Banned Book Week

In this political season, I think a lot about the presidential candidates, and why I should vote for one over the other. To me one of the most compelling reason to vote for Obama is that he's not republican.  The republican party gave us eight years of george bush. Eight years of corruption and blind political partisanship. Eight years of stupidity, lies, and eight years of war. For those reasons alone I will never vote republican. But if you took away all of my knowledge about the previous eight years and just gave me the biographies of the two main candidates and their running mates, I could still never vote for the republicans. And I can narrow down why I would never vote for McCain/Palin to just one reason. Sarah Palin tried to use her political power and influence to ban books that she found controversial. She tried to ban books from a public library. She tried to ban books. Sarah Palin wanted to burn books in her public library because she didn't agree with their content. Sarah Palin is no better than Ray Bradbury's Mildred Montag from Fahrenheit 451. She is intellectually ignorant.

Palin has proven her stupidity over and over in the few interviews that the McCain camp has allowed, but none have quite shown what a redneck, backwards ass, hillbilly, neocon she really is, by revealing the fact that she tried to ban books. Banning books is like banning all free thought.

If someone wrote a book about me, revealing all of my deepest darkest secrets (and there are many) and published "The Evil DJ Hobby," I would still not want it banned. I would want people to embrace it, and read it, to help make me a better person. I would learn from it. That's what human beings do, learn from things we read in books. We learn from our mistakes, and other peoples mistakes, and their life experiences. That's what books are, someone's life experience put into words. If Sarah Palin had ever read a book she would realize this. Books are a collection of peoples triumphs, mistakes, foibles, and wisdoms. An intelligent person can learn from other people's mistakes. An intelligent person can learn from history, no matter how painful that history. An ignorant person ignores the opportunity to learn. An ignorant person bans books.

For that one reason alone I could never vote for McCain and Palin.  Even if McCain had saved my life from a burning building, putting his life in harms way to save mine, I still would not vote for him.  Because the burning building could be a library, set on fire by the hot librarian.

So in support of Banned Book Week I vow not to vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin. And I do this for Holden Caulfield, for Harry Potter, and for Huckleberry Finn. For George Milton, for Scout, and for Guy Montag. For Prior Phillip, for Margaret, for Ralph and Piggy, for Ponyboy, and for Kilgore Trout.