A "neurotic hypersensitivity": It is hard to think of a more harmlessly benign gesture than Melania Trump's

Tear your hair, groan at the glum tale of Melania Trump versus the school librarian

writes Libby Purves from across the pond in the Times.

Weep at the compassion fascism which can only value human experience when it involves newsworthy suffering, and which meets merriment and fantasy with a pious reproof.

Poor Melania Trump, trying to get her head round the role of first lady, sent a gift of books to elementary schools in 50 states for National Read a Book Day. … It is hard to think of a more harmlessly benign gesture, even if the poor woman is married to Donald Trump.

But that could not be forgiven by one school librarian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Liz Phipps Soeiro. In a long open letter she thanked the first lady — with a sneer about the wasteful postage — but said that while her students liked the “beautiful bookplates with your name and the indelible White House stamp” they would not keep them. First, because more deprived schools have greater need, though even hers struggles “to retain teachers of colour and dismantle the systemic white supremacy”. Second, because Melania’s favourite is “a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature. Dr Seuss’ illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures and harmful stereotypes.”

She patronisingly gives another list, books about “children who stand up to racism and oppression . . . trying to connect with parents who are incarcerated simply because of their immigration status”. … They may be excellent, and there is an honourable place in children’s literature for hardship, injustice and resilience. From Serraillier’s The Silver Sword to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas there are historical examples, and modern miseries have a place too.

But the left-liberal piety of the list and Ms Soeiro’s letter have a grim and quelling quality. Fair enough to swipe at unequal educational chances, but there’s a real sneer in her “it was a wonderful gesture, if one that could have been better thought out”. No sisterhood for Melania!

The Seuss-is-racist angle needs unpicking. Real American racism, especially after Charlottesville and Ferguson, creates a neurotic hypersensitivity. The fashionable targeting of Seuss is part of that, even though Michelle Obama read him to her daughters. Theodor Seuss Geisel was originally an advertising cartoonist in the 1940s who, like many others, used “blackface” and other ethnic shortcuts in his work. So last week the magazine Business Insider leapt on the bandwagon, bewailing his “deeply disturbing” drawings and warning of “sad, racist ads”.

So I looked at them. Most are for the insecticide Flit. … Oh, and there’s a cartoon of Hirohito, snag-toothed and slit-eyed. But hell, it was the 1940s. People were scared. And his Adolf Hitler is grossly unflattering too. Anyway, in no time at all Seuss was drawing the famous piano cartoon of Uncle Sam saying: “Look, maestro, if you want to get harmony, use the black keys as well as the white!”

His children’s books, merrily scanned recitable fun, include benign messages. In one, a boy who meets a frisky pair of empty green trousers is scared because they are different, but the animated pants begin to cry so he realises that they are “just as scared as I!” and makes friends.

Seuss said he never started with morals — “kids can see a moral coming a mile off” — but noted that all stories had one. His Yertle the Turtle mocks fascist leadership, as the over-ambitious turtle is capsized trying to reach the moon. The Grinch and Lorax condemn materialism and pollution. They’re dated but fun: not “harmful” propaganda. Seuss should frolic alongside newer authors, because once you learn to read you are made free of everything, whether you pick up Auntie Yang and “A Story of Immigration and Separation” or JK Rowling and Jacqueline Wilson, Dahl and Sendak and Nesbit, Alice in Wonderland and Just William and the Beano. Even Little Lord Fauntleroy.

The librarian’s rejection was hastily disowned by her school board, but there is a wider battle to fight. A battle for fantasy and nonsense, for different perspectives; for entering into other lives and attitudes past and present. When you’re two, the very joy of words and jokes connects you to another’s imagination and thence to the wider world. When you’re six, stories about medieval knights or Victorian explorers can obliquely help your own struggles. Black or white, boy or girl, wizard or muggle, you need many doors to many worlds.

Among the readers who reacted were Mrs Croc, Mr David Devore, CM, RECH, and Jane in Amsterdam.

Mrs Croc:

Well I'm glad none of my children went to that school. What a harpy of a librarian, and didn't she give a fantastic example of stereotyping and race and class hatred in the way she condescendingly replied to Mrs Trump.

Mr David Devore:

I see that Libby Purves, herself, has fallen into stereotyping by referring to Ferguson, MO, as a place of real racism. May I point out that a grand jury accepted that the officer who shot Michael Brown did so in self defence. Furthermore, the main conclusion of  the Dept of Justice report into the administration of justice in Ferguson was not that the system was racist but that it was driven by the desire to raise revenue through fines.  This affected poor people severely, and in Ferguson, poor people tended to be Black. The leaders of Ferguson had been insensitive to this.

The books that the Cambridge librarian recommends instead (and remember...this is for elementary school children), reflect a highly politicised outlook on life. What is shocking is that the Cambridge Public Schools tolerate indoctrination of young children. This woman should be sacked!

