#Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us

[kamreadsandrecs]

By Alexandra Alter

For about as long as he’s been a published author, John Green has faced efforts to censor his books. His debut novel, “Looking for Alaska,” a coming-of-age story that includes references to drug use and sex, has been challenged in schools for at least 15 years, and has frequently landed on the American Library Association’s most banned books list. Last year, it received more than 50 challenges in schools across the country.

But a recent dust-up over whether his books are appropriate for teens feels more personal, and like an escalation of a growing movement to ban and restrict access to books, Green said.

A public library in his home state of Indiana implemented a new policy earlier this year requiring library staff to remove any books with sexually explicit content from the children’s and teens section and re-shelve them in the adult collection. The decision at Hamilton East Public Library in Noblesville meant more than 1,800 young adult books were moved, among them classics like “Forever” by Judy Blume and “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson, as well as two of Green’s novels, “Looking for Alaska” and “The Fault in Our Stars.”

“I love Indiana so much, and it breaks my heart to see that kind of radicalism in a public library,” said Green, who lives in Indianapolis.

The mass relocation of Y.A. titles at Hamilton East has drawn intense public scrutiny in part because Green’s beloved books were swept up in the purge. But it’s hardly an isolated incident.

Efforts to ban books have soared across the United States in the last two years, driven by conservative groups and lawmakers who have targeted books they view as inappropriate, most often titles that address race and L.G.B.T.Q. issues. Lately, a growing number of public libraries have responded to complaints by moving books out of the children’s section, or placing them in a restricted area where parental permission is required.

In Montgomery County, Texas, commissioners voted in July for new library policies that bar people under the age of 18 from accessing books with “explicit” content, including many L.G.B.T.Q. themed works. A library board in Campbell County, Wyo., passed a measure this summer requiring librarians to weed out any books with sexual content from the children’s and teens sections, and fired the library director after she refused to move the books.

In Crawford County, Ark., the library system removed children’s books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes and placed them in a separate age-restricted “social section,” a policy that is being challenged in a lawsuit. And after residents in Marion County, Miss., complained about L.G.B.T.Q. content in the popular Y.A. graphic novel series “Heartstopper,” a library board agreed to move it to the adult section, and to conduct a review of all the books in the young adult section.

Librarians and free speech advocates say that such practices, while not new, are rising, and can amount to a form of censorship.

“I see this as censorship, because it is removing access from the intended audience,” said Emily Knox, the board president of the National Coalition Against Censorship. “No one wants to be called a censor, so one of the ways you do that is by impeding access.”

At a moment when conflicts over books have divided communities, the debate over Green’s novels has been especially charged. His blockbuster novel “The Fault in Our Stars,” which follows two teenagers with cancer who fall in love, has sold around 25 million copies, and has particular resonance in Indiana, where most of the novel takes place.

As a literary celebrity with a massive online following, Green has now become a somewhat reluctant conscript in a raging culture war over what books are appropriate for young readers, and who gets to decide.

“This is an escalation on the part of those far right groups that want to control what kind of information teenagers have access to,” Green said. “‘Looking for Alaska’ has been removed from dozens and dozens of school libraries just in the last year, so the public library is the next logical step.”

The controversy over young adult books in the East Hamilton library started in early 2022, after the library had received challenges to 11 books that patrons viewed as inappropriate, including nonfiction titles for teens about sex education. Following a caustic public debate about whether such works belonged in the children’s section, the board instituted a new policy that would restrict all books with explicit references to sex to the adult section. In the spring, they added new restrictions, requiring library staff to review Y.A. titles not only for sexual content but also for certain profanities and criminal acts.

By mid August, library staff had reviewed more than 3,500 young adult titles, and moved more than 1,000 books, drawing widespread complaints from community members who opposed the removals.

Public outcry against the policy intensified last month, after Green posted messages on social media slamming the policy as “ludicrous” and sent an incensed letter to the library board.

Last Thursday, after weeks of pressure, the library board voted to suspend and re-evaluate the policy. The books that have already been moved to the adult section will remain there while the policy is paused, but could be returned to the young adult section pending decisions by the board, the library director and board president said in a statement to The Times.

While many residents who attended last week’s library board meeting criticized the policy, some spoke in favor of moving books with explicit content. One speaker who supports the removals, Julie Boyd, brought a stack of books that she said had explicit content, and read a sex scene from Courtney Summers’ novel “I’m the Girl.” “I don’t want kids reading this,” she said.

Moving books so that they are inaccessible to their intended readers could constitute both a breach of the First Amendment and a lapse in a librarian’s professional duties, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the office of intellectual freedom at the American Library Association.

“If you are re-shelving John Green’s books because you don’t like the content, that could rise to an unconstitutional act,” Caldwell-Stone said.

In the past, courts have ruled that such practices violate the First Amendment. In 2000, a judge ruled that the city of Wichita Falls, Texas, had violated residents’ right to receive information after the city implemented a library policy that led two children’s books about L.G.B.T.Q. characters to be removed and placed in the adult section.

For now, the status of Green’s books and hundreds of other titles that have been moved at the Hamilton East Public Library remains unresolved.

Green said he will never grow used to having his books, some of which feature teen romance and intimacy, labeled pornography. But it was especially jarring to hear such accusations being lobbed so close to home.

“It’s always pretty tough for me,” he said. “But it’s certainly a little harder when it’s in your hometown, and you’re conscious of the fact that you have to walk around the grocery store with those people.”

Green, who has spoken and written about his struggles with anxiety, said he was reluctant to get involved because the controversy makes him “super extra anxious,” but he felt compelled to do so because the librarians who are bearing the brunt of the criticism were unable to speak out for fear of losing their jobs.

“I believe very strongly in the freedom of expression and in teenagers’ rights to read, and I feel very strongly that other parents shouldn’t have any say in what my kids get to read,” he said. “As long as that fight goes on, I feel obligated to lend my voice to it.”

[kammartinez]

By Alexandra Alter

For about as long as he’s been a published author, John Green has faced efforts to censor his books. His debut novel, “Looking for Alaska,” a coming-of-age story that includes references to drug use and sex, has been challenged in schools for at least 15 years, and has frequently landed on the American Library Association’s most banned books list. Last year, it received more than 50 challenges in schools across the country.

But a recent dust-up over whether his books are appropriate for teens feels more personal, and like an escalation of a growing movement to ban and restrict access to books, Green said.

A public library in his home state of Indiana implemented a new policy earlier this year requiring library staff to remove any books with sexually explicit content from the children’s and teens section and re-shelve them in the adult collection. The decision at Hamilton East Public Library in Noblesville meant more than 1,800 young adult books were moved, among them classics like “Forever” by Judy Blume and “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson, as well as two of Green’s novels, “Looking for Alaska” and “The Fault in Our Stars.”

“I love Indiana so much, and it breaks my heart to see that kind of radicalism in a public library,” said Green, who lives in Indianapolis.

The mass relocation of Y.A. titles at Hamilton East has drawn intense public scrutiny in part because Green’s beloved books were swept up in the purge. But it’s hardly an isolated incident.

Efforts to ban books have soared across the United States in the last two years, driven by conservative groups and lawmakers who have targeted books they view as inappropriate, most often titles that address race and L.G.B.T.Q. issues. Lately, a growing number of public libraries have responded to complaints by moving books out of the children’s section, or placing them in a restricted area where parental permission is required.

In Montgomery County, Texas, commissioners voted in July for new library policies that bar people under the age of 18 from accessing books with “explicit” content, including many L.G.B.T.Q. themed works. A library board in Campbell County, Wyo., passed a measure this summer requiring librarians to weed out any books with sexual content from the children’s and teens sections, and fired the library director after she refused to move the books.

In Crawford County, Ark., the library system removed children’s books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes and placed them in a separate age-restricted “social section,” a policy that is being challenged in a lawsuit. And after residents in Marion County, Miss., complained about L.G.B.T.Q. content in the popular Y.A. graphic novel series “Heartstopper,” a library board agreed to move it to the adult section, and to conduct a review of all the books in the young adult section.

Librarians and free speech advocates say that such practices, while not new, are rising, and can amount to a form of censorship.

“I see this as censorship, because it is removing access from the intended audience,” said Emily Knox, the board president of the National Coalition Against Censorship. “No one wants to be called a censor, so one of the ways you do that is by impeding access.”

At a moment when conflicts over books have divided communities, the debate over Green’s novels has been especially charged. His blockbuster novel “The Fault in Our Stars,” which follows two teenagers with cancer who fall in love, has sold around 25 million copies, and has particular resonance in Indiana, where most of the novel takes place.

As a literary celebrity with a massive online following, Green has now become a somewhat reluctant conscript in a raging culture war over what books are appropriate for young readers, and who gets to decide.

“This is an escalation on the part of those far right groups that want to control what kind of information teenagers have access to,” Green said. “‘Looking for Alaska’ has been removed from dozens and dozens of school libraries just in the last year, so the public library is the next logical step.”

The controversy over young adult books in the East Hamilton library started in early 2022, after the library had received challenges to 11 books that patrons viewed as inappropriate, including nonfiction titles for teens about sex education. Following a caustic public debate about whether such works belonged in the children’s section, the board instituted a new policy that would restrict all books with explicit references to sex to the adult section. In the spring, they added new restrictions, requiring library staff to review Y.A. titles not only for sexual content but also for certain profanities and criminal acts.

By mid August, library staff had reviewed more than 3,500 young adult titles, and moved more than 1,000 books, drawing widespread complaints from community members who opposed the removals.

Public outcry against the policy intensified last month, after Green posted messages on social media slamming the policy as “ludicrous” and sent an incensed letter to the library board.

Last Thursday, after weeks of pressure, the library board voted to suspend and re-evaluate the policy. The books that have already been moved to the adult section will remain there while the policy is paused, but could be returned to the young adult section pending decisions by the board, the library director and board president said in a statement to The Times.

