Friday, June 5, 2009

Bibliophobia: A Burning Passion

I don't know if it is because they are afraid of equality, they can't stand having an African American President, or that they are just experiencing mass psychosis, but the right wingers have shown a lot of asocial and maladaptive behaviors of late.

We have seen people that feel an irrational need to wear a gun while doing their gardening. This led to a group of people wanting to have a picnic where the main attraction was taking literal potshots at the potato salad.

Then in West Bend, we had people that felt threatened by a book and wanted to limit the public's accessibility to it. This bibliophobia is apparently contagious.

Jason Haas alerts us to another group of fascists that are even more unhinged than the first batch:
For the immediate future, West Bend officials will be dealing with the CCLU’s legal claim. Describing the YA novel by celebrated author Francesca Lia Block as “explicitly vulgar, racial, and anti-Christian,” the complaint by Braun, Joseph Kogelmann, Rev. Cleveland Eden, and Robert Brough explains that “the plaintiffs, all of whom are elderly, claim their mental and emotional well-being was damaged by this book at the library,” specifically because Baby Be-Bop contains the “n” word and derogatory sexual and political epithets that can incite violence and “put one’s life in possible jeopardy, adults and children alike.”
Now, besides being so fragile minded that they are actually traumatized by the mere existence of the book, their proposed remedy to their perceived trauma does show that they might have some sort of mental and emotional defect, although not necessarily due to any book (emphasis mine):
Milwaukee-area citizen Robert C. Braun of the Christian Civil Liberties Union (CCLU) distributed at the meeting copies of a claim for damages he and three other plaintiffs filed April 28 with the city; the complainants seek the right to publicly burn or destroy by another means the library’s copy of Baby Be-Bop. The claim also demands $120,000 in compensatory damages ($30,000 per plaintiff) for being exposed to the book in a library display, and the resignation of West Bend Mayor Kristine Deiss for “allow[ing] this book to be viewed by the public.”
Imagine what they would demand if they had been exposed to such vile works like Alice in Wonderland, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath or The Bible, which someone has found offensive at some time or another and wanted banned and/burned.

They would be demanding public executions.

Isn't it about time that people started taking deep breaths and getting a little more in touch with reality?

For more on the book burning bozos, see also Zach Wisniewski and Illy-T.

4 comments:

  1. Robert C. Braun?? That name sounds familiar. Is he from WA??

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  2. You should have heard his tirade before the meeting. I don't know what your policy is for swearing in comments, so I'll link to my post about the meeting. His enlightened comments are in the first paragraph.

    http://eema-le.blogspot.com/2009/06/day-no-books-would-burn.html

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  3. I am, unfortunately, not surprised by Mr. Braun's boorish manners. But it is more than ironic that a man who wouldn't want to have his grandchildren exposed to such words in a book(if they are even in the books in question), but has no qualms about exposing them with his own tirades.

    I can only imagine what they hear in their grandfather's home.

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