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In Georgia, book banners are on the march:

A suburban county that sparked a public outcry when its libraries temporarily eliminated funding for Spanish-language fiction is now being asked to ban Harry Potter books from its schools.

Laura Mallory, a mother of four, told a hearing officer for the Gwinnett County Board of Education on Tuesday that the popular fiction books are an “evil” attempt to indoctrinate children in the Wicca religion.

Board of Education attorney Victoria Sweeny said that if schools were to remove all books containing reference to witches, they would have to ban “Macbeth” and “Cinderella.”

Nooooooo!!! Don’t give them any ideas!

From Crooks and Liars:

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side. –Aristotle

If I’ve learned anything in my years on the internet, it’s that you shouldn’t believe everything you read. So I went looking for some sort of verification of this quote. I found the quote itself in many places, but my cursory search didn’t turn up any attribution that said precisely where in Aristotle’s writings to look for it.

Aristotle’s works are out of copyright, so I looked for complete texts online. I found one collection at MIT, and felt this quote was likely to be from Politics. (I found another translation here.)

There was no verbatim match. He wrote in Greek, so I searched for individual words from the quote, and finally found it, in Politics, Book V, Chapter XI.

Aristotle discusses two kinds of tyrants: those who rule by terror, and those who pretend to care about the welfare of their subjects. The quote is about the second kind — the benevolent tyrant. (He distinguishes tyrants from kings who actually do care about the welfare of their subjects.)

This quote, from the beginning of the chapter, is also interesting:

[R]oyalty is preserved by the limitation of its powers. The more restricted the functions of kings, the longer their power will last unimpaired…

I can’t help thinking that Bush and Rove, if they ever read Aristotle, skipped over some parts.

Via Boing Boing: Last week a Texas man asked his daughter’s school district to drop Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s novel about a future world where “firemen” don’t fight fires, but burn books.

“It’s just all kinds of filth,” said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read “Fahrenheit 451.” “The words don’t need to be brought out in class. I want to get the book taken out of the class.”

Last week, you may recall, was the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week. How much do you suppose the ALA had to pay Mr. Verm to illustrate the problem so effectively?

Today is the start of Banned Books Week, and I can’t think of a better way to observe this week than to read George Orwell’s 1984:

Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper — the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

Or, you could read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Catcher in the Rye. Lord of the Flies. The Color Purple. The Outsiders.

Any of the Harry Potter books. Any of the Goosebumps series. Or maybe Where’s Waldo?

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, all about a different kind of totalitarian society.

Or you could read Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.

Any of those would be good. They’re all frequently-challenged books.

Censorship is non-partisan. There are books challenged by liberals, books challenged by conservatives, books challenged by the ultra-religious and books challenged by atheists.

I generally like to read in a nice quiet place, but I like to read banned and challenged books as publicly as possible — poke my finger in the eye of the people who would like to make these books unavailable, so to speak. And say, as loudly and clearly as possible, thought is not a crime, and:

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

Books, books, books!

From the very beginning of Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine comes this quote from Thomas Jefferson:

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience quotes Professor Robert G. Vaughn summarizing Alan Westin:

Authoritarian governments are identified by ready government access to information about the activities of citizens and by extensive limitations on the ability of citizens to obtain information about the government.

See, if the people aren’t well-informed, they can’t be trusted with their own government, and that means full employment for those who keep tabs on the citizens.

Finally, a long passage from Paul Krugman’s 2003 book The Great Unraveling:

Back in 1957, Henry Kissinger … published his doctoral dissertation, A World Restored. One wouldn’t think that a book about the diplomatic efforts of Metternich and Castlereagh is relevant to U.S. politics in the twenty-first century. But the first three pages of Kissinger’s book sent chills down my spine, because they seem all too relevant to current events.

In those first few pages, Kissinger describes the problems confronting a heretofore stable diplomatic system when it is faced with a “revolutionary power” — a power that does not accept that system’s legitimacy…. It seems clear to me that one should regard America’s right-wing movement — which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media — as a revolutionary power in Kissinger’s sense. That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.

Am I overstating the case? In fact, there’s ample evidence that key elements of the coalition that now runs the country believe that some long-established American political and social institutions should not, in principle, exist — and do not accept the rules that the rest of us have taken for granted.

… If you read the literature emanating from the Heritage Foundation, which drives the Bush administration’s economic ideology, you discover a very radical agenda: Heritage doesn’t just want to scale back New Deal and Great Society programs, it regards the very existence of those programs as a violation of basic principles.

