(2-part; forgive the break)
Note: While I don't and won't block comments, I'm not too interested in getting into a comment war over what may or may not have happened. I've read many articles/fact-checking sites, etc., and this is what *I* (and Jan) have come to believe happened between Sarah Palin and Wasilla library director Mary Ellen [Emmons] Baker. I put in the "apparently" because this info is based on what Anne Kilkenny has stated, not something I saw with my own eyes. I will say that I think it is wrong-minded and silly to say there's no issue here because "no books were banned." I don't even really think the story is about banned books (nor have I used my "bannedbooks" tag on this strip), and it's a shame discussion is getting mired in faux banned-book lists, etc. I think the story is about power and control. Banned books fall under that banner--the desire to have control over what is made available to the public. But this attitude seems to me to be just as (or even more) dangerous brought into institutions other than libraries, and I do not expect that Palin did stop or will stop, if elected, at libraries. For reference: link to Kilkenny letter; link to "Palin: Library censorship inquiries 'Rhetorical', an article that first ran in the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman on 12/18/96.
9/9/08
Shelf Check #266
2 comments:
This would be of a piece w/ the Troopergate stuff. Josh Marshall's crew finds some interesting history at
Talkingpoints Memo.
All right, after doing a bit of fact-checking myself, seems the query at the city council and the query to the librarian were one and the same (small town, after all), and Emmons was asked to resign, along with pretty much everyone else, before this all went down. All in all, it resulted in little enough that I take it for a Malcolm-and-Macduff sort of scene.
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