer Whales are forming motorcycle gangs and most of Canada is on fire and the smoke is and/or was drifting into the United States.

Which had and/or has (depending on when I get around to posting this) a bunch of people freaked out and as I point out in the cartoon above, when it comes to a polluted atmosphere by now we should be used to it.   

There are ideas and concepts that are pretty unrealistic that we seem to like anyway and one of them is the idea that a regular-old person with common sense can do better than the experts. That’s the plot in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (regular guy becomes a Congressman) and Dave (regular guy becomes president) and Little Big League (a regular 12-year-old guy becomes owner and manager of the Minnesota Twins).

While my experience with the inside workings of Congress and the White House are somewhat limited I can tell you with extreme confidence if a 12-year-old tried to tell Big League ballplayers what to do, he’d find himself upside down in a whirlpool or taped to a dugout support pole.

That’s three-time Cy Young winner and Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez taped to a Fenway dugout pole so just imagine what the Red Sox would do to a snotty seventh grader.

Anyway…

I have friends who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 while under the misimpression that maybe a regular guy could do something about the mess in Washington, D.C. which might have worked in Dave, but if there’s anything we should have learned by now it’s that Donald Trump is not a “regular guy.”

He’s a rich kid who pulled himself up by his father’s bootstraps and then grew up to be a vain, pompous, not-particularly-bright sexist egomaniac who is obsessed with himself and his feuds with minor celebrities.

The evidence indicates that Donald Trump liked being president mostly because it forced people to listen to him when tweeted his opinions, like the time he told the world the Vanity Fair publisher’s Oscar Party was no longer “hot.”

I did not make that example up, so while you were worried about climate change, racism, sexism, the economy and male pattern baldness, Donald Trump was worrying about Oscar parties and being pretty bitchy about it.

Bottom line: if you voted for Trump in 2016 maybe you get a pass because you didn’t know what he was like and how he would behave, but if you vote for him in 2024 you know exactly what he’s like and how he’s going to behave and you’re voting for him anyway, which in my opinion, makes you a dumbbell.

Unless…

You’re a stand-up comedian or late-night talk show host or political cartoonist and vote for Trump because you need the high-quality comedy material he provides on a daily basis.

Or…

You’re stinking rich and hope he gives you another one of those tax breaks you don’t need.

OK, lately I’ve been posting an entire week’s worth of cartoons and writing about the logic and/or bias involved in their creation, but as he tends to do, lately Donald Trump has dominated the news and I’ve got waaaaaay too much Trump material right now so I’m going to stop here and make base camp and rest up for my final assault on the summit which will happen whenever I get around to it.

In the meantime, if you decide to watch a Dr. Dolittle movie – and if the internet is right you’ve got seven of them to choose from because Hollywood has clearly run out of ideas – you might need an exorcism afterwards.  

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/