Or consider foreign policy. Since World War II the United States has built its foreign policy around international institutions, and has tried to make it clear that it is not an old-fashioned imperialist power, which used military force as it sees fit. But if you follow the foreign policy views of the neo-conservative intellectuals who fomented the war with Iraq, you learn they have contempt for all that — Richard Perle, chairman of a key Pentagon advisory board, dismissed the “liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.” They aren’t hesitant about the use of force; one prominent thinker close to the administration, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, declared that “we are a warlike people and we love war.” …

… The separation of church and state is one of the fundamental principles of the U.S. Constitution. But Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, has told constituents that he is in office to promote a “biblical worldview” … (DeLay has also denounced the teaching of evolution in schools, going so far as to blame that teaching for the Columbine school shootings.)

There’s even some question about whether the people running the country accept the idea that legitimacy flows from the democratic process. Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal famously praised the “bourgeois riot” in which violent protesters shut down a vote recount in Miami. (The rioters, it was later revealed, weren’t angry citizens; they were paid political operatives.) Meanwhile, according to his close friend Don Evans, now the secretary of commerce, George W. Bush believes that he was called by God to lead the nation. Perhaps this explains why the disputed election of 2000 didn’t seem to inspire any caution or humility in the part of the victors. Consider Justice Antonin Scalia’s response to a student who asked how he felt making the Supreme Court decision that threw the election to Bush. Was it agonizing? Did Scalia worry about the consequences? No: “It was a wonderful feeling,” he declared.

Suppose, for a moment, that you took the picture I have just painted seriously. You would conclude that the people now in charge really don’t like America as it is. If you combine their apparent agendas, the goal would seem to be something like this: a country that basically has no social safety net at home, which relies mainly on military force to enforce its will abroad, in which schools don’t teach evolution but do teach religion and — possibly — in which elections are only a formality.

Yet those who take the hard-line rightists now in power at their word, and suggest that they may really attempt to realize such a radical goal, are usually accused of being “shrill,” of going over the top. Surely, says the conventional wisdom, we should discount the rhetoric: the goals of the right are more limited than this picture suggests. Or are they?

Back to Kissinger: his description of a baffled response of established powers in the face of revolutionary challenge works equally well as an account of how the American political and media establishment has responded to the radicalism of the Bush administration over the past two years:

Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent, they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework. the defenders of the status quo therefore tend to begin by treating the revolutionary power as if its protestations were merely tactical; as if it really accepted the existing legitimacy by overstated its case for bargaining purposes; as if it were motivated by specific grievances to be assuaged by limited concessions. Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane…. But it is the essence of a revolutionary power that it possesses the courage of its convictions, that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its principles to their ultimate conclusion.

As I said, this passage sent chills down my spine, because it explains so well the otherwise baffling process by which the administration has been able to push radical policies through, with remarkably little scrutiny or effective opposition.

In recent months, some Republicans have tried to back away from Bush and some of the policies Congress has been rubber-stamping for years. Mustn’t lose control of the House or the Senate in November’s elections. If they manage to hold their majorities by even a single vote, rest assured their radical agenda will be right back on the front burner.

Rev. Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics, tells how to recognize members of Congress among the many people on Capitol Hill: they’re the ones holding a wet finger in the air, testing which way the wind is blowing.

The great practitioners of real social change, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, understood something very important. They knew that you don’t change a society by merely replacing one wet-fingered politician with another. You change a society by changing the wind.

Wallis says that shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, King went to the White House to urge President Lyndon Johnson to take the next step, a voting rights act that was essential for real change. Johnson told King he had used up all his political capital to pass the Civil Rights Act, and it would be years before a voting rights law could be passed.

King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began organizing — in a sleeply little town nobody had ever heard of, called Selma, Alabama.

On one fateful day, King and the SCLC leaders marched right across the Edmond Pettis Bridge, alongside the people of Selma, to face the notorious Sherriff Jim Clark and his virtual army of angry white police. On what would be called Bloody Sunday, a young man (and now congressman from Atlanta) named John Lewis was beaten almost to death, and many others were injured or jailed.

Two weeks later, in response to that brutal event, hundreds of clergy from all across the nation and from every denomination came to Selma and joined in the Selma to Montgomery march….

The whole nation was watching. The eyes of America were focused on Selma, as they had been on Birmingham before the civil rights law was passed. And after the historic Selma to Montgomery march for freedom, it took only five months, not five or ten years, to pass a new voting rights act: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King had changed the wind.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson writes about a moment of clarity in Washington:

Once in a while the fog machine that’s kept on “high” around here to obscure everyone’s real intentions breaks down. There’s always a mad rush to crank it up again, but for the briefest moment we can see our elected representatives for what they really are, not what they pretend to be. Wednesday we had one of those rare high-definition moments, when the House Republican caucus defied its leaders and refused to back renewal of the Voting Rights Act.

That tells you about all you need to know, doesn’t it?

…

The renewal probably could have won easy approval on the House floor, since Democrats would have voted for it, but Hastert’s policy is to not bring out any bill that lacks majority support from Republicans, so he had no choice but to yank it.