RECH:

I imagine I will be shot down for this, but the unthinking condemnation of stereotyping is itself another example of PC.

The fact is that people do conform to stereotypes because we are all members of multiple groups to which we conform to a greater or lesser extent, but more importantly when we meet someone we are not, however liberal we think we are, a blank slate.  We inevitably start out with a broad brush impression of that person derived from stereotypes, and then move on to a greater understanding of the individual as an individual as we winnow out more information about them.  The degree to which we are liberal, in my opinion, determines how open minded we are in terms of allowing that deeper understanding to develop. 

 Jane in Amsterdam:

Perhaps it's just me, or maybe social media and the digital age allows them more prominence, but I feel that society seems to have developed a rich vein of the professionally and permanently indignant.  Just like those who can read something and take issue with the grammer but ignore the content,  there seem to be many who expend an enormous amount of energy deliberately looking for something they can deem to be bigoted, racist, fascist, sexist et al, just so they can feel satisfyingly offended for the day.

And this is how real, important issues get lost in the noise.

CM:

I wonder if lefties realise what terrible bores they are, and that no one can stand them?

The reason the Left pushes this “speech is violence” nonsense: If speech is truly violence then it must be restrained

After weeks of footdragging, 

writes Benny Huang on the Constitution website in disgust (thanks for the link, Maggie),

the University of California at Berkeley finally allowed conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to speak on campus on September 14^th—albeit after charging the event organizers an unconstitutional “security fee.” The Left’s sick attempt to deploy the heckler’s veto to silence this articulate, thoughtful man did not rule the day as it did last April when Ann Coulter was prevented from speaking on campus. Thank goodness for small victories.

Amazingly, no one died. No one was even hurt, though if someone had been hurt it would not have been Shapiro’s fault. It would have been the fault of whoever perpetrated the violence, probably one of those well-known proponents of “love” and “tolerance,” wearing a mask and swinging a club. But you wouldn’t have known how harmless the whole thing was from talking to the protesters, many of whom chanted “Speech is violence” outside the venue.

Speech is violence? No, it isn’t. Speech is speech. Violence is violence. They’re [two] very different things. That’s something we all should have learned as children but alas, some of us apparently didn’t.
 
When Shapiro had his chance to speak he let the protesters outside know how foolish they sounded.

“The idea is that if I attack your ideas, if I say that you have bad ideas, what I am really doing is attacking you personally. I’m attacking your identity. I’m aggressing you. You might require counseling. This is the philosophy of microaggressions. My words are violence. Even the term ‘microaggression’ suggests that it is an aggression against you, right? Microaggressions. I am aggressing you. It’s an act of violence. As NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has said, ‘Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless.’ …And the thing is that microaggressions are actual violence. This is why you see the dolts outside shouting that speech is violence, because they think that I am actually doing them violence when they don’t hear me. But if they would hear me, then presumably I would be doing them violence and they would need counseling, and if they act with violence it’s because it’s in response.”

Thank you, Mr. Shapiro, for exposing one of the insidious reasons that leftists push the “speech is violence” trope. Calling someone else’s words “violence” is an attempt to justify one’s own violence as an act of self-defense. Sure, people on the Left break people’s faces with bicycle locks but people on the Right started it. They wore MAGA hats, or they opposed affirmative action, same-sex marriage, abortion, or whatever, which means that they threw the first “punch.” And even though the “punch” was entirely rhetorical that doesn’t make it any less real. Actual bone-crushing violence on the part of the Left is therefore an understandable reaction to rhetorical violence from the Right.

But there is another reason the Left pushes this “speech is violence” nonsense. If speech is truly violence then it must be restrained. We wouldn’t entertain the notion of a First Amendment right to walk around hacking off people’s limbs with a machete, would we? Of course not. If mere words are somehow indistinguishable from a physical attack because both can wound then we have an obligation to gag people.

Sounds like the end of the First Amendment as we know it. Might that be the point?

It should be noted here that the protesters outside Shapiro’s event didn’t just come up with this idea on their own. It’s being spoon-fed to them in their courses. They’re learning this anti-constitutional, cultural Marxist garbage at a taxpayer-funded institution.

In light of “Free Speech Week,” an event that was supposed to feature a number of dissenting conservative voices, students and faculty debated whether the right to invite such speakers should be protected. According to the New York Times,

“At Berkeley, there are both unequivocal voices championing the importance of free speech, no matter how inflammatory, and professors who say lines need to be drawn on campuses. These professors argue that the First Amendment needs to be reassessed for reasons that include the rise of internet trolling and cyberbullying and that some scientific research now shows that hateful speech can cause physical pain. There are faculty members who explicitly reject violence as a way to counter hateful speech, and others who say it is acceptable if used against what are perceived as fascist intruders.” (Emphasis added [by Benny Huang].)

And there you have it—speech is violence and shall be met with more violence. It’s okay to punch Nazis and everyone who doesn’t think like a Berkeley social justice warrior is basically a Nazi, whether openly or crypto.

