DATE: Sunday, September 21, 1997            TAG: 9709110869

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   73 lines

BANNED BOOKS ARE SOME OF THE BEST

Time to read a banned book.

This year, that means Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, banned from the Lindale, Texas, advanced placement English reading list because it ``conflicted with the values of the community.''

It also means William Shakespeare's ``Twelfth Night,'' removed from a Merrimack, N.H., high school English class because of a policy that forbids any instruction that has ``the effect of encouraging or supporting homosexuality as a positive lifestyle alternative.''

And it means, of course, the perennial favorite, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, dropped from the mandatory required reading list at the Upper Dublin, Pa., schools because of ``insensitive and offensive language.''

But there are many, many more to choose from.

Kevin O'Malley's Froggy Went A-Courtin' was restricted at the Baltimore County, Md., school libraries because of Froggy's questionable deportment in speeding away from the cat police.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods was removed from classrooms at the Lincoln Unified School District in Stockton, Calif., because it ``promotes racial epithets and is fueling the fire of racism.''

And - steel yourself, dear reader - Bruce Coville's My Teacher Glows in the Dark was contested in the classrooms and school libraries in Palmdale, Calif., because the book includes the words ``armpit farts.''

Consider yourself corrupted.

But if you have gotten this far without taking pen in hand to fire off a furious letter to the editor in defense of keeping these volumes safely locked up, you're probably one who has read one or more of them without any demonstrable ill effects.

You probably find yourself a bit baffled, as I am, at the virulence of opposition to what you formerly regarded as, if not uniformly classics, at least fairly innocuous reading matter.

Still we all need to be reminded that there are powerful forces in our society led by folks who don't read. These folks would like to impose their endlessly outraged will upon those who do. Then, lemming-like, we can all march confidently over the edge together in uniform ignorance.

This week marks the 16th annual Banned Books Week, a celebration of the American freedom to read.

It is also a symbolic stand against anyone who would remove reading material from libraries, bookstores and schools.

Who sponsors such a radical insistence upon the strict integrity of the First Amendment?

These are the firebrand organizations responsible: the American Booksellers Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the American Library Association, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Association of American Publishers and the National Association of College Stores.

Further, Banned Books Week is endorsed by the Center for the Book of the Library of Congress.

The books mentioned above came from an official ALA list of scores and scores challenged or banned during the past year.

There are so many superb works cited - William Howard Armstrong's Sounder, John Knowles' A Separate Peace, Herman Melville's Moby Dick and on and on - that it's possible to imagine authors out there who find themselves a little browned off because they're not included.

The next best thing to writing a banned book is reading one.

So let's get busy.

It also happens to be a terrific way to acquire a strong liberal arts education.

To those who recoil at this notion, who can't bear to see their preconceptions contradicted in print, who would close the covers for once and all upon controversy of any kind, I can only add in conclusion:

Armpit farts, armpit farts, armpit farts. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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