When a school board in North Dakota demanded in 1973 that one of its teachers burn all 32 copies of Slaughterhouse Five that the teacher had been using as a teaching aid in the classroom, this is the letter that the author Kurt Vonnegut sent to the board:

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

There’s a reason Kurt Vonnegut is the hero of so many literary-minded individuals around the world.

Want something heartbreaking? Here’s Gin and Tacos’ take on the Trayvon Martin situation, posted a few weeks back:

DL Hughley has a joke about why “extreme” recreational pursuits like skydiving or bungee jumping are mostly for white people. He argues that white people need to pay someone to get the thrilling experience of cheating death, whereas black people can get the same experience by going out in public, reaching for their wallet, and hoping they don’t get shot 41 times. The joke is over a decade old and the 41 shots refer to Amadou Diallo, the black Guinean immigrant who was shot by four plainclothes NYPD officers while delivering take-out food in the Bronx.

It’s a good joke. I understand why people laugh at a topic like this; the only other choice is to cry.

I don’t understand how black males, especially younger ones, do it. I don’t know how their parents do it, knowing that every time the kids leave the house there’s some cop or concealed carry asshole who will imagine them “reaching for a weapon” and you’ll never speak to them again. I don’t know how you accept that reality and then add to it that the law won’t lift a finger for you when it happens other than to tell you that it’s your kid’s fault he got shot.

You’ll just be another dead black male on the local news, and no one will care because getting shot and killed is what black males are supposed to do.

Be sure to read the whole post. His indictment of the American “justisce” system is so incisive.

Would you believe that during George W. Bush’s presidency, white persons were four times as likely as non-white persons to be pardoned? Even when the crime is something as innocuous as under-reporting income? Sociological Images has that in nice graphic form, if you can’t visualize the disparity.

This world.

My sister read The Last Battle recently, book 7 in C. S. Lewis’ beloved Narnia books, infamous for its unveiled religious proselytizing. While the parallels between Aslan and Jesus had always been present in the rest of the series, book 7 is when–spoiler alert–a 16-year-old girl doesn’t get to go to heaven (Narnia) by dying in a train wreck (the Rapture) because she’s into make-up and boys now.

Hold on, what?

I asked Em, who just turned 12 recently, what she thought of the book, and this was her response:

I think that the author might’ve been trying to get too philosophical in it, and it was a bit strange. It wasn’t bad, but it sort of reminded me of Animal Farm, by George Orwell.

This is better literary criticism than I’ve seen of some freshmen college students. Also, she’s read Animal Farm??

Basically, my sister rocks.

Matt Gemmell has a lovely, thoughtful, and poignant post about the hypocrisy and absurdity of religious persecution against homosexuality:

Even as a rank amateur, I can attest that married life is wonderful. There’s something that definitely changes upon making a formal commitment; a certain evolution of feeling, of patience, of outlook, and of attitude. I’m delighted to be married, and by all accounts everyone else is delighted about it too. At no point has my pleasure at this happy new status had to be modulated by a qualifier, such as a fumbled-for and ambiguous word like “partnership”.

Because my wife and I are automatically paragons of ‘morality’, just like everyone else who doesn’t happen to be gay.

It makes me shake with rage, and weep with frustration, that in the year 2012 we still allow the madness of denouncing homosexuality. My wife and I aren’t religious – indeed, as thinking, rational people who can so easily see its human-fabricated nature and the many evils it has visited on the world, we’re contemptuous of and embarrassed by it – yet we’re permitted by the state to be married.

We opted-out from the insidious influence of religion, with its exhortations to switch off our brains and mindlessly ‘believe’, yet our rights haven’t changed. Why then should homosexuals be impeded by religion’s febrile influence, if even I wasn’t? Where’s the morality in that?

I’m glad people like Matt Gemmell exist, to voice thoughts that I am too angry to put into coherent sentences.

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Here’s another great article decrying the treatment of the non-heteronormative population in the US:

Children hear, and children listen. And more importantly, children mimic. What are we to expect from kids who bully, when politicians like Michele Bachman demonize gays at every opportunity [and who had been quoted] as saying “gays are part of Satan”?

When a young person who is gay hears a neverending stream of derogatory comments from adult leaders, they are sending a message: “You are different and deserve to be treated differently.” Those adults are responsible for pushing that child toward taking his own life.

Seems to me the homosexual kids aren’t the immoral ones in this equation.

This post in The Nation about the insidious ways in which women working in the home are treated by their male counterparts is so on-point it’s almost painful:

But the brouhaha over Hilary Rosen’s injudicious remarks is not really about whether what stay-home mothers do is work. Because we know the answer to that: it depends. When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work—difficult, sacred, noble work. When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do—teenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks—changing diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath—are not only not work; they are idleness itself. Just ask Mitt Romney.

So there it is: the difference between a stay-home mother and a welfare mother is money and a wedding ring.

It is not really possible to disengage domestic work from its social, gendered context: the work is valuable if the woman is valuable, and what determines her value is whether a man has found her so and how much money he has. That is why discussions of domestic labor and its worth are inextricably bound up with ideas about class, race, respectability, morality and above all womanhood. You can talk all you want about equal parenting; nobody is raising his son from earliest childhood to see as the most important job in the world being a stay-home father dependent on a high-earning wife. Nobody says to men in college, “You can be a physicist, or you can be a homemaker—it’s your choice!”

