Guest Essay
The Right in America is busy banning books in formerly progressive
states like Iowa. Meanwhile the Left is banning speakers from
universities that formerly prized academic freedom. The New York
Times righteously decries what the Right is doing, the Wall Street
Journal delights in making fun of what the Left is doing. We live in a
censorious age in which extremists from both sides seem to think their
main job in these culture wars is to protect the kiddies from
information they routinely get in far more graphic form from the
Internet and social media every hour of every day. How juvenile the
behavior of adults who regulate books and speech in such futile
fashion, and how hollow the automatic responses of our major
newspapers and cable channels, which cannot resist their own
ideological impulses to attack the sins the other side commits.
A modest proposal: take the men out of the legislatures and
newsrooms and put women in charge—of everything. Sure, there are a
few extremist women who contribute to our divided society, but let’s
face it, guys, it is men who pass the vast majority of silly and destructive
rules and perpetrate the worst ideological crimes. Men are peculiarly
unsuited to the job of responsible governing. As someone once said,
what men love most is the remote control of their television sets. It
perfectly combines their two central traits: they are remote from
human emotion and understanding, and they want nothing more than
to control them. Hapless! Hopeless! They sit at a distance and push
the clicker to change the channel, cut off the sound, get their way from
afar.
Seriously, can’t we begin to move the extremes out of leadership and
put moderate people, mostly women who care, in responsible
positions? We would be so much better off. And so would our kids,
who need to be exposed to good literature that raises their sights and
introduces them to challenging topics and scenes, even risqué ones
that make some parents uncomfortable. One of the most intelligent
statements on book banning comes from Bridgette Exman, an assistant
superintendent of curriculum and instruction for public schools in
Mason City, Iowa, which now makes it a crime for librarians to keep
books on the shelves with racy passages. “This summer I became the
book-burning monster of Iowa” is the title of her essay (NYT Sept. 1,
2023), a smart and tough dismemberment of the arguments made by
the Iowa legislature in its law forbidding libraries to carry certain books.
Read it and don’t weep, get angry.
By the same token, if your child’s college or university is into banning
speakers, remind the administration that academic freedom is a
bedrock reason why American higher education is so good, the envy of
the world and the place where the rest of the world wants to come for
research and instruction. If a speaker makes college students cringe, let
them fire back, not cringe, argue, not shrink. How else do they learn to
defend their positions and broaden their views?
OK, enough pontificating. If you are in the modest middle, please
speak up and take action. We need you--now. As my father used to
say, “moderation in everything, even in moderation.”