While many residents who attended last week’s library board meeting criticized the policy, some spoke in favor of moving books with explicit content. One speaker who supports the removals, Julie Boyd, brought a stack of books that she said had explicit content, and read a sex scene from Courtney Summers’ novel “I’m the Girl.” “I don’t want kids reading this,” she said.

Moving books so that they are inaccessible to their intended readers could constitute both a breach of the First Amendment and a lapse in a librarian’s professional duties, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the office of intellectual freedom at the American Library Association.

“If you are re-shelving John Green’s books because you don’t like the content, that could rise to an unconstitutional act,” Caldwell-Stone said.

In the past, courts have ruled that such practices violate the First Amendment. In 2000, a judge ruled that the city of Wichita Falls, Texas, had violated residents’ right to receive information after the city implemented a library policy that led two children’s books about L.G.B.T.Q. characters to be removed and placed in the adult section.

For now, the status of Green’s books and hundreds of other titles that have been moved at the Hamilton East Public Library remains unresolved.

Green said he will never grow used to having his books, some of which feature teen romance and intimacy, labeled pornography. But it was especially jarring to hear such accusations being lobbed so close to home.

“It’s always pretty tough for me,” he said. “But it’s certainly a little harder when it’s in your hometown, and you’re conscious of the fact that you have to walk around the grocery store with those people.”

Green, who has spoken and written about his struggles with anxiety, said he was reluctant to get involved because the controversy makes him “super extra anxious,” but he felt compelled to do so because the librarians who are bearing the brunt of the criticism were unable to speak out for fear of losing their jobs.

“I believe very strongly in the freedom of expression and in teenagers’ rights to read, and I feel very strongly that other parents shouldn’t have any say in what my kids get to read,” he said. “As long as that fight goes on, I feel obligated to lend my voice to it.”

[sydney-humanism-group]

Manufacturing Consent The Political Economy of the Mass Media EDWARD S. HERMAN and NOAM CHOMSKY

Summary

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a book by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman that analyzes the role of the mass media in the United States. The book argues that the mass media in the United States is not a neutral disseminator of information, but rather a tool of the powerful to maintain their control over society.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part, "The Manufacturing of Consent," discusses the five filters that the mass media must pass through before they reach the public. These filters are:

The size and concentrated ownership of the media: The mass media in the United States is owned by a small number of corporations, which have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. These corporations control what news is reported, how it is reported, and who has access to the media.

The reliance on advertising revenue: The mass media relies on advertising revenue to survive. This means that they are beholden to advertisers, who can influence what news is reported and how it is reported.

The need to conform to elite opinion: The mass media is staffed by people who are drawn from the upper echelons of society. These people tend to share the views of the elite, and they are more likely to report news that conforms to those views.

The internal censorship of journalists: Journalists are subject to a number of pressures that discourage them from reporting controversial or dissenting views. These pressures include the fear of losing their jobs, the fear of being ostracized by their colleagues, and the fear of being sued.

The anticommunism consensus: The mass media in the United States has been influenced by the anticommunism consensus that has prevailed in the country since the end of World War II. This consensus has led to the suppression of news that is critical of the United States or its allies.

The second part of the book, "The Political Economy of the Mass Media," discusses the economic factors that influence the mass media. These factors include the need to make a profit, the need to conform to the expectations of advertisers, and the need to avoid controversy.

The third part of the book, "The Alternatives," discusses the possibilities for reform of the mass media. Chomsky and Herman argue that the only way to truly reform the mass media is to change the underlying economic and political structures of society.

Manufacturing Consent is a controversial book, but it has been influential in shaping the way that people think about the mass media. The book has been translated into over 20 languages, and it has been cited in numerous academic journals.

Here are some additional details that I found interesting from Manufacturing Consent:

Chomsky and Herman argue that the mass media in the United States is a "propaganda system" that serves the interests of the powerful.

They argue that the mass media is not a neutral disseminator of information, but rather a tool that is used to manufacture consent for the policies of the government and the corporations.

They argue that the mass media is biased in favor of the status quo and against dissent.

They argue that the mass media is controlled by a small number of corporations that have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

Manufacturing Consent is a complex and challenging book, but it is an important read for anyone who wants to understand the role of the mass media in society. The book provides a critical analysis of the mass media that is essential for anyone who wants to be an informed citizen.

[polhmemphis]

1920s social questions quizlet

It is not the kind of change America needs. But it is not the kind of change America wants. The agenda Clinton and Clinton would impose on America-abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units-that's change, all right. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself." In addition to criticizing environmentalists and feminism, he portrayed public morality as a defining issue: He argued: "There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. In a prime- time slot at the 1992 Republican National Convention, Buchanan gave his speech on the culture war. ĭuring the 1992 presidential election, commentator Pat Buchanan mounted a campaign for the Republican nomination for president against incumbent George H. When this threat ended upon the close of the Cold War, Evangelical leaders transferred the perceived source of threat from foreign communism to domestic changes in gender roles and sexuality. She writes that Evangelical Christians viewed a particular Christian masculine gender role as the only defense of America against the threat of communism. Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez attributes the 1990s emergence of culture wars to the end of the Cold War in 1991. For example, Bill O'Reilly, a conservative political commentator and former host of the Fox News Channel talk show The O'Reilly Factor, emphasizes differences between "Secular-Progressives" and "Traditionalists" in his 2006 book Culture Warrior. Others have adopted the dichotomy with varying labels. Hunter characterized this polarity as stemming from opposite impulses, toward what he referred to as Progressivism and as Orthodoxy. Furthermore, not only were there a number of divisive issues, but society had divided along essentially the same lines on these issues, so as to constitute two warring groups, defined primarily not by nominal religion, ethnicity, social class, or even political affiliation, but rather by ideological world-views. He argued that on an increasing number of " hot-button" defining issues- abortion, gun politics, separation of church and state, privacy, recreational drug use, homosexuality, censorship-there existed two definable polarities. Hunter described what he saw as a dramatic realignment and polarization that had transformed American politics and culture. James Davison Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, introduced the expression again in his 1991 publication, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. In subsequent decades during the 20th century, the term was published occasionally in American newspapers. It was also a result of the cultural shifts and modernizing trends of the Roaring '20s, culminating in the presidential campaign of Al Smith in 1928. This followed several decades of immigration to the States by people who earlier European immigrants considered 'alien'. This usage originated in the 1920s when urban and rural American values came into closer conflict. In American usage, "culture war" may imply a conflict between those values considered traditionalist or conservative and those considered progressive or liberal. The translation was printed in some American newspapers at the time. In German, Kulturkampf, a term coined by Rudolf Virchow, refers to the clash between cultural and religious groups in the campaign from 1871 to 1878 under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of the German Empire against the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. The term culture war is a loan translation ( calque) of the German Kulturkampf ('culture struggle'). These include wedge issues such as abortion, homosexuality, transgender rights, pornography, multiculturalism, racism and other cultural conflicts based on values, morality, and lifestyle which are described as the major political cleavage. Its contemporary use refers to a social phenomenon in which multiple social groups, holding distinct values and ideologies, attempt to steer public policy in opposition to each other, thus a culture war now describes "hot button" or "polarizing" social issues in politics and public policy. It commonly refers to topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarization in societal values. Bismarck (left) and the Pope (right), from the German satirical magazine Kladderadatsch, 1875Ī culture war is a cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices.

[morebedsidebooks]

The yearly list of most challenged books continues to illustrate flashpoints in US culture. Along with perennial questions every community faces not only over texts, but when a creator themselves becomes a subject when it comes to harm.

American Library Association’s Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2020

 1.      George Melissa’s Story by Alex Gino. Challenged, banned, and restricted for LGBTQIA+ content, conflicting with a religious viewpoint, and not reflecting “the values of our community.”

2.      Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds. Banned and challenged because of the author’s public statements and because of claims that the book contains “selective storytelling incidents” and does not encompass racism against all people.

3.      All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. Banned and challenged for profanity, drug use, and alcoholism and because it was thought to promote antipolice views, contain divisive topics, and be “too much of a sensitive matter right now.”

4.      Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. Banned, challenged, and restricted because it was thought to contain a political viewpoint, it was claimed to be biased against male students, and it included rape and profanity.

5.      The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Banned and challenged for profanity, sexual references, and allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of the author.

6.      Something Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story about Racial Injustice by Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, and Ann Hazzard, illustrated by Jennifer Zivoin. Challenged for “divisive language” and because it was thought to promote antipolice views.

7.      To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Banned and challenged for racial slurs and their negative effect on students, featuring a “white savior” character, and its perception of the Black experience.

8.      Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Banned and challenged for racial slurs and racist stereotypes and their negative effect on students.

9.      The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Banned and challenged because it was considered sexually explicit and depicts child sexual abuse.

10.  The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Challenged for profanity, and because it was thought to promote an antipolice message.

 (courtesy of American Library Association, image edited)

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

Banned Books Week 2021 will be held September 26 – October 2. The theme of this year’s event is “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.”

[potteresque-ire]

More ask answer about Word of Honour (山河令, WoH) and the so-called “Dangai 101 phenomenon” under the cut ~ with all the M/M relationships shown on screen, does it mean improved acceptance / safety for the c-queer community?

Due to its length (sorry!), I’ve divided the answer into 3 parts: 1) Background 2) Excerpts from the op-eds 3) Thoughts This post is PART 1 ❤️. As usual, please consider the opinions expressed as your local friendly fandomer sharing what they’ve learned, and should, in no ways, be viewed as necessarily true. :)

(TW: homophobic, hateful speech quoted)

After WoH had started airing, I had waited for one of China’s state-controlled media to publish opinion pieces about the show. Specifically, I’d like to know ~ what is the administration’s current take on Dangai  (耽改), as a genre? How does it characterise the closeness of the same-sex leads—the closeness that is suppressed when the original IP, of the genre Danmei (耽美) was converted for visual media presentation?