“Words can be like rape — they can destroy you,” said Berkeley Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Really? Like rape? These people are impossible to parody. Free speech is not rape and if it were we would be morally obligated to repeal the First Amendment and to do penance for permitting it to stand for more than two centuries. Scheper-Hughes continued: “The Supreme Court is behind the times. The First Amendment deserves to be re-looked at.”

“Re-looked at.” “Reassessed.” These are code words for what the Left has done to other parts of the Constitution—the free exercise clause, the Tenth Amendment—which is to render them dead letters via judicial perversion. What they really want—and what they would openly advocate if they weren’t despicable liars—is to repeal the First Amendment. But repealing amendments is difficult, especially one that has been as traditionally cherished as the First, so they look to the courts to neuter it instead. It’s a tactic that has worked well in the past.

But Scheper-Hughes is wrong when she says that the Court is “behind the times.” Historically speaking, free speech is a relatively new concept and in that regard SCOTUS is very much ahead of the times.

According to free speech advocate Flemming Rose, the Danish editor most responsible for Jyllands Posten’s 2006 publication of a series of controversial (to say the least) cartoons depicting Mohammed, speech was considered a form of violence until modern times. He writes in his excellent book “The Tyranny of Silence”:

“Until the 17^th Century, words and actions were treated identically throughout Western Europe. Verbal expressions of deviant or unorthodox notions in religious matters was taken to be a physical attack on the Church, its members, and God. Speaking out in favor of political change or against the existing order was perceived as incitement to rebellion or treason. Exactly the same was true of totalitarian societies of the 20^th Century.”

It’s clear that when we stop distinguishing between speech and violence we are actually backsliding to a time when suffocating orthodoxy reigned supreme. It’s downright medieval. Giving up on free speech means admitting that our grand experiment in free minds and the free exchange of ideas has actually been a failure. We’re saying that we need an authority to determine and enforce right thinking, as well as to ferret out and punish wrong thinking. I’m sure the campus Left sees themselves as that authority and they’re probably right. They run academia and they decide what’s out of bounds. But what if they lost that power? Would they still like censorship so much? I doubt it. Then they’d find out how it feels to be forcibly silenced—in other words, to be the kind of “marginalized groups” they pretend to be now.

Free speech is the foundational idea of a classically liberal society. We learn that while some people’s ideas may rub us the wrong way, may even make our blood boil, those people have a right to their ideas just as we have a right to ours. Free speech is a reciprocal agreement among members of a society that each will tolerate the others’ words. Things change when someone crosses the line into violence. If there is truly no distinction between speech and violence then we cannot have a classically liberal society. We must start locking each other up for our ideas, a proposition that has gained considerable support in places like Canada and Western Europe that delude themselves into believing that they are still free.

Is It True that "Nowhere but America do horrific large-scale mass shootings happen," with "this degree of regularity" or otherwise?

Fox News reports on the Las Vegas shooting, said to be the deadliest in United States history. Needless to say, gun control has reared its head.

Connecticut’s senators, who have been especially outspoken on gun control ever since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, were among the first to issue statements Monday.

“Nowhere but America do horrific large-scale mass shootings happen with this degree of regularity,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in a statement. “This must stop. It is positively infuriating that my colleagues in Congress are so afraid of the gun industry that they pretend there aren't public policy responses to this epidemic. There are, and the thoughts and prayers of politicians are cruelly hollow if they are paired with continued legislative indifference. It's time for Congress to get off its ass and do something."

How much truth, though, is there to that declaration?

Time to brush off the principal outtake from my in-depth examination of the gun control issue, which was was published in the New York Times less than two years ago, updating it slightly in the process (and reposted in response to a Washington Post article):

It is easy for leftists, American as well as foreign, to tout the success of the gun control laws in the rest of the western world and to say that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries” when you ignore:
• the 1996 massacre of 16 children at a Scottish primary school;
• the 2000 killing of eight kids in Japan;
• the 2002 deaths of eight people in Nanterre, France;
• the 2002 killing of 16 kids in Erfurt, Germany;
• the 2007 fatal shootings of eight people in Tuusula, Finland;
• the killing of 10 people at a Finnish university less than a year later;
• the 2009 killing of 15 people in Winnenden, Germany;
• and, needless to say, Anders Breivik's 2011 mass murder of 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers;
• not to mention the various terrorist attacks of the last few years, such as the 2015 mass shootings inside the Bataclan nightclub which killed 90 Paris revelers.

Is it unrealistic to wonder whether the tolls would have been lesser had a few of the adults in each place carried a weapon and tried to shoot back at the respective killers?

Related: What Is to Blame for Mass Shootings? Does the Blame Lie with the Right to Bear Arms Or Can It Be Found Elsewhere? (a lengthy and in-depth post that I consider one of my best in 13 years of blogging)