This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

“Welcome to Tennessee!” Fighting against the future for over 100 years! The ignorant can’t ever be made to understand what book banning really means to the world at large, because they are uneducated. They can’t understand the signal it sends from the mountain top or what it means or what it represents. Physically, philosophically, or metaphorically. It’s a sign placed at the city limits, “Posted: Employers Keep Moving! Strictly Enforced!”

“Welcome to Bleaker Corners, the folks here are real nice. Only don’t rile them. Don’t you go dragging your muddy future and new ideas in here all over our nice clean memories of the past! We don’t go in for sort of thing around here.

We remember how things used to be in Bleaker Corners. When certain folks couldn’t come to the front door or hold jobs in public. When the stores closed at sundown, but the Klan was open all night. When we voted to keep the town dry and the town bootlegger wet. When we painted a happy face on America and pretended that it was so.” Bibles and bullets and bullshit. “Give them a light, and they’ll follow it anywhere.” – The Firesign Theater

These things can take on a life of their own, like a feeding frenzy. And before you know it, you’re burning books and witches and heretics galore. “Here in Bleaker Corners, we just assume not hear about such awful things like a Holocaust that happened so long ago. Why not write nice books? Books about puppy dogs playing under an old red wagon in the shade of a tall oak tree. That fine old Southern tradition, “Thank you, for not mentioning reality while in our schools.”

Sure, there was a holocaust and millions of innocent people were brutally murdered. But do they have to use dirty words and pictures to tell about it? “Gosh darn you, Nazis, you murdered my whole family, dang it!” A streetcar named denial, if we pretend it is so, then it is so. We don’t want you to teach about such things that might color young minds. “We did not descend from monkeys, and God created the world in seven days. If you put books about homosexuals in the library. Homosexuals will read it and discover they are homosexuals, when without the book…they would never have known.

They could of had a normal happy life with a wife named Janet, and two kids in suburbs. With a Volvo in the driveway and a dog named Rex. A life ruined because of a book in the middle school library. If you go around telling the children about how big the universe is. They might get to wondering, why God would ever choose such  a Ma & Pa Kettleville of a planet such as this one in the backwaters of the universe, to be his pet project? Next thing you know, they’re “no shows” at the Wednesday Night Bible Study and watching “R” rated movies on the HBO!

Here in Bleaker Corners, if you miss the meeting you’ll have to call around and find out what we’re outraged about this week. Always something, and you can’t always trust  the newsletter. Clear my schedule, I’m going down to that middle school library and straighten them out! God forbid, that my days should ever be so barren and empty. I heard they have a book on Thespians!

It is the eternal struggle of light pushing against darkness, and darkness pushing against light. You see, sending information about birth control through the mail, was considered pornography. Anatomically correct depictions of the female body were “dirty pictures.” Painting reality as they wished it could be. This is a nation of God-fearing church goers. Which accounts for all the heavy traffic congestion on the roads on Sunday mornings. It’s not that we want to stifle information about birth control, it’s that we want to save you from pornography dear. Can’t you explain birth control without all those dirty pictures of genitals?

If you could, what day would you stop the world? Call it, Frozen retro-futurism. Can’t it be 1975 or 1985 forever? That day that a pretty girl first kissed you and your shorts began to ride up? We have only good old days. The future is a hailstorm tearing apart our good old days. When Daddy would put us, all in the pickup truck take us to town on Saturday. And buy us all a sody pop after mom made us a picnic lunch. (Or was that Ozzie & Harriet?)

When we’d all sit together on Sunday night and watched Ed Sullivan. When we’d all sit together on a Sunday night and listen to Arthur Godfrey on the radio. When we’d sit together on a Sunday night, and someone would read aloud. Seeking to pressure our personal perceptions of a time that only really existed to us. So, if we didn’t know about it, we didn’t have any of it. Ignorance is bliss.

Didn’t need no such books in the library when I was a youngin. Didn’t need all of them new stars and planets they done discovered. What’s wrong with all the old planets? Ain’t they good enough fer ya, no more? Trying to hold on to shreds and fragments of a time that never was in a windstorm, all with the best of intentions.

Don’t worry, we’ll stop before we reach 1900. I say we take a real good look at that Periodic Table of Elements! Einsteinium? What the hell is that? Ain’t no Einsteinium in the Bible, you can’t buy it at the Rexall, so get it out of here. It’s from the Periodic Table from hell! That sounds like something Satan made up to me.

It’s a wonderful day here in Bleaker Corners. Jimmy has stopped drooling and can pick the hell out of the banjo for your listening pleasure. We’re all going to get dressed up and go to the sock hop down at the high school later or listen to Buddy Holly on the car radio. There’s plenty of gas in the old man’s Buick, but were not allowed out after 1955!