Bill’s Barbershop And Joe’s Dirty Book Store
“If you are distressed by anything external,
the pain is not due to the thing itself
but to your own estimate of it;
and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
Marcus Aurelius
Ahhhh!
Where’s that feisty, guardian-of-American-morals-against-degeneracy spirit of John David Ashcroft when so many so badly need him?
Some might remember when – four months after 9-11 - George W. Bush’s attorney general saved the American soul by ordering $8,000 of blue drapes to hide two giant, aluminum, art deco, partially-nude statues in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice.
Partially nude!
Oh, the horror! The toga-clad female statue – the Spirit of Justice - stood with its arms raised, but a single breast completely exposed; the male – the Majesty of Justice – had a cloth covering his midsection.
Both statues – in all their unnaked dignity – had been in place for half a century and the souls of America’s youth had not been destroyed by what some today would call pornographic.
Bill’s Barbershop on the southern edge of Coral Gables was one block from the Cocoplum Women’s Club Library with its complete Hardy Boys mysteries collection. In the back, next to the last chair was a loose assortment – only slightly less loosely guarded – of “girly magazines,” available only to men old enough to need thrice-weekly shaves.
Two blocks west, Joe’s Dirty Book Store – actually, it was only called Joe’s – carried a wide range of newspapers (in the ‘50s and ‘60s, usually a day late), intellectual reviews and journals and a more extensive – and up-to-date – array of naked-women publications.
Pubescent and adolescent males desperate to grab a sneak peek at those verboten rags were usually forced to settle for the latest edition of National Geographic.
Mysteriously, generations of men have managed to mature, thrive and become the grandparents of today’s high schoolers despite their exposure to what today’s (erroneously named) Moms for Liberty would burn in the town center. Then came the Internet and what their grandfathers once sought surreptitiously today’s teens can access on their laptops, cellphones or tablest. And, amazingly, the world continues to spin on its axes.
“Very few college professors want high school graduates
in their history class who are simply "gung ho" and "rah-rah"
with regard to everything the United States has ever done,
have never thought critically in their life,
don't know the meaning of the word ‘historiography’
and have never heard of it.
They think that history is something
you're supposed to memorize and that's about it.
That's not what high school,
or what college history teachers want.”
James Loewen
In contemporary America, British author L. P. Hartley’s (1895-1972) observation “the past is a foreign country” is only partially true. Governors like Florida’s, the ironically titled Mom’s for Liberty – their website oxymoronically boasts that they are “joyful warriors” – and other eager-to-censor politicians and “warriors” would prefer that the past were a foreign country “never visited.”
Ignoring, denying and demonizing history; claiming that the facts of history will traumatize children or somehow satanically cause grade and high schoolers to “hate” themselves or suffer overwhelming self-loathing is little more than a Trojan horse for folks eager to return to the1950s when Black Americans knew “their place,” religious groups – like the American Catholic bishops’ Legion of Decency - governed what you saw at the movies, and signs declaring “[Blacks], Catholics and Jews need not apply” were common in Southern store windows.
Classic erotic art and depictions of sexuality and sexual activities apparently had a wide variety of uses and may well reveal more about Twenty-First Century attitudes about human sexuality than those of the Ancients.
Need proof?
Sixth and Fifth Century Greek and Roman classic art was often more graphic in its depictions of sexuality - gay, straight, individual and groups, with and without animals and mythological characters - than any 2020s high school sex-ed textbook. In fact, Roman tintinnabula (wind chimes), common in modern day discoveries in the gardens of Pompeii, gave a particular meaning to “lifelike.”
The Moche were a pre-Incan/pre-Columbian civilization and the dominant power in northern Peru from early in the First Century AD through the mid-Eighth Century. Modern day archaeologists have recovered approximately five-hundred samples of their ceramic pottery with phallic, childbirth and explicitly sexual themes and activities.
The Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli – an easy name to translate – is home of the Gabinetto Segreto – the “Secret Cabinet,” established in 1819, when Francis I, King of Naples, visited the museum with his wife and young daughter and was shocked by the collection of explicit imagery and ordered all items of a sexual nature be removed from view and locked in the cabinet, accessible only to scholars of “mature age and respected morals” – a euphemism for male scholars only.
The Cabinet was only opened to the general public in 2000 – despite protests by the Catholic Church; the objects have not yet been reunited with non-sexual artifacts in the general collection.
With English translations facing the original Greek (green) or Latin (red) texts, the Loeb Classical Library (LCC), first published in 1912, is the authoritative collection of classic ancient texts. But until 2000, editors/translators took pains to remove or edit passages that “might give offense” or were “coarse” or bawdy, as well as references to sex and homosexuality or “dirty and four-letter words.” LLC frequently resorted to euphemisms or translations that completely changed the meaning of Catullus, Aristophanes and others.
Wow!
Ancient Greeks and Romans actually used the equivalent of four-letter words!
We’re shocked!
“Never underestimate the power of dreams and
the influence of the human spirit.
