Books Banning—the New/Old Plot Twist
Under the category of everything old is new again, along with bell bottoms and fuzzy bucket hats, we must include that famous adage, the pen is mightier than the sword. Apparently.
If you didn’t know, this phrase comes from the historical play Cardinal Richelieu, written by novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1849. (Bulwer-Lytton, ironically enough for a name most of us can’t remember, wrote another extraordinarily famous line: “It was a dark and stormy night....” The line appeared in the opening of his 1830 play, Paul Clifford.)
But back to the other play, Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII, discovers there is a plot to kill him, but as a priest he is unable to take up arms against his enemies. What to do? His page, Francois, points out: But now, at your command are other weapons, my good Lord. And Richelieu agrees: The pen is mightier than the sword.... Take away the sword; States can be saved without it!
And there we have the core of the argument sweeping into far too many corners of this country. What books should we allow into our libraries, our curriculums? And what books should be banned? What books are so mighty that we need to shut them away so their impression cannot be seen or felt?
Right now, nearly half the states in America have some form of censorship bills on their table.
Tiffany Justice, a former school board member in Indian River County, Florida, and a founder of Moms for Liberty, was quoted in the NY Times saying, “The bottom line is if parents are concerned about something, politicians need to pay attention.” Ms. Justice added, “2022 will be a year of the parent at the ballot box.”
Just look to Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. He rode this issue right through the front door of the Governor’s Mansion.
According to Rebecca Knuth, author of Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century and Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction, “A lot of ancient book burning was a function of conquest,” Knuth says, citing the destruction of the magnificent Library of Alexandria in 48 BC when Caesar chased Pompey to Egypt.
But then came the printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440, and with it, came a seismic shift. Now, not only were there far more books, there was also far more access to knowledge.
So as the printing press ushers in the Enlightenment era, we see that if knowledge is power, then public access to knowledge is a threat to, well, the private powerful. Whether in an “authoritarian regime,” or just a mom afraid her child might “catch the gay.”
And now the unifying factor between all types of purposeful book-burners in the 20th century, (and their book banning advocates), Knuth says, is that the perpetrators feel like victims, even if they’re the ones in power.
The amazing, celebratory, just-reported news of where we, the LGBTQ community, stand today is: 7.1 percent of US adults identify as part of us! That number is double the figure from 2012, when Gallup first began measuring it.
So, if we go with the majority needing to suppress a minority, it explains why George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, and Alex Gino’s George (now retitled Melissa), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, are living in the crosshairs. Yes, we have climbed publicly to seven percent of the population, and yet 50 percent of books being banned center around an LGBTQ character and/or characters of color. Hmmmm.…
When Donald Trump became president, I wrote a column saying it was all about the justices. And looking at the Supremes, it was sadly prescient.
It was only 1982 when the US Supreme Court, in Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School v Pico, ruled that local school boards may not remove books from shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.
But these are different justices.
And different times. While banning books in our era of internet is almost absurd, it still serves to punish teachers and librarians, narrowing curriculum, until ultimately, possibly, delegitimizing public schools.
Author Barbara Tuchman said in her 1980 address at the Library of Congress, “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.”
I say without books, so many of our LGBTQ community would not have survived to rise up and be counted. Maybe that’s the point. ▼
Stefani Deoul is a television producer and author of the award-winning YA mystery series Sid Rubin Silicon Alley Adventures, with On a LARP, Zero Sum Game, and Say Her Name.