Tis the season of book banning again in the central wack zone. This time, Kurt Vonnegut and Sarah Ockler are the targets.
I’m surprised to see an op-ed of this tone in the normally right-leaning Indy Star. Maybe its because Vonnegut is a favorite son.
Last week, the school board of Republic, Mo., voted 4-0 to ban two books, one of them Indianapolis native Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughter-House Five.” The vote came in response to a complaint lodged by a resident named Wesley Scroggins, who home schools his children.
Apparently, removing his kids from public schools wasn’t enough for Scroggins. By his reckoning, “Slaughter-House Five” — named the 18th Greatest English Language Novel of the 20th Century by the Modern Library — failed to meet moral standards of his favorite book, the Bible.
The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis is providing relief to the more enlightened citizens of Republic by shipping copies of the banned text to the area.
The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library stepped into the fray after a Missouri high school banned one of the Indiana-born author’s best-known books.
The Indianapolis library plans to ship copies of “Slaughterhouse-Five” to families in Republic, Mo., who ask for them, Library executive director Julia Whitehead said Friday.
While they’re at it, the library should include copies of Fahrenheit 451 as well.
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
“Slaughterhouse Five” is a classic I want my kids to read. This is an incident that reminds me that there are multiple flavors of what we often call “political correctness” – the “Jesus Is My Gasoline” crowd have their own version of it (and Vonnegut’s work is decidedly not PC by their standard).
I feel incredibly lucky that I got to one of his guest lectures at IU before he died. I’ve been a fan since high school and he lived just a few blocks from me for a while, way back in the dim past.
He wouldn’t have been surprised.
Bet on it.
Neither would he have been outraged.
Bet on that as well.
Just gently amused.
He saw it all.
Yup.
Bet on it.
AG
Yep, that’s exactly the way I saw him too. Too bad the midwest didn’t make a whole lot more like him.