librarypunk - 105 - Storm Center (1956) feat. Horror Vanguard

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

This week we’re joined by Jon and Ash from Horror Vanguard to talk about the spookiest movie of the summer: Storm Center (1956).    Horror Vanguard: https://linktr.ee/HorrorVanguard  Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/jY4jaNgan  Media Mentioned https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhLP8M9eXD8  https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/poetry/item/2729-in-praise-of-communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Brown_(librarian) Face to Face with Communism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_jbMrXcVmw  ​​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproductive_futurism Hammer and Hoe https://uncpress.org/book/9781469625485/hammer-and-hoe/ https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/our-books/capitalist-realism-new-edition  https://www.versobooks.com/products/2631-class-war https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5867314/ https://www.librarypunk.gay/e/080-moms-for-libertymoms-for-libraries/  https://soundcloud.com/user-317910500/201-in-the-earth

So Storm Center, huh? Yeah. Zero storms in this movie. Nobody was chasing tornadoes. I feel like there was like a false advertisement issue going on here. Where is Bill Seye Hoffman in a stupid hat, you know? I was going to ask about that. I was like, why is it called Storm Center?

Like, is there a reference here that I'm missing? Because, like, it seems complete non-sequitur to the actual plot. There was a storm of communist propaganda in America, actually. He was at the center of it. Yeah, that's all I could figure was that it was just like a really shitty metaphor. Like, I'll tell you, this movie just made me think of what Orson Welles said about Elia Kazan. Have you seen that clip? It's one of my favorite Austin Wells quick clip ever.

You know what you're talking about, yeah. He's asked about Elia Kazan, and he says, Elia Kazan is a traitor who sold out his comrades to McCarthy and made a movie called On the Waterfront about, how cool it is to be an informer. However, he is a great film director. And I was like, yeah, this was not directed by Elliot Kazam. That's all I'm going to say. This is quite the opposite.

Yeah, I did a little poking about like the history of the movie, because that's what I'm always interested in is like, who made it and why? Because I don't really always have the skills to understand the film metaphors or what's happening in like the films talking to each other. but I can't at least understand like, oh, this guy was accused of being a communist. So I thought maybe someone involved had had this happen to them. But instead, there's a real librarian that this is main character more or less is based off of.

It's like, oh, cool. And I do love Betty Davis. Just made me want to watch like Now Voyager, which like great film. If you all haven't seen Now Voyager, like, or just whatever happened to Baby Jane. That's like my two mode. I'm either a Now Voyager game. or I'm a whatever happened to baby Jay and gay. There is like no in between.

All right, let's fucking go. I'm Justin. I'm a scalp com librarian. My pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I'm a music library director, and my pronouns are he, him. We have guests. Would you like to introduce yourselves? Boo.

You chose this. You chose this. I'm Ash, I'm one of the co-ghosts of Horror Vanguard, pronouns they, them. And I am one of the other co-ghosts of Horror Vanguard. My name is John, and I use he, him, pronouns. Spooky applause this time. I've had that there since the last time you're on, so thank you for coming back.

Oh, anytime. This is the most fun. So we're going to talk about a spooky, scary movie. About communism. Oh, communism. So we're going to be talking about 1956's Storm Center, a movie that was originally titled The Librarian, I believe. And we are still in the process.

We're looking very strongly into how it got the name Storm Center. Best Research Team is on it. But it is a story about a small town New England library that has to deal with a little bit of a scare of some sort, a little bit of a frightening moment, a little bit of a spook. Maybe a specter, if you will. Something is haunting this act. Weirdly, this is a film. They don't make you watch in library school,

but I think they should make you watch this in library school over Party Girl and Desk Set, which, I mean, Party Girl and Deskets are way better movies than this. But still. I assume this would be required viewing for everybody who works in every single level of the American library system. I'm somewhat surprised. What's going on? I've never heard of it. And I love Betty Davis, and I had never heard of this.

Yeah, no, they just make you watch Party Girl in grad school. That's it. It's a fun one. Yeah. Well, as I've always said before, I am not a great scholar of film, and so I want to open it up to our guests for their opening thoughts about this movie. Maybe set the tone for us. Well, Ash, I think it's over to you.

