Of Mice and Men

 I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books 
and some ideas as though they were diseases.
-Kurt Vonnegut

Just in case you think that me cheering for Neil Young in taking as stand against Spotify, Joe Rogan and COVID misinformation was somehow an endorsement of censorship let me assure you that I am very much against censorship.  In fact, a revulsion at censorship is one of the things I feel most violently, probably because I was permitted to read things like Fahrenheit 451, at a rather young age.  I despise the FCC and it's list of words you can't say on TV and radio. I would rather take the side of Howard Stern at his most vulgar rather than submit to a government bureaucracy that tells us what we should hear and see.  I don't like the MPAA, even though when my kids were growing up, I did consider a movie's rating in deciding whether it was alright for my kids to see.  However, I started to introduce my children to R-rated movies well before they turned the recommended age of 17.  It turns out a lot of very valuable cinema has bunches of profane speech in it.

But banning books is the thing that gets my blood boiling. The much publicized ban of the graphic novel Maus, by some school district in Tennessee is unsurprising and yet disconcerting.  Maus is recasting of the Shoah with the parts of the Nazis going to cats and the parts of the Jews going to mice. It is based on the experience of the author's father who was a Polish Jew who survived the Shoah.  As you might imagine, it contains some pretty grown up material and might be something that you want to think twice about letting someone young or immature try and process without some guidance.  But look folks, we just can't go down this road, especially in the name of safety, especially thinking that we're trying to "protect the children."

Here's a true story, in fourth grade I did so many reading comprehension exercises called "Concepts" that the teacher literally ran out of books to give me.  I believe that he had never had a kid who did as many of them as I did.  Now part of that drive was that you got rewards if you finished so many of these during down times.  In fourth grade, some kids finish the regular work faster than others, good teachers find ways to keep the fast workers (like me) busy while the others keep going. Mr. Senecal had various activities you could do if you were done the assignment, some were math based, some were science based, some were reading.  Concepts were short articles about various subjects, some were fiction, some were nonfiction; all of them had about a page or so of reflection questions to answer based on the article.  By the end of the year I had done nearly two hundred of these things. Around the same time, my Granny, dear old Gran, who was on one hand a brilliant woman who was also a voracious reader, as well as a woman who dealt with persistent mental illness, gave her bookish grandson a bag of books, thick books, grown up books, and I do mean grown up.  One of them was The Celestial Bed, by Irving Wallace, a novel that was based upon the work of Masters and Johnson, who are, ahem, sex researchers.

I remember that it had a classical painting of a nude woman on the cover, not pornographic, like Renoir or one of the renaissance deals, in fact, if I remember she was what some would call "Reubenesque." As a ten year old boy though, I started with that one, for about ten minutes, at which point my mother noticed what I was reading, but by that point the "damage" had been done.  I read some good words.  Words I honestly had no visuals to go with, but the ones I did have mostly came from naughty magazines that always seemed to be kept stashed in garages and the dark corners of closets.  Apparently, my Mom and her mother, my dear old Gran, had some words about the incident.  I don't know the content of those conversations, but The Celestial Bed did not make the journey home with us.

Was I scarred for life? Nope, I only remember the incident rather vaguely and mostly because my Mom made such a fuss about it.  Do I think she should have just let me read it? Also no, that would not have been a good parental decision, but I do remember being a little angry about having it snatched from my grasp.  If Mom hadn't noticed, if I had more time with that book, if I had snuck it around the way boys from my generation snuck pilfered skin mags around, would I have become a pervert, albeit a well read pervert?  Nah, it would have been just more sweaty, pre-pubescent nonsense. My Mom, sorry Granny, was right to take that away from my ten year old self.  You know who wouldn't have been right to take it away from me? A school board, or a governmental agency of any sort.  Should it have been in the library of my Elementary school?  Nope, but the issue with Maus was that it was being used as a way to teach eighth graders about the Shoah, it wasn't just left sitting around by derelict librarians or even well meaning old Grans. That means a teacher was walking the kids through the story, helping them deal with it and process difficult material.  It would be like a High School senior taking a class in Psychology and learning about Masters and Johnson with the guidance of a grown up.

It bears notice that Maus is now the best selling book on Amazon.  Congrats to Mr. Spiegelman, you should send a thank you card to the McMinn County Tennessee School Board.  Apparently our American tendency towards contrarianism actually does do some good.  But let me say that this way lies madness.  Banning books is a terrible idea.  It pushes our society down the path to intellectual blindness.  The fact that this sort of fascism is often hidden behind the guise of concerned parenting is rather insidious.  Your kids are going to see stuff that you don't want them to see, and read things you don't want them to read, you can't stop it.  You should think really carefully about how you limit their ability to learn to think critically about those things.  If you have a teacher who is willing to walk with your kids through the horrors of genocide then you should support that teacher as best you can, not take away their teaching tools.

Worse still is the inclination to try and put that task on some bureaucrats.  As soon as you let those clowns start making the rules about what is okay to learn and what is okay to read, you're on thin ice indeed. Oh, and I still haven't read The Celestial Bed, nor do I really want to, so I guess Mom won that battle, all by herself, without the help of any government agency.  Which is as it should be.

Why We Do Need Neil Young Around, Anyhow

Full disclosure: I love Neil Young, he's one of my top five artists that I do not want to live without.

Also full disclosure: I do not use Spotify.