This is important, as China is a country where the government’s attitude becomes the official public attitude. The state opinion pieces will be quoted and parroted, especially if they come from heavy-weight sources (state-controlled media also have their importance/influence hierarchy). Production of the upcoming Dangai dramas will adjust their scripts accordingly. Marketing tactics will also adjust, make sure it doesn’t spread “the wrong message”; Dangai and Danmei dramas have both been pulled off shelves during or immediately after its airing before (Addicted 上癮 and Guardian 鎮魂, respectively), despite having already passing the censorship board.

If a heavy-weight state opinion piece pans the one-lead-fawning-over-the-other scenes in WoH (there are a few of them), for example, scenes / lines of such suggestive nature will likely disappear from the upcoming Dangai dramas for at least a year or two. If the critique spills over to a harsh stance against the presence of queers in Chinese media, all future Dangai dramas can become strict “socialist-brotherhood” stories, their “no homo” message reinforced by, for example, by inserting a female lead (or changing one of the leads to female).

Whether the official public opinion equates the true public opinion or not, public behaviour in China is quickly driven by the official public opinion. Example: the Xi regime’s conservative stance on queer issues has already translated to a quick deterioration of queer tolerance in China; open expressions that were tolerated, even welcomed, just several years ago are now met with significant hostility in the public.

This is a reflection of the nature of their government. A quick thought experiment may explain this. Take … jaywalking. It’s probably fair to say we’ve all committed this “crime” before?

Will you still jaywalk if your government declares it immoral to do so? Where I am, in the United States, the answer is definitely a no. The public will probably laugh at (and make memes about) the poor official who made the declaration, kindly ask the government to do something useful for once (f*** off), and keep jaywalking.

Now, what if the declaration comes with a law that includes a one-year prison term + lifelong criminal record for jaywalking? Let’s say this law is fully executable and irreversible, given this being a thought experiment—nothing you, or the public, can say or do can contest it.

Will you still jaywalk, even if you disagree with government’s stance that the act is immoral? You’ve got a neighbour who continues to defy the law. Will you think twice before letting your young loved ones go out with them?

Very soon, jaywalking becomes “bad”—even though such “badness” had little moral basis at its origin. It is bad because the government has “characterised” it to be so—an authoritarian government that doesn’t allow challenge of the characterisation.

The retention of queer elements in Dangai is the jaywalking in the example. The Chinese government stepping in to characterise (定性) an event, a phenomenon etc is common, and the people know the drill well that they fall in line quickly.  

If a powerful state-controlled media publish a negative opinion piece on the queer elements in Dangai / Danmei, therefore, those elements can disappear overnight.

My question had been: will the state do it? The Xi regime has made its distaste for LGBT+ representation in visual media abundantly clear with its NRTA directives. However, while the Chinese government typically puts ideology (意識型態) as its Guiding Principle, exceptions have always been made for one reason. One word.

Money.

TU is a legendary financial success story every production company (Tencent itself included) wants to replicate. As a result, there are ~ 60 Danmei IPs (book canon) with their copyright sold for Dangai dramas; this long line of Danmei dramas in the horizon has been nicknamed “Dangai 101”, after the name of the show “Produce 101” Dd was dance instructor in. These dramas are all competing to be the next TU by profit.

Adoration from fans is nice, but money is what matters.

C-ent is currently in a financial bleak winter. The anti-corruption, anti-tax-fraud campaign started by the Xi regime in 2018, which cumulated to a sudden (and unofficial) collection of 3 years of back-taxes from studios and stars, has drained a significant amount of its capital; the number of new TV dramas being filmed fell 45% between 2018 and 2019, and production companies have been closing by the tens of thousands. The tightening of censorship rules also means production is associated with more risk. The commercial sector outside c-ent is also eager for replications of TU’s success—they need more “top traffic” (頂流) idols like Gg and Dd whose fans are sufficiently devoted to drive the sales of their products. Such “fan economy” would benefit the government, even if it doesn’t have direct stakes in the companies in and outside c-ent. People’s Daily, the Official State Newspaper, previously published a positive opinion piece on fan economy in 2019, estimating its worth at 90 billion RMB (~13.7 billion USD) per year.

But if the state allows the queer elements in Dangai’s to pass the censorship board (NRTA) for profit, how can it do so with the current “No homo” directive in place? From previous experience (scarce as it may be), the queerness has to be sufficiently obvious for the shows to make the profit everyone is wishing for. Dangai dramas in which the leads’ romantic relationship remains subtle have not sold the way TU does, even if they are well-reviewed and feature famous, skilled actors (as Winter Begonia 鬓边不是海棠红 last year.)

NRTA, and the government behind it, can’t just say I’m turning a blind eye to the flirting and touching for the money. What can it say then?

Here’s what I’d thought—what it can say, or do, is to “characterise” these Dangai dramas in a way that leave out its queerness. It did so for TU. TU’s review by the overseas version of People’s Daily devoted a grand total of two characters to describe WWX and LWJ’s relationship—摯友 (“close friend”). The rest of the article was devoted to the drama’s aesthetics, its cultural roots. (The title of the article: 《陳情令》：書寫國風之美 Chen Qing Ling: Writing the Beauty of National Customs).

How could it do that? The State’s power ensuring few questioning voices aside, I’ve been also thinking about the history and definition of Danmei (耽美)—Dangai’s parent genre as the causes. Based on the history and definition, I can think of 3 ways the queer elements in Danmei (耽美) can be characterised by the state, 2 of which provide it with the wiggle room, the movable goalposts it needs should it choose to want to overlook the queerness in Dangai.

The 3 characterisations I’ve thought of, based on the history and definition of Danmei (耽美) are:

1) The queer characterisation, which focuses on its homoerotic element. * Summary of the characterization: Danmei is gay.

2) The “traditional BL” characterisation, which focuses on BL’s historic origin as a “by women, for women” genre. The M/M setup is viewed as an escapist protest against the patriarchy, a rejection of traditional gender roles; displays of M/M closeness are often “candies” for the female gaze. * Summary of the characterization: Danmei is women’s fantasy.

3) The aesthetic characterisation, which focuses on beauty—from the beauty of the characters, the beauty of a world without harm to the romance. * Summary for the characterization: Danmei is pretty.

The queer characterisation (1) is well-understood, and likely the default characterisation if it is to be made by the fraction of i-fandom I’m familiar with. Most i-fans I’ve met, myself included, would likely and automatically associate the M/M relationships in The Untamed  (TU) and WoH with queerness.

The “traditional BL” characterisation (2), meanwhile, equates Danmei with BL as the genre of homoerotic works developed in 1970’s Japan for women comic readers, and has been widely interpreted from a feminist point of view.

Under such interpretation of “traditional BL” works, the double male lead setup wasn’t meant to be an accurate depiction of homosexuality. It wasn’t about homosexuality at all. Rather, it was about the removal of women and along with it, the rage, the eye-rolling, the unease women readers had often felt when attempting to interact with mainstream romance novels of the time, in which the female leads had mostly been confined to traditional women roles, and their virtue, their traditional feminine traits.

The M/M setup therefore acted as a “shell” for a het relationship that allowed removal of such social constraints placed on women. The lead with whom the woman audience identified was no longer bound to the traditional role of women, such as being the caregiver of the family. The lead could instead chase their dreams and roam the world, as many contemporary women already did or aspired to do; they were no longer limited to playing the passive party in life and in the relationship—and they enjoyed such freedom without risking the love, the respect the other male protagonist felt for them.

BL, in this traditional sense, has therefore been interpreted as an answer for, and a protest against the heteropatriarchal gender norm still dominant in societies deeply influenced by Confucianism, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China. The M/M setup is, at heart, (het) women’s fantasy. The inclusion of two young-and-beautiful male leads also satisfy “the female gaze” ~ the popularity of BL among het women has therefore been compared to the popularity of lesbian porn among het men. In both cases, the audience is drawn not for the homosexual element but by the presence of double doses of sexual attraction.

(Please forgive me if any of my wording comes as disrespectful! I’m not used to talking about these topics.)

The availability of the “traditional BL” characterisation (2) is key to bypassing queerness as a topic in the discussions of Danmei (耽美).

The aesthetic characterisation (3) is very closely related to 2) in origin, but deserves its own point as a characterisation that can stand on its own, and may be more obscure to the English-speaking fandom given the common English translation of Danmei (耽美) as Boy’s Love.

Boy’s Love, as a name, amplifies the queer characterisation (1) and de-emphasises the aesthetic characterisation (3); Danmei (耽美), meanwhile, does the reverse.

Where does the name Danmei come from?

When BL was first developed in Japan, it used to have a now out-of-fashion genre name: Tanbi. Tanbi was borrowed from same name describing a late 19th century / early 20th century Japanese literary movement, known as Tanbi-ha and was inspired by Aestheticism in England. Aestheticism “centered around the doctrine that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it need serve no political, didactic, or other purpose”. Along the same line, the core belief of authors of Tanbi-ha was that art should celebrate beauty and reject the portrayal of ugliness in human nature, the darkness of reality:

…Tanbi writers argued that the ideas of naturalism writers such as “objectivism,” “truth is more important than beauty” and so on would “oppress human beings’ desire” so as to “lose beauty and human nature.” Accordingly, they insisted on “acute mental and emotional sensibility” [Ye, 2009].

(Source, with more details on Tanbi.)

Neither romance nor homosexuality were requirements for works in the original Tanbi-ha genre. BL borrowed the name Tanbi because its early authors saw their work created under the same principles: the emphasis on the beauty of their characters, their love (romantic and platonic), in a world that was also beautiful and untouched by ugliness such as sexism and homophobia.

The stubborn persistence on keeping one’s eyes trained on the beautiful, the willingness to turn a blind eye to reality for the sake of the beauty is built-in in the genre’s name. Tanbi  meant more than beauty, aesthetics; its kanji form was written as 耽美;  耽 = to sink, drown in, to  over-indulge in; 美 =  beauty.

Tanbi, therefore, literally means to drown in, to over-indulge in beauty.

Over time, as the genre expanded its writing style, Tanbi eventually fell out of favour as BL’s genre name in Japan. However, as it gained popularity in the Sinosphere in the 1990s, starting with Taiwan and Hong Kong, the kanji of Tanbi was retained as the Chinese name of the genre.

