You can't fight in here - Thus us the War Museum

Abstract

I assume that the contours of the War Museum dust-up are familiar to all, so I’ll begin by observing that if you really want to ensure that a book is read, a film seen, or a recording listened to, the surest method is to ban it. I can attest to this from experience: nothing less than a school-wide ban would have obliged the entire population of fourth through eighth graders at my elementary school to read Judy Blume’s coming-of-age novel Forever; not only that, only a ban could have compelled us to discuss, analyze, and otherwise dissect the book with a zeal that our English teachers had failed entirely to arouse in us with freely available literature. That the book turned out to be disappointingly inoffensive taught us important lessons about the character of people who ban things.