Don’t Weep, Just Read ’Em
The attack on Salman Rushdie is the inevitable result of book banning from efforts.
Whether book banning or book burning is sanctioned by the state or by pressure groups or by individuals, it is evil.
The militarization of book banning has but one end, and that is the violent suppression of all non-complaint belief and the enforcement of party line.
It has no place especially in a free society, for if some books are banned, society is not free but captive to the whim and power of a few.
Of course, book banners always couch their efforts in high rhetoric. They’re always trying to save the young and innocent from degenerates.
They want to save our children from those who want to “groom” them for unsavory behavior.
And who, I want to know, groomed the book banners?
Who taught them that this was proper behavior?
Who perverted them?
My daughter Erica gave me a T-shirt for Father’s Day. I wear it a lot. It says, “I read banned books.”
I probably won’t be reading Salman Rushdie, though. I read The Satanic Verses when it came out and was not impressed. But I defend the right of others to read it, even if I didn’t care for it.
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Giving a sworn deposition the other day, Trump pleads guilty more than 400 times.
OK, technically he pleads the Fifth Amendment, the right to avoid self-incrimination. Non-technically that means he’s GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY.
He once claimed that he could murder someone in broad daylight in front of many witnesses and still get off.
Given the rabid response of his followers to the law enforcement raid on his Florida compound, he’s probably right.
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The Trump lie machine says the FBI planted evidence and searched Melanie’s clothes. He is a liar for all seasons. Still, people believe this stuff.
The human capacity for self-delusion and self-destruction is sad but borne out by millennia of experience. The big question today is whether the American experiment in self-rule will survive or crash into fascism.
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Recently spent two great weeks with family in cabins strung along a lovely trout stream in Colorado. Our favorite place. The time went by so quickly!
Before we’d gone there for one-week trips. Now we wonder how we ever got so much activity crammed into just one week. Maybe that was it. Maybe we crammed things in because we had to because we had so little time together. Now we’re all ready for another two weeks. Not sure when we can make that happen, but we all want it to be soon.
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One thing our Colorado experience did was reinforce this conviction: I do not want to live in a world without wi-fi.
Arapaho Ranch, where we stayed in Nederland, just up Boulder Canyon from Boulder, has free wi-fi, but in some cabins the reception is not always robust, especially when several people were online at once.
I survived somehow, but I have the need for speed and the desire for connection.
To answer that frequent Facebook meme, I could overwinter in that little remote cabin – but only if it had good wi-fi.
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Speaking of Facebook… No, this has been a good day. No need to taint it.