In Mandarin Chinese, 耽美 is pronounced Danmei. A hyperfocus on the aesthetics, the utopian aspects of traditional BL is therefore retained in Danmei by its name. People’s Daily could therefore devote its review of TU on its aesthetics. Realism, including politics and all discussions of social issues, can therefore be swept aside in the name of respecting the genre’s tradition.

I’ve mostly been reading about and observing c-fandom, and I believe these 3 characterisations have all attracted its own kind of fans. Fans who care and talk about queer issues even when it isn’t encouraged by their sociopolitical environment, who shine a light upon these issues in their fan works. Fans who treat the M/M leads as if they were a traditional cishet couple, such as calling one of the leads 老婆 (wife) and assigning him biologically female functions when needed (via, for example, the ABO trope). Fans who insist the works must meet their beauty standards, rejecting those that fail (for example, if the leads are not good looking enough) by claiming they’re there for Danmei, not Danchou (耽醜, “over-indulgence on ugliness”). Fans who are drawn to the genre by a combination of these characterisations.

By the history and definition of the genre, all the above reasons for fanning Danmei are as valid, as legitimate as one another.

I thought about this related question then: are c-fans of the second (traditional BL characterisation) and third (aesthetic characterisation) groups homophobic? When I first asked this question, I—a fan whose fandom experience had been entirely in English-speaking communities—assume the answer was yes. I thought, in particular, the insistence of treating Danmei’s M/M couples as cishet couples in a homosexual shell had to be conscious queer erasure. How can anyone ignore the same-sexness of the leads? How can anyone talk about Danmei without associating it with homosexuality?

However, as I read more—again, specifically about c-fandom, and in Chinese—I realised the answer may be a little more complex.

Previously, I had largely thought about homophobia in terms of individual attitudes. This has to do with my current environment (liberal parts of the United States), in which the choice to accept or reject the queer community has become a close to personal choice. Pride flags fly all over the city, including the city hall, every summer, and most churches welcome the LGBT+ community. I hadn’t considered how an environment in which queers have never enjoyed full social exposure, in which education of related topics is sorely lacking, would affect Danmei’s development as a genre.

In such an environment, it is difficult for Danmei to evolve and incorporate up-to-date understanding of RL queerness.

The consequence I can see is this: Danmei is more likely to be “stuck” in its historical characterisation as (het) women’s fantasy inside than outside the Great Firewall, with its queerness de-emphasised if not erased—and it draws fans who are attracted to this kind of characterisation accordingly. This is, perhaps, reflected by the fact that the (het) women-to-queer ratio of Danmei / BL fans is significantly higher in China than in the West (Table 1 in this article summarises how Danmei / BL fans have split between different genders and sexual orientation in the Sinosphere vs the West in different research studies).

Another driving force I can see for Danmei to retain BL’s traditional feminist and aesthetic characterisations: women in China are not free from the social pressure that led to the birth of BL in 1970’s Japan. While many of them have achieved financial freedom through work and have high education, the young and educated have been subjected to immense pressure to get married and have children especially in the past decade.

In 2007, the China’s state feminist agency, the All-China Women’s Federation (中華全國婦女聯合會), coined the term 剩女 (literally, “leftover women”) for unmarried, urban women over 27 years old. The government started a campaign that, among other things, associated women’s education level with ugliness, and their unmarried status with pickiness, moral degeneracy. The reason behind the campaign: birth rates are plummeting and the state wants educated women, in particular, to nurture a high quality, next generation workforce. More importantly, the government sees a threat in the M/F sex imbalance (high M, low F) that has commonly been attributed to the country’s “one child policy” between 1979-2015, which encouraged female infanticide / abortion of female foetuses in a culture that favours surname-carrying boys. The state fears the unmarried men will become violent and/or gay, leading to “social instability and insecurity”. Therefore, it wants all women, in particular those who are educated, to enter the “wife pool” for these unmarried men. (Source 1, Source 2: Source 2 is a short, recommended read).

For Chinese women, therefore, patriarchy and sexism is far from over. Escapist fantasies where sexism is removed—by removing women from the picture—are therefore here to stay.

Danmei is therefore not queer literature (同志文學). The difference between Danmei and queer literature is highlighted by this reportedly popular saying (and its similar variations) in some Danmei communities:

異性戀只是傳宗接代，同性戀才是真愛 Heterosexuality is only for reproduction. Only homosexuality is true love.

The attitude towards heterosexuality is one of distaste, viewed as a means to an end the speaker has no interest in. On the contrary, homosexuality is idealised, reflecting the disregard / lack of understanding of some Danmei fans have towards the RL hardships of c-queers. The ignorance may be further propagated by gate-keeping by some Danmei fans for safety reasons, keeping queer discussions away from their communities for fear that their favourite hangouts would meet the same uncertain fate of other communities that previously held open queer discussions, such as the Weibo gay and lesbian supertopics. Such gatekeeping can, again, be easily enforced using tradition as argument: the beauty 美 is Tanbi and Danmei (耽美), remember, includes the beauty of utopia, where ugly truths such as discrimination do not enter the picture. A Danmei that explores, for example, the difficulty of coming out of the closet is no longer Danmei, by its historical, aesthetic definition.

[I’ve therefore read about c-queers viewing Danmei with suspicion, if not downright hostility; they believe the genre, by ignoring their RL challenges and casting them as beautiful, even perfect individuals, and in some cases, by fetishising them and their relationships, only leads to more misconceptions about the queer community. Dangai, meanwhile, has been viewed with even more distaste as potential weapons by the state to keep gays in the closet; if the government can shove the Danmei characters into the “socialist brotherhood” closet, it can shove them as well.

I haven’t yet, however, been able to tease out the approximate fraction of c-queers whose views of Danmei and Dangai is negative. The opposing, positive view of the genres is this: they still provide LGBT+ visibility, which is better than none and it would’ve been close to none without Danmei and Dangai; while Danmei may skim over the hardships of being queer, fan works of Danmei are free to explore them—and they have.

This article provides insights on this issue. @peekbackstage’s conversation with a Chinese film/TV director in Clubhouse is also well worth a read.]

That said, Danmei can only be dissociated from the queer characterisation if there’s a way to talk about the genre without evoking words and phrases that suggest homosexuality—something that is difficult to do with English. Is there?

In Chinese, I’d venture to say … almost. There’s almost a way. Close enough to pass.

The fact that M/M in traditional BL has been developed and viewed not as queer but as a removal of F also means this: queerness isn’t “built-in” into the language of Danmei. The name Danmei itself already bypasses a major “queer checkpoint”: it’s impossible to refer to a genre called Boy’s Love and not think about homosexuality.

Here’s one more important example of such bypass. Please let me, as an excuse to put these beautiful smiles in my blog, show this classic moment from TU; this can be any gif in which the leads are performing such suggestive romantic gestures:

How can I describe this succinctly? In English?

Two men acting in love? Er. That’s… the definition of gay, almost.

Two men acting gay? Well. GAY.

Right. Fine. Let’s go negative. Queerbaiting? … Still gay, because the word “queer” is in there.

[Pie note: for the record, I don’t think TU or WoH is queer-baiting.]

Personally, I find it impossible to describe the GIF above in English that I do not automatically associate with RL romantic love between two men, with homosexuality. But can I do it in Chinese?

… Yes.

There’s a term, 賣腐 (pronounced “maifu”), literally, “selling 賣 the rot 腐”, derived from the term known among i-fans as fujoshi and written, in kanji, as 腐女. Fujoshi, or 腐 (“rot”) 女 (“women”), describes the largely (het) female audience of the Japanese BL genre (>80%, according to Wikipedia). Originated as a misogynistic insult towards female Japanese BL fans in the 2000s, fujoshi was later reclaimed by the same female BL fans who now use the self-depreciative term as acknowledgement of their interest being “rotten”, for BL’s disregard of the society’s traditional expectations on women.

賣腐 is therefore to “sell the rot” to the rotten women; ie. the suggestive romantic gestures, exemplified by the GIF above, between the M/M leads are catering, performing fan service to their target audience.

[賣腐 is also a term one will see in the state opinion pieces.]

There’s nothing gay about this term.

I’ve therefore found it possible to talk and think in Chinese about Danmei while giving little thought to queerness. The history and definition of Danmei allow that.

Again, I’m not saying any of this to excuse homophobia among in Danmei and Dangai fandoms. The point I’m trying to make is this — given that Danmei has three potential characterisations, two of which can be discussed without abundantly evoking queer concepts and vocabularies, given that history of Danmei, as a genre, already favoured characterisation 2 (traditional BL), the government addressing homosexuality in its opinions on Danmei and Dangai is far from a given.

By extension, the popularity of Dangai may mean a lot or little to c-queers; by extension, the state can approve / disapprove of Danmei and Dangai in a manner independent of its stance on homosexuality, which is itself inconsistent and at times, logic-deying (example to come…).

This is both good and bad, from the perspective of both the government and the c-queer community.

For the government: as discussed, the “triality” of Danmei allows the state to “move the goalpost” depending on what it tries to achieve. It has characterisations 2 (the traditional BL characterisation) and 3 (the aesthetic characterisation) as excuses to let Dangai dramas pass the censorship board should it want their profit and also, their promise of expanding the country’s soft power overseas by drawing an international audience. These characterisations also allow the state to throw cold water on the popularity of Danmei / Dangai should it desire, for reasons other than its queer suggestions—despite the Xi regime’s push against open expressions of queerness (including by activism, in media), it has also been careful about not demonising c-queers in words, and has countered other people’s attempts to do so.

Why may the government want to throw cold water on Danmei and Dangai? They are still subculture, which the state has also viewed with suspicion. In 2018, a NRTA directive explicitly requested that “c-ent programmes should not use entertainers with tattoos; (those associated with) hip-hop culture, sub-cultures (non-mainstream cultures), decadent cultures.” (”另外，总局明确要求节目中纹身艺人、嘻哈文化、亚文化（非主流文化）、丧文化（颓废文化）不用。”).

