Season 9, Episode 11 September 29, 2024

On this episode, we'll hear about the Model T, the Berlin Airlift, and Harry Truman's vision for Palestine.  Not the Headlines examines Banned Book Week, and I'll speak with Jack Kammer about men.

Chapters

• 0:28 Not the Headlines
• 8:58 Let's Go Back
• 13:32 Jack Kammer

Transcript

Hello!  Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube!  I’m your host, Bob Woodley.  On this episode, we’ll hear about Truman’s choice, airfare, and the horseless carriage.  Plus, I’ll have a chat with a man about men.  But first (Not the Headlines!).

This past week was banned book week.  You may or may not have heard about it.  It’s amazing that we actually set aside a week to recognize something that doesn’t exist in America.  If we’re going to have a banned book week, we should also have a systemic racism week and a week to recognize the monkeys that fly out of your butt.
This whole banned books farce is a tit-for-tat effort by the left to draw attention away from the fact that their the most First Amendment-violating party in the history of the Constitution.  When you speak for a living, or when you do it for free, like when you have a podcast, you pay attention to how what you say may or may not be effected by the policies of the politicians.  What I’ve seen since the Listening Tube began is clear evidence, if not outright proof, that the Democratic Party is more likely to stifle my speech.  I’ll point out that I didn’t say try to stifle my speech, because if they want to stifle my speech, they’ve already demonstrated that the can and they will.  Not with my particular program, but in other ways.  The left’s control over the media, and their strong-arming of the social media platforms to hide opposing opinions and other observations, is clearly more restrictive than anything related to so-called book banning.
I’ve addressed this issue on the Listening Tube before.  From a variety of perspectives.  There are no banned books in the United States of America.  There are age restrictions on some books.  But in order to get you outraged about a fictitious issue, banned book week was born.
There are two organizations who haphazardly keep track of what they call banned books, but when you dig a little deeper, the word banned turns into challenged.  But the American Library Association, one of the organizations keeping track, has a tab on their website for banned books.  When you get there, there are none.  It’s like clicking on a tab for a coupon, and finding the coupon gives you a free one if you pay double for the first one.  In other words, there’s no value there.  It makes it clear that there are no banned books, only challenged books.  Granted some of the challenges have resulted in libraries pulling certain books from their shelves, but that’s not the same as a ban.  Even if you can’t get a book at your local library doesn’t mean a book is banned.  Just because a child can’t buy a magazine full of pictures of people having sex doesn’t mean the magazine is banned.  
Society has a responsibility to protect children from words and pictures that they may not be prepared to understand.  Freedom of speech doesn’t just mean I can say what I want, it also means our speech must be responsible for it’s effects.  That’s why you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater unless there’s actually a fire.  
Keeping a book off a shelf in a particular library doesn’t mean the book is banned.  There may be objections to the content of a book, and the librarian may decide to put it aside, or not include it in the inventory at all, but you’re still free to find it somewhere else.
The other organization keeping track of so-called banned books is called Pen America.  Their motto is “Freedom to write.”  PenAmerica claims to have recorded almost 10,000 book bans in the United States.  All of them during the Biden Administration.  But there’s a vast difference between the numbers of banned books among those who claim it’s something to follow.  According to a story by the Associated Press, it’s because of a difference in the way the American Library Association and PenAmerica define a ban.  PenAmerica calls it a ban even if a book is eventually put back on the shelf of a particular library, while the ALA will then reclassify that book as “challenged.”  
But the way they claim that there are almost 10,000 banned books in America is simply a deception.  One title can be kept off 10,000 library shelves, but they make it sound like 10,000 books have been banned. 
Both the ALA and PenAmerica claim most challenged books have either LGBTQIA+ or racial subject matter.  Okay, is that why they’re banned?  PenAmerica says 30 percent of challenged books include characters of color or discuss race and racism.  Thirty percent of challenged books contain LGBTQ+ characters or themes.  A slightly higher 33 percent have detailed descriptions of sex between the characters.  Did I mention these so-called bans only apply to school classrooms and libraries at the pre-secondary level?  That’s right.  Kids.  Legal children.  PenAmerica says 42 percent of banned books cover topics of health and well-being.  Read a little further, and you see that sexual well-being is included in a long list of other subcategories like mental health, suicide and drug use.  It’s like the kid who goes into the store and buys a lot of little things, hoping the cashier won’t notice there a condom among the comb and pack of gum and lighter and beef jerky and a quart of motor oil.  At the top of the list is violence and abuse, at 48 percent of banned books.  If there’s anything we want our kids to learn about slowly more than sex, it’s violence.  I will point out that kids my age witnessed a coyote try to blow up a road runner on a weekly basis.  And a man who sought the viewer’s cooperation by suggesting they be “vewy, vewy quiet” because he was hunting wabbit.  With a shotgun.  If that’s the type of violence people are trying to protect us from, then shame on them.  I never once tried to build a rocket from parts suppled by the Acme company, and I feel terrible every time I run over an animal with my car.  The first one ever was a rabbit.  My buddy Scott was with me.  He could tell how much that hurt me.  But at lease half of the books banned for violence include examples of sexual assault, which also equals 25 percent of all the times books are banned.
This seem like it’s almost a pornography consortium trying to get their dirty magazines into the hands of children.  But it’s actually authors with an agenda aimed at children.  Their agenda is perfectly fine if it’s aimed at adults.  Just like cigarettes, alcohol and pornography.  But just as the vaping industry is challenged when it markets it’s products to kids, so should be the literary fiction industry.  

