Reading Liberally Page Turner: Activist Literacy & Why It Scares the Right-Wing

by: Living Liberally

Tue Aug 28, 2007 at 11:00

"The AP-Ipsos poll found 22 percent of liberals and moderates said they had not read a book within the past year, compared with 34 percent of conservatives."
- An Associated Press story last week

"Obsfucation usually requires a lot more words...so I'm not at all surprised by the loquaciousness of liberals."
White House Spokesperson Tony Fratto, in response to that story

Despite our First Lady being a librarian, reading hasn't been a high priority of the Bush Administration - nor, apparently, of the larger conservative base despite the attempts by right-wing publishing houses such as Regnery.  Forget morbid jokes about what Bush hasn't read or what he has -- this is about more than the President's dislike of "book-learning." This is about an administration that, if the previous quote by its spokesman is to be believed, is doing its darndest to keep Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism In Public Life continually relevant. (A great read, by the way.)

Liberals love words. We love words because we love discourse. But our love of books goes even deeper: reading is intrinsically a revolutionary act, as figures as disparate as Thomas Paine and Franz Fanon might tell you. And literacy is a powerful - and therefore threatening - source of liberal activism.

When publishers didn't want to distribute Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, who took his side?  A concerned librarian initiated a grassroots effort by librarians around the country to put more Moore on the shelves.

Two days later Harper Collins phoned Moore. "What did you tell the librarians?" they asked. "We're getting hundreds of letters a day from angry librarians. Do you know how much business we do with these people?"

Good, old-fashion grassroots griping by graphite grubbers saved the day.  It's just too bad they that the federal government wasn't as easily swayed as the publishers during the battle over the Patriot Act.  Librarians opposed it from the start, and continued to fight against the reauthorization.  If only there were more librarians, that bad legislation would be re-filed under "900" in the dewey decimal system...History.

Speaking of old fashion book-hating...after years of stories claiming American kids are reading less and less, we finally arrive at a book series, Harry Potter, that they actually want to read - and the reaction of certain elements of the far right is to try to keep it off the shelves. Is it the messages of social justice, tolerance and diversity?  Is it the implicit anti-elitist modernism in the themes?  Or are zealots just scared of a little magic?

Regardless, the right wing probably should be scared of Harry Potter...because he's been inspiring young Americans (and young readers around the globe) not just to read about liberal ideals, but to live them.  As we've highlighted before, the HP Alliance has been promoting social justice issues through communities of Rowling fans...and it's been working.

Thousands of Harry Potter readers became activists against the genocide in Darfur.  With other campaigns targeting Walmart's work practices, corporate America should shudder at a horde of Harry-ites coming their way.

Books are a battlefield.  The fact that right-wingers are scared of them reminds us of their power.  And the fact that liberals are reading more of them than conservatives, shows us our power. As at least one of us has written about on this site before, we are entering an era where our most pressing issues are all crises of enormous time-sensitivity, issues where we need to understand more and more complex issues at a time when our news media is dedicated to treating stories in more and more simple terms. If we want to make it out of this century alive, we need to promote reading as a life choice - a choice which liberals seem to be making.

Hey Tony Fratto, was that loquacious enough for you?