So much for the erstwhile “party of Lincoln.”

Sometimes you may need to change the wind. But there are other times when all that’s needed is to throw the bums out. This, clearly, is one of those times.

The PBS program Frontline recently observed 25 years of AIDS by airing a 2-part, 4-hour program on the subject. Very enlightening. I especially liked this, from Rev. W. Franklin Richardson of Grace Baptist Church, about churches that turned their backs on AIDS and AIDS sufferers:

“Bad Bible” is what I called it. We used to do Bad Bible, and make HIV some kind of plague that God had sent upon homosexuals. It was a terrible time for the church.

In his book God’s Politics, Jim Wallis tells how he and several fellow seminary students “scoured the Old and New Testaments for every single reference to poor people, to wealth and poverty, to injustice and opression, and to what the response to all those subjects was to be for the people of God.” They found thousands of verses.

After we completed our study, we all sat in a circle to discuss how the subject had been treated in the various churches in which we had grown up. Astoundingly, but also tellingly, not one of us could remember even one sermon on the poor from the pulpit of our home churches. In the Bible, the poor were everywhere; yet the subject was not to be found in our churches.

Then we decided to try what became a famous experiment. One member of our group took an old Bible and a new pair of scissors and began the long process of literally cutting out every single biblical text about the poor. It took him a long time.

…

When the zealous seminarian was done with all his editorial cuts, that old Bible would hardly hold together, it was so sliced up. It was literally falling apart in our hands. What we had done was to create a Bible full of holes.

I began taking that damaged and fragile Bible out with me when I preached. I’d hold it up high above American congregations and say, “Brothers and sisters, this is our American Bible; it is full of holes.”

It seems to me there’s a lot of Bad Bible going around these days, and the proponents of Bad Bible seem awfully quick to call down condemnation on those who resist.

Susan B. Anthony was onto something:

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

Too busy to read? From email, here are four books that won’t cut into your busy schedule.

Jonathan Alter has written The Defining Moment, a new book about Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days as president. Last night on The Colbert Report, he talked about Roosevelt and George W. Bush:

Alter: Before they were president, they actually had a lot in common. They both came from these aristocratic families, famous names, relatives who were president. They were both derided with the exact same epithet: lightweight. That’s what they called FDR: Feather Duster Roosevelt. But when they got to office, they responded very differently.

Colbert: Why’d they call him that? Why’d they call him the Feather Duster?

Alter: Because they thought that he didn’t have much upstairs, amazingly enough. We think of him as this marbleized…

Colbert: That’s the first thing I’ve liked about this guy. So you’re saying he didn’t overthink problems?

Alter: No. He absolutely did not overthink them.

Colbert: He went from the gut?

Alter: He went from a combination of the gut — he was very instinctive — but he also was like a vacuum cleaner of information. Unlike Bush, he really wanted to know a lot — he was extremely open-minded, and he was constantly picking people’s brains — that’s what they called the Brain Trust — and finding out whether they could help him make better decisions. The other thing is that, you know, FDR put performance ahead of loyalty, and I think one of President Bush’s problems is he puts loyalty ahead of performance.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was on The Colbert Report, promoting her new book, The Mighty and the Almighty:

Albright: When I started writing this book, I thought that George Bush was an anomaly — that he really was different than all of American history — and when I went back andf looked at it all again, you’re actually right. We’re a country that was started by people who wanted to escape religious persecution. They then — whole “Manifest Destiny” and takeover of this continent — forgetting, kind of, that there were some other people here before, and then President McKinley actually said that we had a duty to Christianize the Philippines. So what President Bush talks about is not totally out of character of the United States.

The problem, however, is that he is so certain that everything he believes is right. And the problem with that, when it’s translated into policy, means that if Plan A fails, you don’t have Plan B.

Colbert: But if God’s given you Plan A, do you need a Plan B?

Albright: But we also know that when on this earth, we don’t know everything. There’s some people who may think so, but we do not know everything. And as the Apostle Paul said, “I see through a glass, darkly,” which means you don’t see it all.

…

I think the real problem is, if you’re so sure, as President Bush is, that you know everything, then you don’t listen to alternate plans. Which may explain a little bit of why we’re in such a mess in Iraq.

If you haven’t read George Orwell’s novel 1984, go read it now. Go to the library, go to the bookstore, go to Amazon.com, go to this website — but read Orwell’s nightmarish vision of a world without privacy, thinking, while you read, about the world we live in today.

From USA Today:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

…

The NSA’s domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA’s efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. “In other words,” Bush explained, “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.”

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers’ names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA’s domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.

…

One major telecommunications company declined to participate in the program: Qwest.

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest’s CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA’s assertion that Qwest didn’t need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers’ information and how that information might be used.

