The War on Literacy

From Random Hipatia

The U.S. house recently voted to eliminate the Patriot Act powers for the government to engage in warantless spying on what people read in libraries and what books they purchase in book stores. This is a shame, as several Republican members of the house pointed out, curiously enough, the very same ones who claim Democrats desire a “nanny state”, such places are literally “hotbeds of subversion” and “havens for terrorism” and the American public must be protected from these things. And, as our honorable Republican congress critters pointed out, for those who thought the local librarian was simply a place for nice elderly ladies who likes to inflict library fines, little do you know that libraries and places that provide books where people can read things are truly a danger to the very American way of life itself!

Given this awful danger, I am naturally all for the government’s ability to investigate those dangerous hotbeds of subversion, public libraries and book stores. These places of subversion after all contain these most dangerous of subversive things called “ideas”, far too dangerous to be trusted to the common men. Indeed, our problems with terrorism go right back to the Gutenberg press! Clearly, if the government wishes to crack down properly on these things, this Patriot Act does not go far enough! Instead, I suggest our government forthwith and fully pursue a “war on literacy” for all our safety!

Consider this, literacy is after all the very gateway to terrorism, much like what the FBI now says in justifying its surveillance and suppression of dangerous peace activists like “food no bombs” because, as our FBI explains, such groups are “gateways” to “hardcore activist” groups, like, I suppose those nasty subversives who think invading Iraq was a bad idea, or Greenpeace, or, shutter, the “Sierra Club”. Indeed, literacy itself is the root cause of all our government’s misery.

Before the Gutenberg press, nice honest peasants could count on their local perish priests to interpret the word of god for them, as chosen by their national government through its wise bishops, and the pope, and hence read to and interpret for them only those ideas that they should be permitted or need to know. These enlightened and peaceful times, lovingly enough called the “dark ages”, indeed were times when the western mind was largely free from idea bearing plagues such as literacy.

Clearly those who labored so very hard on the original Patriot Act seem to wisely understand this so very well. Why else would they be so determined to make sure that we would be encouraged to only read and buy the correct books by allowing our ever benevolent government to know what we choose to let ourselves read. Surely it is for our own protection, and to keeps us safe from those dangerous things known as ideas. Far simpler, then, to fully and properly ban literacy itself, and then we can go right back to that idyllic age of authority.