On the plaza at the Santa Fe Fiesta this weekend, amid strolling families, balloons, dogs dressed up like children, and babies beaming at everything bright and sweet, I was chatting with some policemen who were enjoying the peaceful pleasures of this New Mexico morning when I saw another man with a side arm strapped to his hip. Was he plain clothes security, I wondered. He was wearing a ball cap and looked fairly benign but vaguely menacing too. After a sharper look I saw he wasn’t security. On his polo shirt was a stitching that read “ProLife.” A few minutes later I saw another man packing heat walking passed me amid the crowds of kids and old folks pushing their wheeled walkers. It was unsettling. Guns mean trouble, to me. Even when a famous actor is just rehearsing a scene in a western movie, a pistol can accidentally go off and kill someone.
The men packing heat at the Fiesta could well have been suffering from a viral mood of disrespect, suspicion, and lawlessness that’s been highly contagious for many years now. I have to admit, they left me feeling a little shaken. Then I thought of the Fray Angelico Chavez Library just off the Plaza – full of its rich collections of New Mexicana, and other fascinating and sometimes controversial holdings – and flashed on news stories I’d been reading recently about armed bullies storming libraries and intimidating librarians to take certain books off the shelf. I remembered, too, the terrible incident in a public library in Clovis in 2017 when a young man with stolen guns shot up the place and killed two librarians. Was that a prelude to today’s anti-intellectual violence?
Hard to tell. But we know for sure that what happened in Idaho’s Boundary County Library last month is a symptom of the Republican Party’s jingoistic racism and homophobia that fosters in some sociopathic minds a malicious pleasure in persecuting the LBGTQ community and its authors, and threatening the peace and quiet in public libraries. According to the online news outlet LGBTQNation, the Idaho librarian and director of the Boundary County system, Kimber Glidden, “resigned after religious and political extremists threatened her over LGBTQ books that her libraries don’t even carry.”
Glidden told reporters she was warned during public meetings “with fire-and-brimstone language,” and that conservative library volunteers often “show up carrying firearms to frighten others.” “Nothing in my background,” she said, “could have prepared me for the political atmosphere of extremism, militant Christian fundamentalism, intimidation tactics, and threatening behavior currently being employed in the community.”
The National Geographic’s history and culture “Explainer,” characterizes censorship and book banning in the United States as an historical curse that’s been tragically persistent over the years, condemning everything from religious texts and anti-slavery novels, to books believed to be obscene or politically dangerous. In Texas last year, the Washington Post reports, Republican state Rep. Matt Krause “made national news when he released a list of more than 800 books that he wants to prohibit schools and libraries from carrying, inspiring conservative school districts across the nation to step up their own efforts.”
The editorial board of the Idaho Falls Post Register last week ran an opinion piece condemning proposed legislation that would have “led to librarians being prosecuted for checking out materials that are deemed to be harmful to minors.” The bill “thankfully sputtered and died” before the 2022 legislative session ended. The Post Register editorial board piece ended “with a bit of trivia” to show the stupidity and malice of book banners. Bambi, the Board wrote, “was banned by the Nazis in 1935. They saw the book as a political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe and burned it as Jewish propaganda.”
The list of books that have been banned from schools and libraries here betrays what many of us consider examples of a purposeful dumbing down of American public education as a strategy, perhaps, to keep the country from succumbing to “too much democracy,” as some conservative Founders feared. Every conceivable book and work of literature from Darwin to Shakespeare to Dr.Seuss and Webster’s Dictionary has been banned somewhere in America. In the McCarthy era, anti-communist book banners even attached their hysteria over “socialism” to books about slavery and race prejudice, which they apparently considered to be written by “communist dupes.” National Geographic contends that the “Jim Crow-era South was a particular hotbed for book censorship.” Southern bigots even went to far as to ban the children’s book “The Rabbit’s Wedding,” which depicted the marriage of a white rabbit to a black rabbit.
New Mexico has had its share of censorship atrocities. We learn from librarian Gary G. Osborne, MLIS, at the website donaanacountyhistsoc.org, that in Alamogordo, near the turn of the new year in 2001, a “Holy bonfire” incinerated books “HarryPotter” series and the “Lord of the Rings trilogy for being “satanic.” One of New Mexico’s most cherished books, “Bless Me, Ultima,” by Rudolfo Anaya, has been banned so many times and in so many places, it’s next to impossible to keep track of them all. In 1981, the School Board of Bloomfield, even ordered that copies of “Bless Me, Ultima” be taken out of “a cultural awareness class,” piled up and burned.
Book burning is such a powerful and disgusting symbol of hateful small mindedness and the numbing savageries of intolerance that it tends to overshadow the myriad other forms of censorship, including the intimidation of librarians and bringing political upheaval into the sanctuary of libraries themselves.
For writers and researchers, librarians join the ranks of nurses, public school teachers, and first responders, as contemporary heroes on the frontlines of the struggle against human suffering, ignorance, and the boiling forces of malice that splatter all of us with pain, disrespect, disempowerment and despair. Librarians are gate-openers for generations of children and adults. They give us all access to a free, orderly and useable flow of information to help us liberate ourselves from the crippling feeling of being in the dark about life, art, and the affairs of the world.
When these heroes are attacked, we can feel the reality of liberty in our country morphing ever faster into a dispiriting and unreachable myth.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
As someone who experienced book banning first hand–my books weren’t banned but the government tried to ban me in the 1980s–I am familiar with what this aspect of curtailing freedom of thought means in very personal terms. This is all part of an orchestrated attack on all our freedoms and a very slippery slope that must be stopped before we are looking at our democracy fading out of sight in our rear view mirror. Thank you, V.B., for consistently linking the immediate with the overall.
Thanks for the article. These are perilious times.
443 banned books, I was at my library and picked up the list at the library and took it home. I then turned on the compter saw a site about New Mexico and realized I have not been on this site in a while.
Also there were 57 movies made from banned books. I remember one movie where the caritors in the movie became a book memorizing in page by page front of the book to the back. They did so the books would live on.
I wonder how my father a book publisher would have said when he first heard about the burning of books?
Thank you for placing Librarians with other esteemed service members of society. We are rarely described as “heroic” but in our own quiet way, we have made a powerful statement.
Eleanor Bravo, MLS University of Pittsburgh 1971
formerly taught Library Science at UNM