|
Note: A lot of interruptions while writing this post, and I started out by interrupting myself with a book. Kash Patel’s confirmation as FBI Director—already a foregone conclusion in my mind—set off a flurry of phone calls and messages. So did the firings of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. In between, I was in discussions about Trump’s capitulation to Putin on Ukraine (also a foregone conclusion) and the thoughtless damage being done by DOGE, which is saving us money in the same way that you save money by not changing the oil in your car.
I meant to write this yesterday, but I went to retrieve a passage¹ from Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and ended up rereading the entire book, which is a memoir about teaching Western literature—in the classroom and in secret meetings—during and after Iran’s Islamic revolution. What kept me turning the pages were the obvious parallels between the death-to-America Islamists depicted in Nafisi’s memoir and today’s MAGA Republicans: the censorship (while claiming to be censored), the homophobia and misogyny, the desire to return to an imaginary past, the black-and-white thinking, and all the petty grievances of privileged, yet fragile, men. As I read, I felt more and more like there was some underlying quality shared by today’s Trump regime in the United States and Iranian leadership after the Islamic revolution, and I think Nafisi states it perfectly about two thirds of the way through her book when she writes, “Lack of empathy was to my mind the central sin of the regime, from which all the others flowed.”
What brought Iran and then Reading Lolita in Tehran to mind was a social media comment by a North Dakotan who insisted that we did not have a book ban here. I replied that he was right, that what we have here is more of a book fatwa, like the one Ayatollah Khomeini put out on Salman Rushdie in 1989.² Doug Burgum’s book fatwa³ empowers your local library lynch mob to challenge books they don't want the rest of us to read. So far, book vigilantes have not been very successful.
 |
Mostly, book challenges have failed because they were dopey to begin with and because the people who initiated them didn’t show up for library board meetings. They probably anticipated that it would be difficult to advocate for the removal of books they hadn’t read (doing your homework is for nerds), especially when there were people at those meetings who had read the books and were prepared to defend them.
Republicans in the North Dakota State Legislature hate to see a library lynch mob⁴ work so hard and then have to live with a library board’s decision; so now, for the second session in a row, they are considering a bill to fix the pervasive porn problem in our public libraries. The bill creates new processes and reporting requirements, requires storage areas “not easily accessible to minors,” gives unsatisfied complainants recourse to their local state’s attorney, and provides financial punishments for rogue libraries. It is all about protecting children of course, because there is nothing more dangerous for young people than a building full of books. They could lose their cell phones in there. Or fall in love with reading and build some empathy for a character or person who is not like them.
Empathy is dangerous to authoritarians and demagogues. Identifying and demonizing the other is not just part of their playbook for gaining and retaining power; it is the underlying system. Their target audience can have no empathy for or even curiosity about a gay or trans person, an immigrant, a fired government worker, or a child on Medicaid. In revolutionary Iran, people of the Baha’i faith were among the scapegoats. Their cemeteries were bulldozed, and they were excluded from workplaces and universities. Others were targets as well, of course, and the Baha’is were not the only ones whose graves were bulldozed:
“At the start of the revolution, the revolutionary prosecutor bulldozed Reza Shah’s grave, destroying the monument and creating a public toilet in its place—which he inaugurated by pissing in it.” - Azar Nifisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
Sounds very Trumpian, doesn’t it? Very DOGE. Hasn’t USAID and the goodwill it created for the United States around the world been bulldozed, the organization’s name and seal removed from their headquarters building? Our country gained nothing from the destruction, and MAGA Republicans got exactly what cheering Islamic revolutionaries got when the prosecutor bulldozed and urinated on Reza Shah’s grave: the dismay of people not politically aligned with them.
Yesterday, I went to a meeting held at an independent bookstore. Just the venue tells you a lot about what kind of people were there. They were people for whom dismay had given way to anger and a desire to act. Many had seen video clips of constituents confronting Representative Richard McCormick (R-GA) at a town hall meeting in his district. They were eager to do the same, but Hell will feel like North Dakota in February before our Congressional delegation holds a town hall event, so we focused on what we could do, and before we adjourned (some to a book club meeting), each of us shared an action we would complete before our next meeting. Subgroups formed for specific projects. Informal get-togethers were scheduled and contact information shared. Some of us stayed for book club. None of us will be bulldozed.
In the end, that passage did not make the cut.
Describing this law as a “fatwa” is unfair to fatwas, which are usually just a cleric's explanation on some point of Islamic law. North Dakota's library law is similar only to Khomeini's fatwa ordering the execution of Salman Rushdie and anyone involved in the publication of his book.
Burgum signed it into law. He owns it.
Sometimes, Mom’s for Liberty. We will just call them The Lynch Moms.
You’re currently a free subscriber to Trygve’s Substack. For the full experience, including access to the archives, upgrade your subscription.
| ||||||||||
