Louisiana Voice

Something happened in my adopted home town of Denham Springs yesterday that gave me reason for hope and optimism – on two fronts.

There was a book signing party at Cavalier House Books right up the street from where I live for the debut of That Librarian, the story of the trials and travails encountered when one attempts to defend the very bedrock of our First Amendment.

The book is authored by AMANDA JONES, a local librarian who once had the temerity to speak out in opposition to censorship, a stand that brought down the wrath of self-appointed guardians of community morals and purity – their own self-imposed standards of morality and purity, by the way – a position that resulted in threats to her physical safety, threats made by cowards hiding behind computer keyboards.

The two very tangible factors that gave me so much optimism that there yet is hope for the exercise of freedom in a great nation is the fact that (a) independent book stores like Cavalier’s can still exist in an ever-burgeoning corporate world where nothing matters but the bottom line and (b) our community can still turn out en masse to demonstrate its dedication to the principles espoused in the aforementioned First Amendment.

For those of you who have not kept current on the growing threat to public libraries, there is an obscure outfit called Citizens for a Better Louisiana, led by a Michael Lunsford of St. Martin Parish, both of whom are most probably funded by some out-of-state self-righteous Republican outfit, whose sole mission it is to wreak havoc among library boards and their governing agencies (parish councils and police juries) in an effort to purge libraries of anything to do with inclusion, empathy or real, authentic history.

Here are just a few EXAMPLES OF BOOK TITLES that these extremists would prohibit you from reading at your local library:

• Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
• The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
• Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
• Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
• Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
• The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
• Charlotte’s Webb, by E.B. White
• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
• The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
• 1984, by George Orwell
• The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
• Animal Farm, by Geore Orwell
• The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
• As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
• A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
• Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
• The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
• All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
• In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
• The Naked and he Dead, by Norman Mailer
• An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser

To Kill a Mockingbird? Seriously? All the King’s Men, by a former LSU professor? Really? Hemingway? Faulkner? Sinclair? Orwell? Steinbeck? Are you kidding me?

The Jungle, for those of you who may be unfamiliar, is about the horrible conditions at America’s meat packing plants in the early 20^th century. The book brought about wholesale changes in both worker safety and a crackdown on the sale of spoiled meat to consumers. So, why the hell would anyone want to censor or ban such a book? Because it reflects poorly on corporate America, that’s why, and we just can’t have that, can we?

And they have the audacity to accuse librarians of grooming? The same people who push through laws mandating the posting of the Ten Commandments in Louisiana classrooms and who require the teaching of the Bible in Oklahoma schools? Just who is grooming whom here?

But here’s the real irony: I’m old enough to remember when these same people raised holy hell when Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and Little Black Sambo were objected to by civil rights groups because of their overtly racist themes (though history has shown that Mark Twain was never a racist and like the singer Randy Newman, he employed racist vernacular to make a point). Little Black Sambo, though – Yeah, that was racist on so many levels.

But as usual, I digress. Jones was anything but defensive in her interview with Cavalier’s co-owner Michelle Cavalier. Quite the contrary. She was outgoing, friendly and basically, just charmed those who turned out for her party. She opened by categorically denying that her book was self-published (though there’s nothing wrong with that) or that she used money donated to her legal defense fund to finance said self-published work (just another example of the level to which some will stoop when they’re both ignorant and bigoted). She said the outcry over what Citizens for a New Louisiana was attempting and her staunch opposition to their intrusion resulted in her being recruited by a literary agent (something we other authors can only dream of) and that her book was published by the same publishing company (Bloomsbury) that published the best-selling Harry Potter series. Folks, that ain’t self-publishing – not by a long shot.

She followed that by asserting unequivocally that “no library is pushing pornography onto children as some would have you believe.”

You’d never know it by listening to some of our parish council members and the governing boards of other libraries across the state who are hell-bent on stacking local library boards with their hand-picked censorship ogres. They probably haven’t set foot in a library in years.

But the turnout at Cavalier’s for Amanda’s book gives me hope for the future.