Sunday, June 25, 2006
Prudes, Pricks, Bigots
Mandarins of Morality * The non-existent WMD
Think Fahrenheit 451. Can book burning be far behind? How appropriate, North Carolina---the home of Rev. Billy Graham, took the step to ban Cassel Dictionary of Slangs from school libraries. Before going further I would like to state I used the word "prick" as defined in wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn (asshole: insulting terms of address for people who are stupid or irritating or ridiculous) and not one of the other definitions---"penis".
The pricks, devout pricks, campaigned against five books. Four of them escaped being banned but their turn might come.
What about the Song of Songs (Bible: King James Version) ? That's one erotic piece of verse.
From The Guardian, June 24, 2006:
- Jonathon Green, who compiled the 87,000 entries in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, which was published last year, said that North Carolina is the only place he knows of where the book cannot be used in schools.
- A Wake County school official told ABC News that five books, including the dictionary, were formally challenged. The others were listed as The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier, Junie B Jones and Some Sneaky, Peaky Spying by Barbara Park, Reluctantly Alice by Phyllis Reynolds and In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. School officials acted after pressure from Called2Action, a local Christian activist group whose website asks people to "join our E-army today to take your place on the front lines of the battle for our children's future".
- Some parents were also upset that their children were required to read books such as The Colour Purple by Alice Walker and Beloved by Toni Morrison, on the grounds that the books contain "vulgar and sexually explicit language".
Saddam Hussein's WMD
They found them---they were stored in their heads---and they took us to war. Now they talk about democratizing Iraqis as the reason for the war. This is from the Post: "In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare."
- Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.
- A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."
