Day: September 17, 2006

The number of books threatened with removal from library shelves dropped last year to its lowest total on record, with 405 challenges reported to the American Library Association.

Of course, what the ALA tracks are efforts to have books removed from libraries, not successes at keeping those books off the shelf to in the first place. If a school district, for instance, has a policy of never even obtaining certain books, there’s not going to be a fight over banning it.

As writer and artist Brian Bendis notes in a recent interview with comedian Patton Oswalt:

One of my in-laws was in Florida and I was down there and I had a lengthy conversation with the retailer who told me that his favorite comic book was Alias, but that he could not carry it on the shelf because the religious right would shut him down and that they come into the store on a weekly basis just to make sure that his shelves are clean….

[T]o have that conversation is such an eye opener because you can bang your head against the wall like, “Why doesn’t this sell more? Why doesn’t this sell more? Oh, there are whole parts of the country that can’t carry it. That’s a good reason.”

The question, then, is this: are we actually seeing fewer banned books, or simply fewer books that those who would do the banning might find objectionable?

“If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens,” Wynne is reported to have said, “then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation. [Because] if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press.”

Oh no, we wouldn’t want that. Because America is so beloved right now by the world press. It’s nothing but flowers and puppy dogs overseas.

We’re torturing and indefinitely imprisoning the citizens of other countries in wartime situations nearly every day. Does Wynne want to extend his concerns there as well? By his reasoning, shouldn’t we also be willing to torture and lock up American citizens without trial or due process before we take those tactics elsewhere? (I mean, more so than we’re doing already.) Otherwise we could be vilified, right?

And if we’re not willing to use those tactics closer to home, doesn’t that just send everybody else the message that we think those tactics are, well, kind of wrong?

Heck, if you want to take Wynne’s comments to their logical conclusion, we should be plenty willing to use lethal weapons on American citizens, too, before we use those weapons abroad. Honestly, if it’s good enough for the countries we invade…

Look, I’m not saying that nonlethal weapons liked high-power microwave devices are necessarily a bad thing. Or even that their potential use for crowd control is some kind of Orwellian nightmare come to life. I have concerns, sure, but that’s not the issue. What I’m suggesting is that maybe, just maybe, we should reconsider testing those devices out on anybody, including American citizens, before it’s determined if they’re actually safe or not.

Best-selling author Michael Crichton’s new book, Next, a futuristic thriller set in the present…”

It’s a little like setting a present-day story in the past. Or writing an historical novel that’s set in the future. (Actually, I think Gene Wolfe already sort of did that.)