Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock
Dragging books through the mud
Friday, Sept. 16, 2005: I have not written a Brick for more than week because the two subjects I wanted to hit seemed overdone. What could I write about Katrina? Nothing particularly valuable, though I will return to it. Also, I’ve heard from all sides about a local topic, how accessible should books with sex in them be for children of all ages. Overnight, I found an angle on the latter topic.
My Second Fight with an Editor, by Mister Boo
(Mister Boo was my dad’s pet name for me.) The short version of this memoir segment.
For being an excellent English student in eighth grade, I was named to the ninth-grade-only staff of the Rampage, the newspaper of Ramsey Junior High in Fort Smith.
We all were reporters, and we edited one another, yet supervised and ultimately edited by Sylvia Carl, an English teacher who could have been drawn by Gary Larson in a Far Side cartoon, down to her beehive, eyeglasses and personality. (I reinvented my signature during one slack Rampage hour. When Mrs. Carl told me it looked “immature,” I resolved to use that signature forever.)
We staffers also shared editorial-page work. At some point I appointed myself letters-to-the-editor editor. One sort of missive came more than any other, by many times over, and it usually read, “Why can’t we have a smoking area outside, like in senior high?” (This was over 30 years ago.) Some were signed, many not, and some were in the form of petitions.
Mrs. Carl forbade any of those letters from running. That was our fight. I opposed smoking (yet I had just begun experimenting with a pipe and Capt. Black tobacco) and certainly opposed a school tacitly allowing it, yet I still was certain that censorship was un-American. We comprised into my reporting on the issue, and the article ran.
From studying policies and talking to someone in administration I wrote that the First Amendment did not apply to children, even teenagers, and thus neither the administration nor the Board ever would consider student petitions on any matter. I learned the Law backed the school district on this.
I recall this because the Fayetteville School District has a First Amendment controversy.
On Thursday, the School Board voted 4-3 (sorry, hyperlink to this article now is corrupt) to allow three titles that were at the top of a list opposed by a local mother (her list came from a national group’s Web site) to remain in school libraries with no restrictions. She said she’d be happy with the books not removed, just available with parental permission. She thus lost that compromise. The majority apparently agreed with the argument that the First Amendment does apply to children and schools.
These titles are”birds-and-bees” non-fiction. I ran them through Amazon.com — not the original Web site — and found they explained sex and related matters of growing up in contemporary and explicit language.
Other books on the mother’s list — and why these didn’t come up before the board I don’t yet know — are novels by among others Nobel Literature Prize winners Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The objections concerned passages of explicit, violent and-or otherwise taboo sexuality.
A local, experienced columnist, who essentially always hews the liberal Democratic line, endorsed the mother. While I don’t have a problem with school libraries limiting their collections, Mike never mentioned how honored some of these books were; he just hinted at their raunchiness.
Mike would’ve had a persuasive argument identifying titles and authors, saying these are adult books, wonderful fictional stories, but certainly not for children, meaning all but the oldest teenagers. I don’t understand why he didn’t. I wonder why he chose to mis-estimate his readers.
Yet, I resent people I’ve heard (first-hand, but I didn’t take notes and names because this is a blog not reportage), who call this a violation of the First Amendment.
Children, I learned at the Rampage, don’t fall under the First (and if I was publishing this, I’d rely on facts not memory). That for example Morrison’s extraordinary ghost story Beloved is available for all interested students anywhere but perhaps their own school library does not seem a hindrance and does not seem like a First Amendment violation.
There are libraries, retail and used bookstores, your parents’ shelves, your friends’ parents’ shelves, and Amazon and the rest of the Internet. 2005 is far different from the early 1970s in terms of how much knowledge and literature is available openly and on the sly. Titillation for its own sake, too.
Maybe my vague views remain because as good as the Fort Smith public school system was, despite Mrs. Carl and my needing to take pre-calculus in college, I never bothered with any dorky school library after grade school. My bicycle automatically knew how to get to the city library.
A partial list of my teenage reading: Orwell (there’s a little steam in 1984, poor Winston), Heller, Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, Baldwin, Hesse — all of which had some or a lot of sex — and Tolkien (no sex, we’re hobbits). I read these constantly: at home, in the bleachers instead of phys ed, and in boring classes, with the books tucked in front of textbooks.
Look how I turned out, still using an immature signature. -30-