We are all the same in this notion:
the potential for greatness lives within each of us….
[Because she had polio and scarlet fever as a child and
Had to wear a brace on her leg for years,]
“My doctor told me I would never walk again.
My mother told me I would. I believed my mother….
“I ran and ran and ran every day,
and I acquired this sense of determination,
this sense of spirit that I would never,
never give up, no matter what else happened….”
Wilma Rudolph (1940-1994)
And in 2023, there’s guardians of the our nation’s minds like the growing MfL movement and folks like culture warrior Vicki Baggett, an English teacher at Northview High School.
Baggett successfully challenged When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball – the story of the Black sprinter who overcame racial discrimination and became an Olympic champion. Dubbed “the fastest woman in the world,” Wilma Rudolph became the first American woman to win three (1960) Olympic gold track-and-field medals; returning home, she refused to attend her homecoming parade if it was not integrated and was named the Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year in 1961.
But English teacher Vicki Baggett wants to keep When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball out of school libraries in Governor DeSantis’s Escambia County School district because she’s concerned the story could make White students “feel uncomfortable” and she believes she has “a responsibility to protect minors” from this kind of content.
Admirable.
Almost.
Except that in January the website Popular Information reported that during a 10th grade English class, including about fifteen students from a variety of racial backgrounds, Baggett told students she opposed interracial marriage because “[Baggett] said in the Bible somewhere it says that it is a sin for races to mix together and that whites are meant to be with whites and blacks are meant to be with blacks." Another former student reported Baggett said she was opposed to “race mixing” and “she wanted to preserve cultures and didn’t want everyone to turn the same color eventually.”
According to a former student, Baggett was an “openly racist teacher.” In December 2022, Popular Information reported Baggett posting an image of the Confederate flag on her Facebook page and claiming that she was a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy, designated part of the Neo-Confederate movement by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Students also reported Baggett telling a female that that her sister, who had a girlfriend, was “faking being a lesbian for attention” and “nobody’s born that way,” In September 2019, at least one parent complained by email to the Northview principal because of Baggett’s openly hostile comments about LGBTQ individuals, noting she “has expressed her utter distaste for homosexuals to her students” and “stated she thinks homosexuals are DUMB/STUPID for wearing the rainbow.” The parent expressed concern that the comments might make students feel “judged” and “humiliated.”
Among the books which Baggett (and others) challenged was a 2005 picture book based on the true story of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who raised a chick together. Since its publication, And Tango Makes Three has consistently ranked as one of the top ten most banned/challenged books in libraries nationwide.
Perhaps it is time to rethink or redefine obscenity, to view pornography with a new set of eyes, to redefine filth. Obscenity spewed from the mouth of a former president when he spoke of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has resulted in more than 8,000 civilian deaths, as many as 145,000 deaths of Russian fighters and upwards of 13,000 Ukrainian military deaths:
“I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” Trump said in a radio interview with “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show.” “He used the word ‘independent’ and ‘we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”
Politico. February 23, 2022
Real pornography isn’t genital. Real pornography is the floors of Club Q in Colorado Springs stained with the blood of five dead and seventeen shot and injured or the blood-splattered walls of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando where 49 people were killed and 53 others wounded.
Real profanity is the mass graves in Bucha and Lyman and Izium in Ukraine.
Smut is child labor in the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo and meat packing plants of the United States.
Real filth is the still-stateless status of three- and four- and twelve-year-old kids brought to the United States fifteen and twenty years ago, still deprived of the right to citizenship, living under the constant threat of deportation to lands they never knew and whose value as doctors, lawyers, teachers and caretakers can never be fully realized
Obscenity is a body destroyed or a family annihilated by a drunk driver.
Filth is the politician who sells his honor, her integrity, Truth and Justice simply to stay in power or curry the favor of a bloviating narcissist.
Anti-Semitism and racism are the consummate perversion.
Obscenity and pornography is the gaggle of television commentators who – despite knowing without doubt that their guests were lying about stolen elections – continued to fill the air with rage-inducing dishonesty.
Obscenity, filth, slim is screaming “obscenity,” “pornography,” and “filth,” while trying repeatedly to undermine Social Security and Medicare and voting sixty-one – 61 – times to fully or partially repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Obscenity and slim (and absolute cowardice) is the failure or refusal to address the gun violence that makes the United States the world leader in mass shootings at grade and high schools and colleges and universities, while members of Congress sing “Our Children Are Our Future” and promising meaningless “thoughts and prayers.”
Obscenity is the speech of the representative from Georgia calling for a national divorce.
In the end, it turned out that John Ashcroft spent the equivalent of $31,000 in today’s money to cover a breast because he thought it was a “bad look” at his press conferences.
It was politics – a vain man’s need to “look good.”
In truth, that’s what so much of today’s censoring, banning and brouhaha is really all about – politicians and hate-filled, bigoted people desperate to “look good,” get votes and somehow feel righteous and self-righteous.