…

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest’s lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA’s explanation did little to satisfy Qwest’s lawyers. “They told (Qwest) they didn’t want to do that because FISA might not agree with them,” one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest’s suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general’s office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

Bush responded:

President Bush today defended his administration’s decision to collect information on tens of millions of domestic phone calls, saying the National Security Agency program was legal, protects the privacy of Americans and helps guard the nation against terrorist attacks.

“We’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans,” he said. Instead, the NSA’s efforts “strictly target al-Qaeda and their known affiliates.”

When George W. Bush says “Trust me,” the only appropriate answer is a loud and unambiguous “No!” Emphatic epithets are optional.

For several weeks now, I’ve had just one final chapter yet to read in The Once and Future King, T.H. White’s novel about the legendary King Arthur.

I keep putting off reading that last chapter. I don’t want to let go of this book.

The novel brings together four shorter books. The Sword in the Stone, originally published in 1938, tells of Arthur’s childhood and his education by the wizard Merlyn. The Queen of Air and Darkness, first published (with a different title) in 1939, tells of Arthur’s early years as king. The Ill-Made Knight, published in 1940, tells of Lancelot and Guenever. The Candle in the Wind recounts the end of Camelot. It was not published separately.

The early parts of the novel are full of mythical creatures, magic and humor. Merlyn turns the young Arthur into various kinds of animals, so he can live among them and learn from them. As the story progresses, it grows more serious and more rooted in reality. By the end, we are left only with truth and consequences.

One legend says that Arthur did not die, but only sleeps under a hill in Avalon. He will return in England’s hour of greatest need. The legend is poetic and poignant and beautiful. That may be why three books about King Arthur were popular in the early years of World War II.

The legend is also, of course, utterly wrong. White’s Merlyn understands this. Early in the young king’s career, Merlyn refuses Arthur’s entreaties to tell him what to do. Arthur was educated so that he could think for himself. When the king finally does start thinking for himself, Merlyn’s relief and elation is electrifying.

In any era, people don’t solve their problems by waiting patiently for a hero to appear. Real heroes do not rise out of an enchanted mist. They are mortal people who step forward in a time of trouble to do what is needed. That kind of heroism is within the reach of anyone, yet it is so exceedingly rare that those who exhibit it become the stuff of legend.

In T.H. White’s great novel, The Once and Future King, King Arthur is a radical thinker who works to replace the rule of brute force with the rule of law. It’s not easy, and he takes some missteps along the way.

In this scene, Arthur is talking with his queen, Guenever, and his greatest knight, Lancelot. The King is worried about certain factions in his court, and Lancelot suggests that he could simply kill one critic who particularly worries him.

The King suddenly looked surprised, or shocked. He had been sitting relaxed between them, because he was tired and unhappy, yet now he drew himself up and met his captain in the eye.

“You must remember I am the King of England. When you are a king you can’t go executing people as the fancy takes you. A king is the head of his people, and he must stand as an example to them, and do as they wish.”

He forgave the startled expression in Lancelot’s face, and took his hand once more.

“You will find,” he explained, “that when the kings are bullies who believe in force, the people are bullies, too. If I don’t stand for law, I won’t have law among my people. And naturally I want my people to have the new law, because then they are more prosperous, and I am more prosperous in consequence.”

These days, presidents wish to be kings in order to be free of all law.

All kings, it seems, are not created equal.

In T. H. White’s novel, The Once and Future King, the wizard Merlyn lives backwards in time. In the twelfth century, when he advises the young King Arthur and his foster brother Kay, he is an old man who remembers the twentieth century, when he was young. From the book:

Kay looked up, with his tongue between his teeth, and remarked:

“By the way. You remember that argument we were having about aggression? Well, I have thought of a good reason for starting a war.”

Merlyn froze.

“I would like to hear it.”

“A good reason for starting a war is simply to have a good reason! For instance, there might be a king who had discovered a new way of life for human beings — you know, something which would be good for them. It might even be the only way of saving them from destruction. Well, if the human beings were too wicked or too stupid to accept his way, he might have to force it on them, in their own interests, by the sword.”

The magician clenched his fists, twisted his gown into screws, and began to shake all over.

“Very interesting,” he said in a trembling voice. “Very interesting. There was just such a man when I was young — an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos. But the thing which this fellow had overlooked, my friend, was that he had had a predecessor in the reformation business, called Jesus Christ. Perhaps we may assume that Jesus knew as much as the Austrian did about saving people. But the odd thing is that Jesus did not turn the disciples into storm trooper, burn down the Temple at Jerusalem, and fix the blame on Pontius Pilate. On the contrary, he made it clear that the business of the philosopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people.”

I know we could never get George W. Bush to read a big thick book like this. But I wish we could get some studio to do a faithful animated version of the whole book and put it on a DVD for him to watch sometime when he doesn’t feel like working.

From The Once and Future King:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn — pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”