Subculture isn’t “core socialist values”. More importantly, it’s difficult to keep up with and control subculture. 環球網, the website co-owned by People’s Daily and Global Times (環球時報), ie, The State Newspaper and The State Tabloid, famously said this on its Weibo, on 2020/03/04, re: 227:

老了，没看懂为什么战。晚安。 Getting old. Can’t figure out what the war is about. Good night.

The State also cannot stop subculture from happening. It doesn’t have the resources to quell every single thing that become popular among its population of 1.4 billion. What it can do to make sure these subcultures stay subcultures, kept out of sight and mind of the general public.

Characterisation 1 (the queer characterisation), meanwhile, remains available to the state should it wish to drop the axe on Dangai for its queer elements. I’m including, as “queer elements”, presentation of men as too “feminine” for the state—which has remained a sore point for the government. This axe have a reason to drop in the upcoming months: July 23rd, 2021 will be the 100th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the state may desire to have only uniformed forces and muscled, gun-toting “masculine” men gracing the screens.

What about for c-queers and their supporters (including group I fans)? What good and bad can the multiple characterisations of the genres do for them?

For c-queers and their supporters (including group I fans), their acceptance and safety are helped by the Dangai genre, by the Dangai 101 phenomenon, if and only if the state both characterises the queer elements in these dramas as queer (characterisation 1) AND their opinions of them are positive.

Personally, I had viewed this to be unlikely from the start, because a queer characterisation would mean the censorship board has failed to do its job, which is embarrassing for the Chinese government.

Characterisations 2) and 3) are not bad for c-queers and their supporters, however, and definitely not “enemies” of Characterisation 1);  they can not only serve as covers for the queer elements in Dangai to reach their audience, but also, they can act as protective padding for the LGBT+ community if the content or (very aggressive) marketing of the Dangai dramas displease the government — with the understanding, again, that the “traditional BL” arm of the Danmei community is itself also highly vulnerable by being a subculture, and so its padding effect is limited and it also deserves protection.

The downside to achieving LGBT+ visibility through Dangai is, of course and as mentioned, that these dramas are, ultimately, deeply unrealistic depictions of the c-queers. The promotion of these dramas, which has focused on physical interactions between the male leads for “candies”, can encourage even more fetishising of queers and queer relationships. The associated (character) CP culture that makes and breaks CPs based on the dramas’ airing cycle may also fuel negative perception of queer relationships as attention-seeking behaviour, something that can be initiated and terminated at will and for the right price.

Finally, with all this said, which characterisation(s) have the government taken re: Dangai and/or WOH? And what opinions has it given to its characterisations?

PART 1 <-- YOU ARE HERE PART 2 PART 3

[cscclibrary]

[Rectangular graphic with pale off-white background and a broad horizontal black bar across the center. White text in the bar says "Books Unite Us, Censorship Divides Us." A flock of birds in rainbow silhouette fly up from the bottom left, up towards the center right, and back up to the center top.]

Our Banned Books Week event starts Monday! Swing by our table in the courtyard Monday for gift bags & info about our Banned Books Week scavenger hunt. The Delaware Learning Center will handing out gift bags too! Visit our Banned Books research guide to learn more.

[anarchy2021]

Fighting the good fight

/rp Evening comrades.

So, in light of recent events cause by mr @lucemferto, we have constructed a handy guide with some ideas as to how you can prevent DT supporters organising in your area. ((ooc these are actually tips that can be used irl. Surprise this was all a ploy to spread some leftist praxis tips /lh))

Here we’re going to list a few bits and pieces, but later I’ll link you to a place you can find more information and tips. Stay safe!

1. Find collaborators

Divided we are weak, united we are strong. DT supporters have shown they’re not above harassing people who are simply minding their business. It’s important that you find like-minded people to work with here, both to make the job easier and also to help protect each other. Finding community is vital here, make sure you can coordinate and specialize.

2. Remove and replace DT propaganda

Don’t let the DT have any ground! We’ve all seen some ugly stickers on lamposts, or shitty posters knocking about, especially, as of late, near libraries and other educational centres. Don’t let them think they can run about owning the place. Rip those suckers down, and ideally, replace them with your own message. Don’t let them exist unresisted, it’s their unfounded bravery that makes them dangerous, let them know that we won’t take their lies and censorship lying down!

Even where there might seem to be an overwhelming amount of DT propaganda, make sure your presence is still known! People should know they have allies they can rely on in their community!

We recommend defacing the posters you can’t take down, a little paint can go a lonnggg way <3

3. Push politicians and officials to do the right thing

((This is not a call to harass the mods or other parties, remember the context of this is rp))

Let DT supporters who have done the property damage know they have no allies higher up. Push officials to withhold permits if they want to hold a rally, ask people to publicly denounce these peoples actions. Support businesses who don’t allow DT supporters to use their spaces to organise. Warn local hotels, restaurants, and bars. Make it hard for them to act again and let it be known they won’t have legal protection from higher-ups if they do. VOTE FOR THOSE WHO ACTIVELY OPPOSE DT.

4. Support the libraries being targeted by DT2021

Fundraising can be an excellent way to help support the places affected by DT supporters’ actions ((Here is a link to charity in the American library association you can donate to IRL :) https://ec.ala.org/donate)). Offering to help with clean up can relieve being massively impactful as well. The Lorekeepers have a copy of almost all literature that has been published, locating and copying books or texts that may have been lost in the fires will be massively helpful in these times.

5. Aid the injured

Reach out to victims of DT aggressors, and ask how you can be supportive. They may need help with money, legal issues, errands, ect ect. If the victim wishes to go to the authorities, and this is consistent with your beliefs, offer to accompany them through the process. Helping each other is what’s most important here after a crisis. ((This can be a great opportunity for roleplay! In the Anarchy2021 Discord server [link], we've been havin fun RPing helping people in the aftermath.))

All in all, DT supporters, and DT themselves are only a threat if we give them power to be. We’re not scared of them, and you have no reason to be either. If we work together, if we organise, then together we can stop the harm they’re causing.

Stay safe, stay free! - Your presidents of anarchy

((Link to what this is based off of: https://spencersunshine.com/2020/08/27/fortyways/. Remember to be careful, do your research and look for support. Also support your local library.))

[theritualofourexistence]

Clarity in the Cancellation Crusade

After posting multi-paragraph comments on a couple different things that have popped up in my feed recently, it seemed like I should probably just sit down and write this out.

“Cancel culture.” Crazy shit, right?

The recent onslaught of cancellations includes Mr. Potato Head, Pepe Le Pew, a handful of Disney movies (Peter Pan, Dumbo, The Aristocats), and *audible gasp* Dr. Seuss. The Muppets also got a newfangled Disney+ content warning, though I’ve seen significantly fewer headlines about that.

The thing that inevitably happens when the news media decides to publish a headline about a children’s toy or book being “canceled” is a veritable parade of social media complaints about how sensitive people have become. I saw this particular post over 10 times in the period of a couple hours one day last week…

The question I’ve been asking recently when I see posts like that is this: “Who do you think cancel culture is?”

Because “cancel culture” isn’t real. In the majority of the cases currently making headlines, the choice to remove a character from a movie or stop publishing a book has been made by the company responsible for that character or book… and that is very much a normal thing companies can choose to do.

No one I’ve posed the above question to has overtly mentioned “Libtards,” but it’s certainly implied. People who haven’t read a Dr. Seuss book in 20 years are now suddenly all up in arms (literally?) because “the Liberals” are coming for “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.”

The Liberals are not coming for Dr. Seuss. They do not care about a potato toy. Also, nothing is happening to the Cat in the Hat. I repeat: NOTHING is happening to the Cat in the Hat.

The choices to stop publishing that book and to market a vegetable toy in a less gendered way were made by the companies responsible for producing those products… not the Liberal “cancel culture” ghoul. In fact, it’s really, really hard to find public outcry about any of the things that have been recently “canceled.” There was a single NYT article that recently discussed the problematic nature of the Pepe Le Pew cartoons… that said, Warner Bros hasn’t aired that show in decades and it is not clear whether that article had anything to do with the skunk’s scene being removed from the new Space Jam movie.

Even growing up I remember things like political correctness needlessly becoming a partisan issue. When we fall into that media trap, all we’re doing is watering the plant of an already poisonous and ineffective two-party system. Be bigger than that temptation. Push back against media intended to further divide Americans. If something stinks, it’s probably rotten. Sure, there are certain topics that fall under the umbrella of political correctness that sound alarm bells for censorship issues… but didn’t everyone’s mom tell them that if they didn’t have anything nice to say, they shouldn’t say anything at all?

Again, though, the most important thing to remember about this recent wave of “canceling” is that censorship concerns are moot. A person who owns a thing is legally allowed to do all the censoring they want. It’s not the government that has decided to stop publishing 6 books written by Dr. Seuss… if it were, we could have the censorship conversation. These changes aren’t happening because there is a Democrat in the White House. They’re happening because the company who makes these products, has for whatever reason, decided to take a different approach.

In the case of the Dr. Seuss books, Dr. Seuss Enterprises re-evaluated their choice to publish 6 books based on racist themes and images. I have only heard of two of those six. The image below is, in my opinion, objectively problematic:

The fact that a major company behind such a well-known name has seen that something is problematic and has decided to stop publishing the books containing overt racist images is awesome. It sets a great example that we can all learn from. Humans have an amazing capacity to learn… that’s one of the only reasons we are in charge here on Earth. If we fall on ice once, we are often more careful on ice the next time. When we see that something is racially problematic, it’s a good thing if we can take action to get that thing out of rotation. More on that later.

Fundamentally, what is happening right now in Media Land is gross sensationalism.

“Cancel culture” isn’t real. Should people face consequences if they say or do racist things? Yes. We should all agree on that. Should we stop publishing books that perpetuate racist stereotypes? Yes. There are plenty of non-racist books that provide an education about racial differences without the added (exceedingly inappropriate) zing of Asian characters being painted yellow and African characters being given monkey features.