If you look at the dates on this blog, you will notice it's been a minute since I wrote about anything here.  I was burnt out.  The Trump administration had nearly exhausted my capacity for howling into the void.  I told myself I would get back to it when I had something useful to say, not angry, not just venting, but something important and maybe helpful.  Then a pandemic hit and all of the useful and important things I had to say needed to be said elsewhere.  I needed to spend my time communicating with the people to whom I am a pastor.  I found it to be a rather odd phenomenon that when I suddenly had to communicate entirely over the interweb I found the idea of writing a blog every few days to be exhausting, perhaps even soul crushing.  When it's like the salt on an otherwise very "in person" sort of work, it's good, but when everything suddenly turns to salt, you just don't want any more.

So that's my excuse; here's the thing that has brought me back.  A few days ago, Neil Young issued an ultimatum to the online music streaming service Spotify.  Either drop Joe Rogan or take my music off of your platform.  Rogan has recently emerged once again from the moldy basement of showbizness to bless the public ears with a podcast called the Joe Rogan Experience.  It is about what you would expect from a former host of Fear Factor and The Man Show (which would get #metoo'd so fast these days). He talks to celebrities and bloviates opinions about various things with a macho libertarian vibe.  Lately though he decided to be the voice of COVID... let's just say skepticism, to give him the benefit of the doubt.  Others, including Mr. Young, would call it misinformation.  Which is becoming a big problem these days, and which is why this is important and not just another celebrity beef.

Neil Young had Polio as a child, before the vaccines were available (yes, he is old). He has also never been one to shy away from calling out people he thought were being destructive to society (see Southern Man, Ohio, Keep on Rockin' in the Free World).  It should really surprise no one that Neil might not want his musical legacy sharing space with a guy who parlayed his experience making people eat worms on TV into a semi-serious commentary on epidemiology.  And Neil doesn't really need Spotify money anyway, most of his fans are quite happy to own Harvest on Vinyl, Harvest Moon on CD and numerous other albums across the years and recording media.

The reaction to this little spat has been rather more energetic than I would have thought.  Some just figured Young was that grumpy old man shouting at kids to get off his lawn.  Others thought he might inadvertently be taking a stand against freedom of speech and expression.  Spotify was speechless for several days before glumly saying, "okay, I guess no more Neil Young here." In a few days, Joni Mitchell joined Neil in the Spotify walkout, which again, should surprise no one.  Joni has probably been waiting for something to protest for over a year.  It seemed like there might be a sort of movement happening, which didn't really make anyone sad, because no one is going to have too much sympathy for Joe Rogan or a huge faceless internet conglomerate who mostly gets rich by cheating both artist and audience.  Then Joe Rogan did something unexpected, he has (sort of) apologized.  What he actually says is that he will try to balance out some of his more controversial guests with people who aren't loopy conspiracy types.  I do not doubt that this was after Spotify had a serious Come-to-Jesus talk with him, but it's a step.

Do I believe that he will reform himself along the lines of a Howard Stern?  No probably not, but what Neil, Joni and the rest have just done is demonstrate the power of being an ally and using your voice. They are both in a place to do this work in way that younger, less known, less financially secure artists just can't do.  I don't actually believe that Neil's target was Mr. Rogan at all, it was Spotify, he wanted them to take better care of what they were putting out there into the world.  He could have picked any number of podcasters that express similar sentiments, but he picked the most visible.  He could have just pulled his music, but he was making a point.  The point is important: there is too much at stake with public health to allow people to just spout any kind of nonsense they want when it comes to the public health precautions they need to take.

Neil has some experience in dealing with opposing viewpoints.  Back in the 1970s he got into a "feud" with Ronnie Van Sant of Lynyrd Skynyrd.  Neil Young wrote some scathing critiques of the racism and oppression of the South in songs like Southern Man  and Alabama.  Van Sant took exception and included the line: "I heard Mr. Young sing about her, I heard ole Neil put her down. But I hope Neil Young will remember: A southern man don't need him around anyhow," in Skynyrd's song Sweet Home Alabama.  The thing was Ronnie and Neil were friends, they liked each other's music and weren't about to get into a fistfight or anything.  Neil was criticizing the big cultural forces at work in the south, Van Sant expressed the rather understandable perspective of a Southern Man that Neil ought to keep his Canadian opinion to himself.

People who speak up about things that are wrong often get that treatment.  Neil has gotten it more than a few times over the course of his life, but he's still doing it.  All of us need some allies in the fight against corporate greed.  It's the one great flaw of capitalism: you can trust the markets to do the right thing as long as it aligns with their self interest. If they can do good and make money, everything is fine, if they start to need to bend the truth or the rules to make money,  you can bet they will, especially if they think they can get away with it. Consumer boycotts have to reach a huge critical mass before they can make a dent in the profits of a joint like Spotify, but having to publicly remove Neil Young from their catalogue? That gets noticed.

I think the story we need these days, and one that we might actually get, is Joe Rogan interviewing Neil Young.  The Meathead meets the grumpy old grandad of grunge.  So thanks, Neil and Joni and the rest of you who decided to pull the reins back on some irresponsible broadcasting.  I know it's probably a hassle you don't need at this point, but you took the time, and I, for one, think I know why you did it.

P.S. If you're curious, my top five music artists (solo) I will always need in my life are: 1. Bob Dylan, 2. David Bowie, 3. Tom Waits, 4. Neil Young, 5. Peter Gabriel.