Do you think Mitt lay awake at night wondering if he was a bad person for slaving away at Bain Capital and making Ann change the stinkier diapers? If he was a woman, he’d never have gotten a good night’s rest.

Sorry for the liberal quotes, Ms. Katha Pollitt, and rest assured that my hat’s off to you.

Something a little different today.

I came across the above image on a Tumblr post, with the following caption:

An ancient Chinese proverb says “An invisible red thread connects those destined to meet, despite the time, the place, and despite the circumstances. The thread can be tightened or tangle, but will never be broken.”

There’s a lot of jokes made in popular culture about “Ancient Chinese Proverbs” with heavy emphasis on how convoluted and ridiculous some of them can seem. Believe it or not, Chinese proverbs are a pretty fascinating linguistic phenomenon.

Read on!

Procrastination, as they say, is a bitch.

As anyone who has done any sort of creative work knows, inspiration tends to strike you when you’re in the worst position to be able to take advantage of it. (Apparently there’s even a scientific reason for this.) As I write this, I am at least 4.5 hours behind on delivering on a deadline I promised a sort-of client. To be fair, this is partially because I spent most of the weekend incapacitated by a debilitating headache that drove me to take Tylenol for the first time in, oh, probably two years. And while I can probably still deliver on the product before the client gets up for the day–the beauty of being a night owl–the fact remains that I’m staring at my work at 4:30 AM on a Monday morning and all I can think about are the three new ideas I’ve had for blog posts in the past day or so.

I could simply jot down a few notes about the broad outlines of these posts and consign them to the lonely and neglected folder of blog ideas on my desktop, where they’ll be in great company with that half-written rant about college sports, that follow-up post about SOPA with 47 URLs languishing in a text file, and that email about Chinese proverbs that just needs a few tweaks to be adapted into a proper post.

But pushing these ideas out of my mind won’t actually stop me from procrastinating; they’ll simply ensure that by the time I come back to these ideas in four weeks I’ll barely remember what it is I wanted to write about. Instead, I’ll procrastinate tonight–this morning–by doing the dishes, taking out the trash, sweeping, and dusting places I’ve not dusted since I’ve moved into my apartment. All of which are still more pleasant than making myself work for an overdue deadline at 4:30 AM on a Monday morning.

So I thought I’d try something different. Instead of doing twenty different tasks that take five minutes each and pretend to myself that I’m being productive and preparing for work, really, I thought I’d indulge the creative itch for an hour, and see if that exhausts the attention deficit part of me enough for me to actually get down to earning some money.

Read on!

Ginandtacos.com has an excellent article on why the Susan G. Komen foundation sucks, has always sucked, and will continue to suck until we stop pretending that buying a pink waterbottle is doing anything meaningful to help fund medical research. And also, that there are other cancers besides breast cancer.

This section in particular is incisive and brilliant:

Second, just in case you missed what all of the fuss is about, the Susan G. Komen Foundation^tm For the Cure^tm announced on Wednesday that it will no longer be making grants/contributions to Planned Parenthood for early breast cancer screenings for the poor and/or uninsured. Nothing says “We’re committed to stamping out breast cancer by encouraging regular, early mammograms” like eliminating funding for mammograms.

OK.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation^tm has been on my personal shitlist for many years (this post is from 2008). If this is what it takes to get you on the heretofore lonely Screw Komen bandwagon, so be it. But you should not have a low opinion of Komen^tm because of their announcement on Wednesday. You should have a low opinion of them because they’re a fake charity run like any other company with a product to sell. In this case the product is a combination of guilt, pity, and hope dissolved in a weak acid and dyed a nauseating pink.

Author Gabe Durham tries to defend Jonathan Franzen to the internet, to little avail:

“Jonathan Franzen,” the internet said. “What a dick, am I right?”

“Well…” I said. “He’s got a reputation for being a crusty guy, but lots of writers don’t do well in the spotlight. But he admits the public stuff isn’t his strong suit. I chalk him up to being one of those Jonathan Safran Foer writers who I can read and enjoy but don’t necessarily want to meet.”

The internet barfed all over the place. “Him?”

“What, Foer? Well I mean he’s pretty playful, and did you read that story in the 20 under 40 issue of N-”

The internet interrupted me to barf everywhere once more.

This bit of satire is utterly brilliant, explains everything that’s wrong with the internet, and goes back for more anyway. Because we can’t quit it, even if we try.

More black men are in prison in America today than were enslaved in America in 1850. More African-American men are disenfranchised because of felony convictions today than because of all the laws against black people voting in 1870. A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery, primarily because of the chance of incarceration.

These stats are mindblowing. Full write-up. Separate discussion of how black children learn to relate to the police. Hint – it’s not positively.

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Further notes on incarceration in the US: by the age 23, nearly a third of Americans will have been arrested for a crime; We are the 1 in 100 – a Tumblr blog representing the 1 out of every 100 American citizens who are behind bars.