Below is the email I wrote to Mahoney and others yesterday. Nobody of course will respond. In fact, it is highly likely that none of those concerned can even understand it. Yet the logic is crystal clear in it. The PC mindset, however, filters out all intrusively uncomfortable logic.
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From: todslone@hotmail.com
To: kmahoney@clamsnet.org
CC: editor@barnstablepatriot.com; ppronovost@capecodonline.com; sturgislibrary@comcast.net; editor.camelsaloon@gmail.com
Subject: Suppression of Freedom of Expression on Cape Cod
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 09:41:08 -0500
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To Kathleen Mahoney, director, Mashpee Public Library:
Well, here's a complaint on censorship and banning by the Clams Library System of Cape Cod, in particular, Mashpee Public Library. Hopefully, though doubtfully, you will send it on to Chris Peterson, Research Assistant, Center for Civic Media, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who asked you via FOIA to divulge any such complaints.
Well, here's a complaint on censorship and banning by the Clams Library System of Cape Cod, in particular, Mashpee Public Library. Hopefully, though doubtfully, you will send it on to Chris Peterson, Research Assistant, Center for Civic Media, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who asked you via FOIA to divulge any such complaints.
After I’d put you to the challenge last December, as you recall, you’d responded surprisingly positively that you would subscribe to The American Dissident, a 501c3 nonprofit journal of literature, democracy, and dissidence, and become the first and only library in the Clams Library System to be willing to do so. Thus, you wasted my time, making me fill out that tax form and mailing out the copy to you. What were you expecting—PC-bliss in the form of a magazine? The American Dissident exists to fight those like you who serve as gatekeepers to suppress freedom of expression in America. That is its prime purpose. That is what I’d told you in our correspondence! And so a month later, you sent the copy back and wrote you would not be subscribing, refusing to even include a single reason for your about face. Why didn’t you use your library stationary?
As you well know, not one library in the entire Clams Library System of Cape Cod will subscribe (only $20). That was the challenge I’d put before you. Now, thanks to your rejection, it is still flamingly valid. In fact, Sturgis Library, my very neighborhood library, as I’d informed you, rejected a free subscription offer and later permanently banned me because of my written criticism. No warning or possibility of due process was even accorded. Is that how democracy on Cape Cod operates? Why don’t you care about that gross insult to the First Amendment committed by one of your close library-director colleagues, Lucy Loomis? Yarmouth Port Library also refused to accept a free subscription offer! What are you and your librarian colleagues trying to keep from the eyes of public-library patrons here on Cape Cod? Why are you and those colleagues acting as gate-keeping censors? WHY?
An ugly wave of fascism is rotting away the innards of America today... and you are evidently part of it. Librarians like you should be ashamed of your gross hypocrisy regarding your very own policy statements, including: “Libraries should challenge censorship […]” and “provide materials and information presenting all points of view”. What is it that you and those colleagues do not understand about that statement? Why have you chosen to counter it, by refusing to provide such materials? Why do you dislike freedom of expression so much? Did you learn to scorn it in college? Have you become so self-satisfied in a cocoon of kudos that you cannot even perceive the hypocrisy? Give me TRUTH, not happy face! For you and the Loomis’, it’s the opposite.
Thanks to you and your ilk, not one citizen on Cape Cod will have the opportunity in his or her local library to examine the caustic criticism, regarding local librarians like you, included in each issue of The American Dissident. Not one citizen of Cape Cod will likely have the opportunity to read this very letter, which will appear in the next issue of The American Dissident, but not on one library shelf in all of Cape Cod. The local newspapers won’t even publish it! Shame on the Cape Cod Times and Barnstable Patriot! Finally, your rejection, as an incident, is of course quite minor. BUT the principle involved is really quite major. Whether or not you thought The American Dissident “appropriate,” whatever that might imply in your mindset, is immaterial. (Evidently, somehow you think Jackass 1, 2, and 3 movies are appropriate) You should have subscribed to it and thus subscribed to the FIRST AMENDMENT and of course your very own policy statement, which was developed by the American Library Association as the “Library Bill of Rights.” Hot air? You bet! In fact, the ALA’s very own Office of Intellectual Freedom doesn’t give a damn about these concerns either! Look in the mirror, Kathleen! What do you see, if not Stalin or Hitler in drag… and with a smile of course?
Sincerely,
G. Tod Slone, PhD (universite de Nantes, FR),
Founding Editor (1998)
The American Dissident, a 501c3 Nonprofit Journal of Literature, Democracy, and Dissidence
www.theamericandissident.org
wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com
todslone@hotmail.com
217 Commerce Rd.
Barnstable, MA 02630