If you’re not convinced that some of Dr. Seuss’s material is racially problematic, I encourage you to pop on over to Google to check out the series of ads he did for FLIT in the 1930s. Yes, it was the 1930s. In the last 90 years, we’ve learned that images like that are not okay… let’s use that knowledge to let old racist graphics die.

Still can’t accept that “cancel culture” isn’t real? Still feeling like there’s something in the air now that is different and worse than before?

Okay, then, let’s consider it further.

Things have been “canceled” by people for millennia… this isn’t new. Being all for cancel culture when Colin Kaepernick kneels for the anthem (a perfectly legal form of peaceful protest considered respectful by many veterans) but opposing cancel culture when it’s threatening to eliminate an obviously racist thing is not exactly a moral stance. Burning your Nikes in the street but then turning around and spending $400 on a copy of “If I Ran the Zoo” on eBay after Dr. Seuss’s own family has pulled it from publication due to racist imagery is… silly.

The same people who seem to be so vocal about “cancel culture” now are part of the same communities who tried to cancel plenty of things in my lifetime. Things like trick-or-treating, Harry Potter, school dances, books and movies with LGBT+ characters and themes…

History absolutely bubbles over with things that have been canceled… often for good reason! Some examples that come to mind: 

DDT

the Catholic Church (see the 16th century Protestant Reformation)

doing our everyday poopin’ in outdoor holes

polio

hoop skirts

phrenology (new science cancels old science like every damn day)

Ford Pintos (not to mention cars without seatbelts)

telegrams and rotary phones (replaced by easier and better ways to communicate)

lead paint

asbestos

Four Loco

Y’all remember when we all did the ice bucket challenge to cancel Alzheimer’s?

Learning that something is problematic and moving past it is LEARNING… not cancel culture.  Learning and growth are good things. We all benefit from them.

Another thing worth commenting on from that Cat in the Hat post that circulated in my Facebook feed: why do we consistently demonize sensitivity? Racism feels like something we should all be sensitive about. If being sensitive about something results in meaningful change and a less hateful country, isn’t that… good? Why do so many Americans seem to place so much value on their “freedom” to hurt others?

And don’t get me started on comparing this stuff to Cardi B. It boggles my mind that that’s happening at all. Why is there suddenly so much outcry about one song that features female genitals in a literal ocean of songs that feature male genitals. I grew up knowing every word to songs about sex well before I even knew what sex was. Your kids are only desperate to listen to WAP because they know it makes you squeamish. And take a second to think about why it makes you squeamish. Genitals are human and scientific and we literally all have them. If you have more of a problem with WAP than with any of the other 10,000 songs about dicks and sex, you need to spend some time examining why that is.

Here’s another post I’ve seen bouncing around the social media feeds:

Something about this is just plain hilarious to me. Like what are racism and rape culture if not THE REALEST issues? This country’s problem with systemic racism runs so, so deep and is reflected very plainly in centuries of cold, hard numbers. It’s not that I *think* systemic racism is a problem. The data very clearly shows that regardless of what white people think about race in this country, systemic racism absolutely IS a problem. Racism and rape culture, arguably at the root of the most recent canceling spree, are not just real issues, they’re real American issues. They’re cultural issues. And solving cultural issues is not easy. We know that these issues have been passed down through the generations so maybe changing children’s toys and books and shows isn’t such a bad thing to try. There is SO much work to do to address racism and rape culture in the United States, but small steps are still progress.

If choosing to stop airing a show that blatantly perpetuates rape culture means one less young person is stalked or assaulted or raped, that’s worth it, no? What if that one young person who doesn’t become a victim is your daughter?

If choosing to stop publishing a book with racist themes and images leads to even one kid understanding more about the nuance of race in America and the breath-taking extent of white privilege, that’s worth it too.

Would I rather the media spend time and money to bring American attention to bigger issues associated with this nation’s racism and rape culture? 100%. There are ENORMOUS fish to fry. Dr. Seuss is not an enormous fish. Potato head toys are not enormous fish. Pepe Le Pew is not an enormous fish. They’re not even big fish. They’re small. They’re tiny fish. They’re anchovies. But frying some fish is better than frying no fish.

Canceling Pepe Le Pew is not hurting anyone. Warner Brothers owns Pepe Le Pew. Warner Brothers owns nearly everything; they are not hurting for money. And canceling Pepe certainly isn’t hurting American kids. There are plenty of other kids’ shows to watch that are significantly less problematic. Just because you watched Pepe Le Pew and went on to be a properly respectful adult doesn’t mean there aren’t other kids out there who did internalize a harmful disrespect for consent. No, Pepe Le Pew probably isn’t single-handedly responsible for anyone’s decision to stalk or rape anyone else. But could a show reinforce the groundwork that ultimately leads a kid down a path where he is unable or unwilling to respect the boundaries of others? I mean, it’s not the craziest thing I’ve heard this week.

Canceling six total Dr. Seuss books that are already pretty obscure is not hurting anyone.

Changing the name of an already genderless potato toy to reflect that genderless-ness is not hurting anyone.

A brief recap: racism and rape culture are very real, very American issues.

If the decision to stop doing a thing doesn’t hurt anyone and may even save someone some hurt, why does that decision bother you?

Also, in all your frantic Facebook posting, make sure you are differentiating between “cancel culture” and consequences. When the media tosses around the phrase “cancel culture” it has this tone of finality that is, plainly, not realistic. Fads and trends move so quickly in the internet age that the idea that a group of people could “cancel” something permanently is just not possible. People who do or say racist things, though, should face consequences. People who do or say transphobic or homophobic things should face consequences. Consequences are one of the only ways we learn to do better. And again, that’s not my opinion, it’s science.

One of the consequences that can have the most impact is, you guessed it, losing money! In this capitalist hellscape, money talks. Boycotting and choosing how we spend our money are some of the most engaging ways to combat racist and homophobic garbage. When you have your temper tantrum because the company who owns a book with overtly racist imagery decides to stop publishing that book, that speaks volumes about your priorities. If you respond to that company’s decision by buying the book in question on eBay for $400, that speaks even louder volumes. What are you doing? WHY are you doing it? I’m guessing you don’t even know, and you should probably spend some time thinking about it before you flush away a chunk of your stimmy on a freaking RACIST KIDS’ BOOK.

All actions have consequences. All of our choices never affect just us. How we vote affects other people. How we spend our money affects other people. Spending our money on things that are problematic perpetuates the problem… whether it be racism, rape culture, homophobia, or transphobia… or so many other things this country desperately needs to address.

It’s human to not like change. Change is going to happen, though, regardless of whether or not we’re comfortable with it. In the information age, we have a remarkable opportunity to steer that change. Leaving behind racist relics is change, so it may be inherently uncomfortable. But change that moves our country away from racism and rape culture is GOOD change.

I am begging you. Use critical thinking… if you’re seeing a headline about something being canceled, look up WHY. Some of these headlines are absolute bunk… they’re shared just to get people all riled up and create American division. However, just like we *should* cancel lead paint, a children’s book with overtly racist images shouldn’t be published anymore and it’s weird if you disagree with that. Disagreeing with that decision, as silly as it may seem, perpetuates racism. I know how triggered y’all can get when someone suggests you might be perpetuating racism, but it is what it is. Do your research. Don’t spend your money on racist garbage. Be better.

I feel like this post is me just barking the exact same thing in different ways, but I also feel like there is so much more I could say.

I’ll leave you with this:

What will it take for Americans to weigh the threats of racism and homophobia the same way we weight the threat of lead paint? If it’s a matter of costing lives, well, the numbers speak for themselves.

[avrablake]

From the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week website:

Books unite us. Sharing stories important to us means sharing a part of ourselves. Books reach across boundaries and build connections between readers. Censorship, on the other hand, divides us and creates barriers.

[psychosibyl]

Twitter isn't letting people tag 1984...

I deleted the Twitter I’d briefly had yesterday, but I’ve heard and seen that from others.

I’ve worked in academia long enough and have heard enough to know it’s not at all going to stop at censorship. Suspensions, firings, and mandatory ideological training have all gone on for years there, and I think all of the above have been soft compared to what we’ll start to see. Notice too that Facebook and other social media sites have banned (and erased) major community platforms built on the foundation of people uniting despite differences.

Divide and conquer. It’s the oldest trick in the book and too many people were already awake with too many more waking up. Yet there are still those clinging to the absolutely asinine and disconnected ideas they’re fed. They regurgitate them without even stopping to think--something each side (note I didn’t say “both”) are guilty of to some degree, but only one of those sides has every major institution backing it or under its thumb, controls the information consumed by the public on a mass scale, and actively works against free speech, the ability--or more accurately, the possibility--of people to defend themselves, and their ability to fund themselves.

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”

The path straight to Hell usually is paved with people who have good intentions. The problem is that those intentions might be good only in theory, and only on the surface.

“In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind...”

Not too many years ago there are a lot of things I’d have called conspiracy. It’s unsettling just how often reality has surpassed those notions.

My goal isn’t to make anyone afraid, but if more people aren’t willing to take a step back and have the humility to realize they might be wrong, it’s going to get uglier than most can imagine. If not in one way, it’ll be in another.

[nerdygaymormon]

Moral Combat

​Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics—R. Marie Griffiths

I finished reading this book about how Christianity in the United States went from being mostly united on the topics of gender and sex at the beginning of the 20th Century to divided into 2 main camps by the end.

A series of issues served to open and then deepen a division in American Christians. This division is the basis of the culture war in the United States.

At the beginning of the 20th Century there was a national agreement on men as head of home with women submitting to his authority. Monogamous, heterosexual marriage was the only acceptable relationship. Straying from this order was shunned or often punished by law. 

