The Tesco County Committee for Decency staged what organizers are calling their largest ever Book & Record Burning Festival this past Sunday at Metre Hill Memorial Park. In the course of the 8 hour bonfire and picnic, over 3,500 offensive books, periodicals, videotapes and compact disks were burned by some 2,100 participants."We don't actually get many records anymore," observed Chet Smith, chairman of the Committee for Decency, "it's mostly cassette tapes and CDs these days. We had a few DVDs this year, and that was a first."
First staged in 1970 by a joint panel of the Tesco County School Board and Library Commission, the festival shifted to private sponsorship following a series of court challenges in the mid-1980s.
"These are private books from private homes," Mr Smith observed with a mischevious grin. "Heck, we had the schools and public library pretty well cleaned out by 1975."
The first festival in 1970 was staged in direct response to a list published by the Billy Graham MinistriesTM cataloging a large number of inappropriate titles then said to be widely available in U.S. public schools and libraries.
Books on the Ministries' list included titles by J.D. Salinger, Mark Twain and the now tame-by-comparison pornographer Henry Miller.
"That first year was a little rough," Mr Smith recalled. "Turned out we didn't have much of anything on the shelves at the high-school or two middle-schools. We did manage to dig up a copy of a Huckleberry Finn and a Mark Twain reader at the public library, but we had to buy copies of Salinger and Miller just for the bonfire."
Asked whether the money spent on the banned books might not have been better spent on inoffensive math textbooks, Mr Smith countered, "Well, first of all, define 'inoffensive.' You might be surprised at the kind of things a radical egalitarian can slip into a seemingly simple equation."
"Also," Mr Smith continued, "it's hard to get people to give you money for books unless you're going to burn them. Maybe if we told people the children would have to pray in school to get the books, we could get some interest. But, frankly that will have to be a mission for someone else."
Asked whether private individuals burning books from their own collections wasn't a bit self-defeating, Mr Smith suggested that very few books were bought exclusively for the purpose of burning.
"Lots of times folks will buy a book or movie without realizing how wicked or seditious it is," Mr Smith explained.
Mr Smith offered Martin Scorcese's virtually unwatchable Last Temptation of Christ and the Disney classic, The Little Mermaid, as examples of potentially misleading titles.
A local representative of the ACLU requested anonymity and denied living or working in the Tesco County area. She further requested that we stop using gender specific pronouns, which we will do right about ... now.
As in past years, the event drew a largely family-oriented crowd who happily settled in with lawn chairs and coolers for the daylong picinic and bonfire. An explicit ban on Mormon participants was apparently successful in heading off the late day rowdiness that marred last year's event.