Let’s Go Back liner

1908
Ford puts the Model T car on the American market at a price of $825.  Eight-hundred-twenty-five dollars!?  For some newfangled janitny?  Eight-hundred-twenty-fi...why, I could git two and a half horses for that much money!  I guess if people wanna spend that kind of money on something that can’t pull a hoe, that’s their business, but I don’t see ‘em catchin’ on...

This week in 1946, not long, in terms of history, after World War II, U.S. President Truman urges British Prime Minister Attley to open Palestine to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.  This was 1946, so Truman wrote to him for help because Great Britain was in control of Palestine since the end of World War I.  The original plan was to relocate 100-thousand Jews who had found themselves without families, jobs or anything else after the Nazi purge.  
Less than two weeks later, the King of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud, accused Truman of breaking a promise that he wouldn’t try to relocate anyone to Palestine.
Truman objected to the creation of a Jewish state, and was disappointed that he was not able to create an Arab-Jewish partnership in the region.  But he and Attley brokered a deal that would relocate the Jewish to what they considered their ancestral home.  
By early January, Palestinian guerrillas had begun attacking British enclaves in multiple cities as revenge for allowing the Jewish settlers.  By the end of January, all British women and children were ordered evacuated from Palestine.  A report from the time says about 5-thousand Americans lived there, but were not considered in danger because all of the attacks were directed at the British.  Two years later, the British withdrew, and in May of 1948, Truman recognized Israel as an independent state. 

1949
The Berlin Airlift ends.  There’s a common misconception that Berlin was situated on the border between East and West Germany.  That’s not the case.  All of Berlin was in East Germany.  About two-thirds of it was West Berlin, and West Berlin was like an island of capitalism in a sea of communism.  Russia didn’t like it there.  Kruschev called it a bone in the throat of communism.  So they blocked all the roads into West Berlin in order to starve it into submission.  No food, no fuel, no nothing.  But the west had three air corridors under the four-powers agreement that would allow them to fly in and out all they wanted.  And they did.  Code-named “Operation Vittles” by the Americans, and “the Air Bridge” by Berliners, it’s today remembered as the Berlin Airlift.  It lasted more than a year, and ferried in between 5 and 8 thousand tons of supplies into West Berlin every day.  
Eventually, the Soviet Union realized the blockade wasn’t working.  A roundup of the event on History dot com says it hastened the creation of West Germany and made the Soviet Union look like bullies to the rest of the world, and by doing so, led to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, which, as you may know, recently added some new members because of Russia’s continued attempts to intimidate, all these decades later.


Phone and email liner

My guest this week is a champion of men’s issues.  It’s not an accidental position.  He’s got decades of working in and studying social issues, and recognized the effects of societal change on men, and their role in society.  I had a very candid conversation with him about the relationship between men and women, and how equality may be a good goal, but it may not be all it’s cracked up to be.  His name is Jack Kammer...

Interview with Jack Hammer 

Jack’s written books about the subject, including Goodwill Toward Men and If Men Have all the Power, How Come Women Make the Rules.  Learn more about Jack Kammer at malefriendlymedia.media.com.  My thanks to Jack for spending time in the Listening Tube.

The Listening Tube is written and produced by yours truly.  Copyright 2024.  Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube!  Subscribe today, or text me from the homepage!  I’m your host, Bob Woodley for thou ad infinitum.