Back when John Rich and I were kids, there was this huge brouhaha about how some kinds of music were ruining children. It was, apparently, beyond damaging for white kids to buy albums with lyrics like “Ooh, me so horny, me love you long time,” but somehow not damaging for white adults to watch the movie Full Metal Jacket, which contained the line, “Ooh, me so horny, me love you long time.” I don’t know what the circumstances were that magically transformed these words from damaging to entertaining, but those were strange times.
Tipper Gore, who at the time was the wife of Al Gore (in case you’re wondering why so much of Gen X is so meh on ol' Al), and some other busybodies founded the Parents Music Resource Center and set about on a wave of censorship in order to protect the children from Black music and heavy metal. The PMRC even put out a list called “The Filthy Fifteen” to demonstrate to America just how bad the music was that kids were listening to. The Filthy Fifteen was — as you might expect, since it was the 1980s — Prince and his friends, Black Sabbath and a bunch of bands they influenced, and Madonna and Cyndi Lauper.
They had a big congressional hearing about it. John Denver called the PRMC a bunch of Nazis, and it was this huge cultural moment where we all learned that censorship is bad and the people who want it are corny assholes. The corny assholes kind of won, since albums did get parental advisory stickers on them if they were deemed potentially offensive, and Tipper Gore and her fellow busybodies were not permanently banned from all cultural events.
But on the other hand, they didn’t win, because music is still delightfully raunchy. They didn’t actually change music and put it on a more modest path.
But in the immortal words of Dwight Yoakam, we’re back again for another night of trying to break free from the sadness we can’t lay to rest. And this time the culture censors are headed up by John Rich, who is up at the state Capitol drumming up support for banning books. On Wednesday, he spoke to legislators about the necessity of such actions:
What’s the difference between a teacher, educator or librarian putting one of these books which you have on the desk of a student, or a guy in a white van pulling up at the edge of school when school lets out and saying, "Come on around, kids, let me read you this book and show you these pictures"? What’s the difference in those two scenarios? There is a difference, by the way — they can run away from the guy in the white van.
Books have been supposedly ruining children forever. The poem “Howl” was supposed to ruin children. John Rich grew up in a world supposedly ruined by “Howl.” Can he point to any adult suffering from the adverse effects of being exposed to “Howl” as a child?  The Catcher in the Rye was supposed to ruin kids. Harry Potter was supposed to ruin kids.
They keep promising us that this time, this batch of books is the ruination of children, but it never is. But rather than reflecting on this fact, they just keep floundering around for the book that is the problem — the one that, if gotten rid of, will keep their kids from harm.
Dee Snider explained the problem with this approach to Congress back in 1985. He said, “The beauty of literature, poetry and music is that they leave room for the audience to put its own imagination, experience and dreams into the words.” Art is a collaborative effort between the artist and the audience. If John Rich is reading those books (I feel 100 percent certain John Rich is not reading those books) and being corrupted by them, that’s something that’s happening in John — not something he can guarantee will happen to others who read those books. Perhaps he should not read them, but that doesn’t mean he has the right to decide that no one can.
The parents who buy into Rich’s drama seem to believe that, if children’s education is limited in specific, considered ways, then those kids will grow up and be guaranteed to become just like them. If kids, for instance, never learn about racism, then they won’t question why few Black kids go to their private schools. If they never learn about people who are gay or trans, then they won’t be gay or trans. Just keep them in a sort of sensory-depravation tank and they will be glad to have only the sensations approved by their parents. Or if their parents are loving and accepting, parents more like John Rich.
As a society, we keep muddling up fear, respect and love. If someone fears us, we interpret that to mean they respect us. If they respect us, then that means they love us. And it sure seems like a lot of people have reached a point where they feel disrespected by a culture that is not catering to them all the time. I suspect this makes them feel unloved, which is a really terrible way to feel. But since they’ve conflated fear and love and respect, in order to feel right about the world again, they resort to trying again to be so scary that people are afraid of them, and they can feel that as a kind of love and respect.
There’s a real tragedy here, because just being a loving person who people respect is always an option. But these silly busybodies, for whatever reason, can’t allow themselves to do that. So instead, we’re just caught up in their larger and larger efforts to bully the rest of us so that they can feel something that is, for them, akin to being loved and respected.
It’s hollow. In some respects, you get the feeling they know it’s hollow. John Rich could ban a million books and it’s not going to make writers respect him. He’s never going to be cool again. All he’s done is change his legacy from “Who? Oh yeah, I liked that one song” to “Who? Oh, fuck him.”
