On his blog, my brother Tod fills out the questionnaire the Citizens For Literary Standards are sending to candidates for the Blue Valley School Board in Overland Park, KS. His answers to their self-serving questions makes for good reading… which, of course, means it would be banned if these "citizens" had their way.
The Citizens for Literary Standards, you may recall, seek to "inform parents and the community about poor quality literature and vulgar subject matter (profanity, sex, occultism) in graded reading assignments." Books these LitNazis want to ban from high school include such "poor quality literature" as ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, BELOVED, LORDS OF DISCIPLINE, CATCHER IN THE RYE, OF MICE AND MEN, and I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS.
It makes sense to me. As we all know, reading CATCHER IN THE RYE has turned generations of Americans into Satan-worshipping, drug-addicted, sociopathic liberals.
You joke about Catcher in the Rye, but several high profile killers were obsesed with it. (I think John Lennon’s assassin was one of them. Is it Six Degrees of Separation that has a conversation on this point? I can’t remember…) Which is of course not to say that it should be banned, but it is proof of the power of great literature.
Of course, a killer can also be obsessed with Dink, the Last Dinosaur. Nutjobs are nutjobs. But there seems to be something in Catcher — not too hard to see, really — that speaks to young men who are so removed from the rest of humanity that they are driven to kill.
I dislike censorship of any sort, because I make my own decisions about what to read, view, eat et cetera. No one need do it for me !