Today we have on one side traditionalists who wish we still lived in a country where men are the wage earners & rule makers and the wife handles domestic affairs while being the nurturer of children. From their perspective, the following things threaten America’s greatness:

Women’s increasing participation outside of the home

Non-Christians becoming more common

Whites losing power & privilege

LGBT people upsetting gender roles

On the other side are progressives who want to undo patriarchy and thereby free women and others to make the most of their talents and abilities. The things that traditionalists view as threats are seen by progressives as opportunities to expand America’s greatness.

Given their two viewpoints, arguments on these divisive issues have often been framed as protecting religious liberty versus embracing the modern world.  

1910′s  women’s suffrage - Women voting would mean they have influence over issues outside the home, and this could increase their desire to know about & a be a part of those things. Many men didn’t like the idea that his wife could choose to vote for someone without consulting her husband

1920′s  getting women access to & information about birth control - Freeing women from the consequences of sex outside marriage was troubling. It also transformed the concept of sex to not be strictly tied to pregnancy, but something for enjoyment. It was believed that this would lead to better care of children because they are spaced out and wanted. Some religious leaders warned this takes away the choice from God of how many babies a woman would have. Some were concerned that the racial makeup of the nation would change if white women restricted the number of children they have.

1930′s  end of the obscenity laws - The Depression caused a drop in movie attendance. In response, film makers started making more dramatic and racy films as a way to boost attendance. When censors cracked down, average American attitudes towards censorship changed. Why should Catholics or any other religious group get to determine what the rest of the country can watch?

1940′s  interracial sex & relationships - Anthropology undid the idea that there are separate races and showed that we all come from common ancestors. This threatened religious teachings that had justified slavery and segregation. It also was seen as a challenge to the racial hierarchy of Southern society.

1950′s  findings about women’s sexual activity (Kinsey report) - Religious conservatives were upset to learn that a large percentage of women didn’t adhere to their strict teachings on sexual conduct. Liberal leaders used these findings to talk about the importance of joy in sexuality within marriage. Both groups began using forthright language to talk about sex, a change from what had been social norms

1960′s  sex education in public schools - Traditionalists wanted abstinence-only teachings as a way to reinforce their religious doctrines. Progressives viewed sex education as a way to inform teens of ways to prevent pregnancy & disease

1970′s & 1980′s  abortion - Many women had sought for ways to end unwanted pregnancies. Some women were unable to use contraception due to religious beliefs & because their husbands opposed it. Providing access to legal, safe abortions early in pregnancy was seen as an extension of contraception by progressives. Traditionalists viewed aborting even a small clump of cells as murder and it also removed the husband from the decision which undermined his role as head of the family.

1990′s  sexual harrassment - When Clarence Thomas was nominated for the US Supreme Court, Anita Hill came forward with allegations that she had been sexually harassed by him in the workplace. When Bill Clinton ran for the presidency, several women came forward to share instances where he sexually harassed them. Later it was revealed that as president, Bill Clinton had inappropriate relations with an intern.

What was interesting wasn’t that the traditionalists and progressives lined up on opposing sides, but that they switched sides depending on whether it was a Republican or a Democrat who was being accused.

2000′s  gay marriage - people of the same gender who marry cannot follow traditional gender roles. together they have to negotiate how to divvy up all the things that need to get done. They can raise children, which also is a challenge to the traditionalist view that a child needs a father & a mother.

[morebedsidebooks]

Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2021

The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2021. Of the 1597 books that were targeted, here are the most challenged, along with the reasons cited for censoring the books:

1.      Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe Reasons: Banned, challenged, and restricted for LGBTQIA+ content, and because it was considered to have sexually explicit images

2.      Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison Reasons: Banned and challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and because it was considered to be sexually explicit

3.      All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson Reasons: Banned and challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, profanity, and because it was considered to be sexually explicit

4.      Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez Reasons: Banned, challenged, and restricted for depictions of abuse and because it was considered to be sexually explicit

5.      The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas Reasons: Banned and challenged for profanity, violence, and because it was thought to promote an anti-police message and indoctrination of a social agenda

6.      The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie Reasons: Banned and challenged for profanity, sexual references and use of a derogatory term

7.      Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews Reasons: Banned and challenged because it was considered sexually explicit and degrading to women

8.      The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Reasons: Banned and challenged because it depicts child sexual abuse and was considered sexually explicit

9.      This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson Reasons: Banned, challenged, relocated, and restricted for providing sexual education and LGBTQIA+ content.

10.  Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin Reasons: Banned and challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and because it was considered to be sexually explicit. 

(courtesy of American Library Association)

[canchewread]

Editor’s note: this is going to be a very different sort of book review article than the ones I usually write; namely in that the main essay doesn’t include an actual book review.

For those of you who are curious - “Permanent Record” by Edward Snowden is an enjoyable read which I have no regrets about buying, even in hardcover. Although it’s true that there are no “new” revelations about the NSA mass surveillance program and part of the story Snowden is telling has already been told from the perspective of other people involved in the later stages of the tale, I disagree with the idea that the book presents “no new information.” The author’s impassioned arguments about the need to alter the fundamental functions and purpose of the internet, his clear insight into the reasons why online privacy rights were now as fundamentally essential to a free society as our already recognized rights and freedoms and finally the exposure of the thoughts, motivations and overall rationale that finally pushed Snowden to leak evidence of the NSA mass surveillance program are all fundamentally “new” bits of information - they just aren’t leaks.

All in all I’d say it’s a good book but it’s still a biography and as such you can probably afford to wait for the softcover, unless the CIA finds a way to ban it before then.

---

The Casualties of Cacophony

As those of you who read my post on Can't You Read yesterday already know, I recently purchased the new Edward Snowden biography and I've been reading it during smoke breaks for the past three days.

After hearing from numerous reviewers that the book contained "no new information" my primary motive here was personal enjoyment but even just the act of buying the book itself was telling me a story I wasn't listening to and wouldn't understand until this weekend. I'll explain:

On the day the Permanent Record was released in the country I'm staying in right now, I went out to my local bookstore to purchase it with tampered expectations and yet still, a certain amount of hopeful expectation.

Now before I continue further here I should mention that Americans who do not travel abroad are largely unaware of the tremendous amount of influence U.S. political media and ideological thought have over the (largely) white majority of the West in general and most Five Eyes countries in particular. Furthermore this influence is typically divided along the exact same "culture war" political lines that exist in the United States, although the degree to which they incite passions often varies from region to region - the average Canadian "conservative" cannot afford to be as rabid about opposing gun control laws as the average American "conservative" because culturally the idealized tradition of gun ownership does not exist there - but the idea, even without its systemic reinforcement, does.

I mention this because my local bookstore can be said to have a distinctly Americanized "liberal" set of sensibilities and ideas; although they would likely object to that statement as all Canadians vociferously object when you compare them to Americans. This is reflected in the "balanced" book selections on the shelf (which overwhelmingly consists of mainstream liberal, or conservative writers/thinkers and or Canadian authors) and in the sensibilities of the staff, management, and ownership I’ve encountered while shopping there; all of which were (as far as I can tell) fundamentally identical to those of your average white American Democrat.

I don't say any of these things to disparage them; the shop is a small, single-proprietor business and it's hardly surprising to anyone who understands class dynamics that a petite-bourgeoisie bookstore in a rural "conservative area" isn't going to be a hotbed of left wing thought or ideology. 

Yet despite all of this, I found myself somewhat shocked when the clerk behind the counter informed me that the stored hadn't ordered any copies of Ed Snowden's new biography - so much so that I did a double take. I asked again, if only to confirm that it wasn't a question of U.S. Government censorship or the fact that I was in a country that wasn't home so the release dates had changed - no, they simply hadn't ordered it.

For my part I assumed that was a careless mistake, after all even mainstream liberals had celebrated Snowden as a heroic whistleblower when the results of his revelations were appearing in corporate "liberal" news publications like the Washington Post and The Guardian. At that point (and while still not connecting the dots) I asked the store to order me a copy and helpfully suggested that they might want to order several copies for their shelf as this was the first time to my knowledge that Snowden would be presenting his own thoughts about one of the more important scandals and abuses of government power in our lifetime.

Then I innocently went on my way and back to my busy life for a week until the book finally arrived. As it turned out (and at my insistence) they'd ordered two copies, one of which was mine.

This decision would continue to baffle me for several long hours after I left the bookstore and indeed, none of it would start to make sense until I actually started reading Snowden's book - and with that act, found that the flood of memory about the NSA mass surveillance leaks and the political circus surrounding it, came rushing back to my mind like a raging river of madness and deceit.

There is, especially for the scholar, something altogether terrifying about reading something that you already knew and realizing, as you're in the very act of reading it, that you had for all intents and purposes forgotten something important that you were never supposed to forget. After all you can’t rightly analyze society without analyzing the history that helped shape that society, and you certainly can’t analyze history that you don’t even remember.

This creeping and altogether horrifying feeling of morally inexcusable “forgetting” became my constant companion as I reviewed Snowden's work, in his own words, while reading Permanent Record. I'm not just talking about the NSA spying and online data collection programs either; those I readily remembered, although I can't necessarily say the same for the public at large around me. As Snowden recounted James Clapper lying under oath to Congress, the (now all but completely deposed) wave of Democratic Socialist governments that opposed American internet surveillance and even the U.S. government’s efforts to trap the author in Moscow so he wouldn't fly to Ecuador, I slowly realized what I'd forgotten.

I'd forgotten the sheer breadth and open brazenness of the Pig Empire's war on not just privacy, but the truth. A war conducted not just against the whistleblowers and those rare few souls in the media who would seek to help them expose abuses, violations and atrocities conducted by our governments and the ruling classes of our societies, but also on each of us, on our own feelings, our own memories and dare I say it, our own psychological well-being. A war we are all losing as I write this to you today.

To understand what I mean by that however we’re going to have to go back to the bookstore and answer the question I should have been asking the day I tried to buy a copy of Permanent Record I the first place. That question is of course “what changed?” If only six years ago, Edward Snowden was a hero in liberal media (The Guardian U.S., the Washington Post) for exposing mass surveillance and abuses by the NSA and various arms of U.S. intelligence, why was I getting a weird side-eye for even asking about the book in an ostensibly “liberal” bookstore – especially in Canada?

