The Once and Future Censor:  Sarah Palin

There is a book list circulating on the internet, said to contain the titles of books that Governor Sarah Palin, then Mayor Sarah Palin, would have excluded or removed from the library of that small town in which she was raised, Wasilla, Alaska.  Actually, it is a pretty fair list.  It contains quite a few classics of western literature by such authors as Aristophanes, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Rousseau, the Brothers Grimm, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, Steinbeck, Alduous Huxley, Harper Lee, Joseph Heller, Garcia Marquez, and Solzhenitsyn (I was happy to note that I had read all of them).  It also contains books on witchcraft and the occult (J. K. Rowling made the list four times), homosexuality, and other subjects that might disturb a small-minded, religiously-conservative reader, one who would like nothing better than to dictate the reading habits of society.

Let me say at once that I don’t believe for a moment Sarah Palin drafted the list.  I arrived at that opinion almost immediately after seeing it for the first time, and a fair amount of research done since has only reinforced my view. 

In one sense, the list is very real:  it names books that conservatives not infrequently try to have banned from libraries.  But just who attributed it to Palin remains a mystery.  Since it seems to have appeared following the Republican Convention, the betting favorite has to be someone unhappy enough with the new Republican vice presidential nominee to engage in a piece of disinformation.  Or, if one is a conspiracy theorist, one might see it as a product of the McCain campaign.  How could that be?  Knowing that the whole library issue would come up, Republican strategists might have engaged in a bit of disinformation of their own; concocting a phony that could easily be refuted, then posting it as a means of winning sympathy for their “slandered candidate” while detracting attention from the real issue involved.  (By the way, I do not believe this alternative heory; I merely mention it as a possibility, however remote.)

And what is the real issue—the one that seems to have been largely overlooked in the flurry of debate about whether or not Palin’s has a penchant for censorship?  To understand, consider what we know did happen:

Shortly after her election as mayor, Palin had a conversation with then librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons.  During that conversation, the mayor asked if the librarian would be willing to remove books from the library if she were asked to do so.  According to the Frontiersman, the newspaper that first reported the incident, “Palin asked her outright if she could live with censorship of library books.”  The shocked librarian replied that she could not. 

Several months later, Emmons received a letter from the mayor informing her that she was going to be dismissed.  The censorship issue was not specifically mentioned; according to a story in the Anchorage Daily News, “The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn't fully support her and had to go.”  Apparently, the move blew up in Palin’s face.  When it “went public” in the local newspapers and the mayor began to sense the extent of support for the well-liked librarian, she hurriedly back-pedaled and retracted the dismissal letter.  Interviewed about the matter at a later date, Palin dismissed her question as simply a “rhetorical exercise” (whatever that means), “simply part of a policy discussion with a department head about understanding and following administration agendas."

The Emmons interview in the Frontiersman is not the only source for what happened.  Apparently, Palin brought up the matter more than once.  On one occasion, Anne Kilkenny, another Wasilla resident, witnessed a Palin-Emmons exchange.  Her account of what happened is quoted in a recent article in the Anchorage paper:

"Sarah [Palin] said to Mary Ellen, 'What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?" Kilkenny said.

"I was shocked. Mary Ellen sat up straight and said something along the line of, 'The books in the Wasilla Library collection were selected on the basis of national selection criteria for libraries of this size, and I would absolutely resist all efforts to ban books.'"

In a letter currently circulating widely on the web, Kilkenny sums up her recollection of the event as follows: 

While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed.  City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin's attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter.  People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.

 Now here’s the rub:  this mayor chose to pose this particular question to a librarian as the litmus test for loyalty to her “administrative agendas.”  The only “administrative agenda” I can see behind such a question would be to control the town’s reading matter!  Put at its simplest, Sarah Palin was asking, “Would you be willing to exclude the books that I don’t think should be in the library?”  Of course, Emmons said no.  Any good librarian, worth his or her salt, would have said the same thing.  And shortly afterwards, she was fired. Is the famous fallacy, post hoc, ergo propter hoc at work here?  Possibly, but not likely!

 The question to Emmons was a bit like asking a policeman, “will you arrest the people I want arrested?”  Or a judge, “will you convict the people I want convicted?”  Or a teacher, “will you teach the subject matter I want taught?”

Questions of this nature, while common in and perhaps even characteristic of a totalitarian society, have no place in a democracy. 

In short, the whole issue of whether or not books were actually removed from the shelves or if there ever was a specific list of offending works should be recognized for what it is, a king-sized red herring.  The absence of such a “smoking gun” in no way exonerates Sarah Palin.  Her question to Emmons makes it pretty clear that she would engage in censorship if she could get away with it.  All evidence we do have points unmistakably to that conclusion.   

And so, my reader, if you happen to be one of those right-wing Americans who would joyfully embrace a national censorship shaped in your image (and I believe there are a lot of you out there), then by all means vote for Sarah Palin.  She is definitely your candidate.  Marcus Portius Cato “the Censor” would be proud of his new accolyte.