The Wrongologist

The Daily Escape:

Ashokan Reservoir, Ulster County, NY – February 2024 photo by Dan Mish

The GOP effort at book banning isn’t going well. DeSantis acts SHOCKED that his punitive censorship laws have resulted in chaos and excessive book banning in Florida public schools. DeSantis knows he went too far. Mr. Never Back Down, is in fact, backing down:

“With objecting – if you go to a school board meeting objecting. If you have a kid in school, okay. But if you’re somebody who doesn’t have a kid in school and you’re gonna object to 100 books? No, I don’t think that’s appropriate. So I think the legislature is interested in limiting what the number of challenges you can do, and maybe making it be contingent on whether you actually have kids in school or not. We just want to make sure we’re not trying to incentivize frivolous objections or any type of games being played.”

But don’t get your hopes up. The Propaganda Professor (PP) takes a look at book banning, riffing on a National Review article “Book Curation is Not Censorship”:

“Curation is the process whereby a venue (library, museum, theater, etc.) decides what products to offer its patrons….But curation means making such decisions…on the basis of such factors as quality, relevance, timeliness, and constraints of space and budget. Those factors for the most part do not figure into with what is happening in Florida, Texas and elsewhere. Books are being pulled just because someone chooses to find them offensive….And those choices aren’t being made autonomously. They’re being made under intense pressure from government bodies and their proxy agitators.”

While denying that they’re really banning books, Right-wingers offer attempts to justify the bans they say that they’re not really doing. They often brand the offending book as “pornographic”. They slap the “pornography” label on anything that makes any vague reference to sex. Another common claim is that the books being attacked are guilty of somehow “indoctrinating” kids into…something. Usually some combination of “liberalism”, “leftism”, “communism” or “anti-Americanism”.

More:

“There are two types of books in particular to which they are eager to award the Indoctrination Trophy. One is anything with a gay or trans character, or that even makes reference to a gay or trans character….Such books, they…warn, are indoctrinating kids into the gay ‘lifestyle’…”

A huge problem is banning books that have too much truth about racism. If you write about the horrors of our shameful past, you can expect to be branded as someone who “hates white people”. One of the books removed for “review” was a biography of baseball legend Roberto Clemente because it mentioned the racism he encountered in baseball. Above all is the complaint that so much literacy will indoctrinate our kids into wokeism or leftism — or whatever FOX says is the equivalent du jour.

More from the PP: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Getting back to National Review, Daniel Buck…is particularly appalled that anyone should (as some have done) liken the situation [book banning] to anything that happened in the Third Reich. After all, you may have heard how the Nazis responded to books they didn’t like.”

But that kind of thing IS happening. Valentina Gomez a GOP candidate for Missouri Secretary of State posted a video of herself burning two books about the LGBTQ community with a flame thrower:

In the video she says:

“These are Missouri library books. When I am in office, they will burn.”

The sad thing is that this isn’t the fringe of the Republican Party. It’s become the mainstream.

We can’t begin the weekend without lamenting the death of Alexei Navalny, opposition leader against Putin, who Russian state media says died in prison in Siberia. In 2020, Navalny was poisoned by the Russian state. After he recovered in Germany, Navalny faced the decision whether to go back to Russia, where he was certain to be arrested. Or he could have remained free in the west. He returned home and was sentenced to 30 years in prison..

Wrongo is only surprised that he survived as long as he did.

Navalny loved his country so much he allowed himself to be martyred in an attempt to free it from Putin’s oppression. Imagine the fortitude required to survive an attempted assassination, only to surrender to the assassins and take the fight to them. He was an amazing man who should be a role model for activists everywhere.

On this unhappy note, it’s on to the weekend. At the Mansion of Wrong, we had about 11” of snow to dig out from. And the weekend weather calls for high winds and low temperatures, meaning it’s time for indoor sports.

But let’s take a break from whatever Speaker Johnson is doing by sending the House home for two weeks when there’s so much legislating to be done; or why guns can be open carried by juveniles in Missouri.  Instead, let’s try to gather ourselves for what promises to be another roller-coaster ride of a week to come.

Start by grabbing a chair by a south-facing window and watch and listen to Playing For Change’s cover of Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train” featuring Yusuf himself playing white piano in an open air setting in Istanbul, along with Keb’ Mo’, Rhiannon Giddens and 23 other musicians from 12 countries. Maybe this 1971 anthem of hope and unity will say something to the 2024 version of us:

Also, Wrongo and Ms. Right watched the Netflix documentary “The Greatest Night in Pop”, about the making of the funds raising tune, “We Are The World”. This shows the biggest music stars of the time coming together to perform a song about hope and the collective strength of humanity. It’s worth your time.