While I won’t claim to be psychic, I think it’s fair to say that what have largely changed are mainstream liberal attitudes towards leaks, whistleblowers and the larger American national security state. Somewhere in the culture war-fueled anger about losing the 2016 U.S election, among stories of malignant foreign hackers, Hillary’s leaked emails, the Russianization of Wikileaks, the demonization of Julian Assange, the lionization of Barack Obama and a new fascist president’s ongoing war with “true liberal patriots” in his own FBI and CIA, the original signal had been lost. More accurately, the past on some deep and purely emotional level in the larger liberal zeitgeist had been replaced with a new communal understanding that my alienation from mainstream liberal thought had prevented me from recognizing until now. The word ‘replaced’ rather than ‘forgotten’ is important here because due to social pressures and the normal human tendency to forget our own embarrassing mistakes, the memory of Snowden’s time as a brave hero in the liberal reckoning is at best extremely hazy and more often than not, completely gone from the minds of most observers.

To the clerk behind the counter I wasn’t asking for a biography about a heroic whistleblower, but instead a bound volume of lies written by a traitor whose very existence represented a threat to their now-entrenched image of the iconic and canonized last liberal President (Barack Obama) and whose “decision” to hide from “justice” in the now thoroughly hated Russia proved where his true allegiances had always lain. Besides, even if in some unlikely event Snowden was innocent and Obama had gone after the wrong guy - leakers and traitors represent a grave threat to our beloved intelligence agents who are, as you all know from hours of repetition on Rachel Maddow, the only thing standing between everything you love about America and the sinister iron grip of Vladimir Putin.

From the mainstream liberal perspective I might as well have been asking them to fetch me a copy of the latest work by Lee Harvey Oswald at that point. Nothing about Snowden or his earth-shattering leaks had changed, but because the larger feelings about Snowden had been altered, both the leaked information and the author himself were now perceived in a new and wholly less favorable light.

In the often quoted but rarely understood science-fiction novel about authoritarian states entitled 1984, author George Orwell’s central character Winston chillingly observes that “who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.”

What Orwell meant by this is that the powers of the day control our understanding of, perceptions about and feelings towards the past and in doing so can have a tremendous amount of influence on our actions in the future. Of course in his novel the Ingsoc government had absolute control to write and re-write the historical record of society but the author was also engaging a metaphor that cast light on the nature of this truism in even a “liberal democratic” nation like Britain in the late 1940’s. It is not enough to simply acknowledge that “history is written by the victors” but one must also be aware that the writing and analysis of our society’s historical record (which is often conducted in real time by the news media) is largely conducted by upper class writers who are ultimately employed in the service of some aspect of establishment power or another – whether we’re talking about mainstream corporate media companies, the American government itself or the elite educational institutions that churn out historians, journalists and the general class of television punditry.

At this point you might find yourself protesting that despite their upper class backgrounds, the media, publishing houses and academic institutions don’t work for the government and in some broader sense that’s true, but in terms of the facts on the ground in the war against truth, it’s also hopelessly naïve. Setting aside the obvious reality that corporate media and elite educational institutes are themselves part of what any sane person would identify as “establishment power” the fact is that the American government does actively seek to influence the records of our past, both in real time and in its own files.

We know from revelations like “Operation Mockingbird” and the periodic unmasking of intelligence agency employees in the public eye that at least some of “the news” is directly written by folks with very clear ties to U.S. intelligence. From incidents like the Valerie Plame Affair, we know that the government sometimes purposely leaks top secret information to the media for its own nefarious purposes. We know that official government sources and interpretations of events are almost invariably broadcast unaltered and without serious challenge in mainstream media outlets - how many stories in the past month have you read that contained information from “a senior administration source” or “an undisclosed official at the State Department?” I’ll bet it’s happened significantly more times than you’ll remember.

This reinforcement of the establishment line even filters all the way down to your local news, where police department summaries of “officer involved shootings” are routinely broadcast as if they were the established facts of the case with few, if any questions asked about whether or not the department might be somehow motivated to lie about why some cop shot someone in broad daylight, again.

Not sinister enough for you? Okay, how about the Bush administration’s decision to retroactively classify thousands upon thousands of government documents and legal opinions that had already been released to the public, thereby effectively erasing America’s own arguments against the illegal activities the administration engaged in - like mass surveillance, extraordinary rendition (read: kidnapping) and the now rarely-mentioned and almost forgotten CIA torture program? Sort of puts the now infamous Karl Rove quote “we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do” into a new and terrifying perspective, doesn’t it?

Please keep in mind that these are only the direct ways the state, virtually any Pig Empire state, influences the media and thereby our collective real-time record of history; there are quite literally a myriad a indirect ways the state influences the media you consume as well. A good example might be simple access to the information a journalist needs to write stories; if a news outlet is consistently critical of the government and skeptical of the claims made by its officials, how long do you think they’ll keep getting off the record statements, leaks and interviews from people aligned with that government? How about the right-leaning billionaires who own modern media companies, do you think they align with the interests and power of the government? Well they probably should in America at least - thanks to the magic of corporate lobbying and Citizens United they own most of the politicians who work in that government after all. Once you realize that Jeff Bezos owns both the Washington Post and Amazon, the latter of which currently has the cloud computing contract for the CIA, the idea that you can separate establishment power in the state, from establishment power in the private sector (even in private media) starts to look more than just a little bit obtuse.

Of course as Michael Parenti discussed at length in his still spectacular 1986 work “Inventing Reality: the Politics of the Mass Media” not even a corporate news outlet can lie away some stories without irreparably damaging their credibility. Presented with the opportunity for a scoop, irrefutable evidence and public outcry bolstered by outrage among even the average “liberal” voter the corporate media was forced to turn against their own political allies and go along for the ride on the “Edward Snowden is the greatest hero of our time” train - although not without fastidiously printing government lies and denials as if they were fact in the very same articles that proved Snowden’s accusations.

Over time however and under the relentless crushing weight of op-ed after op-ed, an edit here, an omission there, one tiny smear and suggestive bit of framing at a time and the story starts to change. You can’t actually alter history but by subtly washing Snowden’s story in the ongoing smears against Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and other whistleblowers while casually omitting the subject or context of the author’s still mindbogglingly important revelations, you can start to change feelings about the past and the rest is basically a self-reinforcing cycle with a highly predictable outcome.

Memories of complex technical information about online surveillance fade, and the constantly reinforced feeling that leakers and whistleblowers are harming our brave and decidedly “anti-Trump” intelligence agencies in their battle against the dastardly Russian menace and Vladimir Putin, takes their place - until one day, just over six years after Edward Snowden risked his life and freedom to blow the whistle on an ever growing American police state, some clerk at a small town liberal bookstore is eyeing you up as a potential terrorist when you ask about purchasing the Snowden biography in broad daylight.

Understood in that light, perhaps the most alarming thing about Orwell’s quote as spoken by Winston in 1984 is the fact that the author didn’t know about and had no way of conceiving of the internet. Here after all is an environment where editing the record of the past is as easy as pulling down one article and publishing a new one under the same URL as before - and if you don’t think that is happening online, even in stories published by major news corporations you simply haven’t been paying very much attention.

Nor could Orwell have imagined that between social media, the comments section and twenty-four hour cable news programming, we would create a media environment that intrinsically favors outrageous or controversial lies over “boring” and nuanced truths. He could not have predicted that eventually the average American media consumer would become so bombarded with marketing, propaganda and contradictory information that all too often the facts of current events would be lost, replaced only by a wave of vague and hard to pin down emotions that in turn color the observer’s future observations - even observations about the now forgotten facts themselves.

One man however did see it coming and long before the internet existed in its present form - Canadian professor and communication theorist Marshall McLuhan. Combining his study of the effects advertising had on society with some alarmingly prescient observations about the fundamental ways “electronic media” was altering man’s relationship with the world, McLuhan predicted a society totally immersed in a cocoon of endless media content which served more to inspire feelings and emotions than to inform - an idea partially captured in his most famous phrase “the medium is the message.” In the case of ongoing Snowden coverage in the mainstream media, the contents of the stories themselves (and indeed, the author’s act of heroism on behalf of global society) have clearly taken a backseat in favor of defending the national security state and establishment power as a whole over time.

Although this probably isn’t what McLuhan ultimately meant by his famous phrase one can certainly say with a certain amount of bitter irony that in the Snowden story at least, the medium has indeed become the message - the problem is that the medium, corporate liberal media that directly influences mainstream liberal attitudes and opinions, doesn’t like the message our intrepid whistleblower delivered and now after years of subtle propaganda, neither do most of the people consuming that media.

Perhaps the saddest part of it all is that reading “Permanent Record” makes it clear that Snowden himself has almost no idea that this massive cultural shift in attitude towards him has even occurred. Frankly, how could he? Trapped in exile, he didn’t directly experience the slow and often subtle media reconstruction of public confidence in the national security state over these past six years. Having been purposely shut out by both the American government and the mainstream media, Snowden was unable to participate effectively in the ongoing discussion around whistleblowers and the demonization of leaks. In far away Moscow it may not have even occurred to him that hostile feelings towards Julian Assange on behalf of newly-anointed liberal saint Hillary Clinton would poison the liberal discourse towards all other “leakers” like himself.

In some ways the war against truth as it pertains to Edward Snowden has already been won by the national security state. Sure the author’s leaks promoted some legal restrictions on the NSA’s power but even Snowden openly admits that this isn’t nearly enough to effectively stop government mass surveillance. Indeed, Snowden himself and a few of the more famous journalists who told his story are really the only triggers that jog the public memory left in this story. The author exists as a living reminder that freedom and democracy are a sham in a post-internet world and that’s why he will never be pardoned and never be allowed to return home so long as this establishment remains in power - not just the government, but the whole corrupt oligarchy and all of its elite corpse merchants.

All wars, even propaganda wars, have causalities.

- nina illingworth Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog. Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

[nedsecondline]

Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.

Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.