I actually have a prissy written for this if you want me to read it. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I'm surprised. I got caught out once, caught out once on left page slash hereby media for not having a pracey, wrote it during the show and have since never not had one out of fear of not having one. I didn't want to be presumptuous and rude to our guests.

So I was, I was poking for, does Ash have a precy? Please feel free. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And I thought a bunch of crazy nonsense with this one, too. There are a few game systems that contend with the library as a site of struggle and metamorphosis. better than Call of Cthulhu. In COC, your character regularly finds themselves visiting local libraries, special collections, and forbidden archives to better understand the world around them. Your

place in a Lovecraftian world is never certain and constantly renegotiated as you attempt with strained success to correlate the contents of your existence. It's a shame that HPL died when he did, even with his evolving socialist politics set aside, the style of historicized fear that he excelled at writing, defined America during the Cold War. Senator McCarthy is a poor man's copy of a Waitley or an armitage. The idea of a book so compelling, so challenging, that it drives one instantly insane, is not just Lovecraftian, but the corner conceit of Storm Center. The Communist Dream, the film's tired masking of Marx's Communist Manifesto,

is reportedly so dangerous that the community would rather watch a child become a crazed arsonist than contend with its contents. In no way then do we find difference between the Communist. dream in the Necronomicon. The terror for the fearful uninitiated, a tool for those already familiar with the arts therein. Alicia Hull herself is the perfect vehicle for an aged sage of the best weird fiction traditions. She embodies the types of alterity that make her kith and kin to elder things and deep ones. Hull is a being in a slightly ambiguous gendered position, a ciswoman certainly, but also one thrust into the political arena of her gendered overclass.

Hull contends with the hyper-objects of the reel in ways that would make the great face of Yith proud. Storm Center's liberalism has it constantly running out of steam. The communist dream must be kept in libraries for uncertain reasons no more specific and no more vague than a nationalist sense of moral fortitude. It's Wilbur Waitley and Dean Armitage locked in combat over the coming age of Yogsathoth. Neither see beyond their small spheres of influence no deeper in time than perhaps a quarter of a quarter of a life. Hall and the city fathers likewise battle over something less concrete than the coming of a great old one. There is a third contender, dear listener, in this cryptic conflict.

It is you, I, the viewer. We could side with Hull for a sense of academic freedom, the city council over wartime concerns, but both of these leave us stuck with the peace and safety of a new dark age. It is within us to transcend Yogsathoth, to build something that can last longer than the Yithians, to extend and abstract the library as a site of struggle, concept, and social framework throughout our lives. A writer gave birth to cosmic horror. A writer gave birth to communism. And a writer hemmed them both in with patriotic prose.

All contenders in the Erie Archive Arena of your local library. Join us as we check out Storm Center. Pun. I was so excited to see how non-librarians would react to this film's like bullshit neutrality. intellectual freedom arguments because like I read the Wikipedia for this and it was like oh this is like anti-McCartheon about like a book about communism and defending it in the library okay and then I watched it and I was like oh okay and I was so caught up in that that I was so curious as to like what non-librarians would think of us that was beautiful ash thank you

oh my thank you yeah I also read the wiki before watching I had never heard of this one either until you all suggested it I read the wiki and I was like really hyped I read a bunch of reviews, period, and later reviews. And it was like, anti-McCarthiest, brave film stands up to, and then I watch it, and I'm like, oh, there's some like great, creepy shots, but this is like the most like liberal, both, they literally both sides mind comf in this movie. Yeah, yeah. It literally opens on a shot of John Stuart Mills on Liberty. That's the, when the credits roll, that's the text that's being displayed. So it's like, oh, welcome. to the antonymies of American liberalism as it is completely unable to deal with ideology or

politics properly. Politics will literally turn children into arsonists. That's what politics does to you. And like sadly, even now, still in our current, and this is something we talk about on library punk all the time that like so much of discourse around like book banning intellectual freedom still in libraries now is this sort of tired hollow liberal but we have to have all of the ideas right it's more about the principle of the thing than actual ideology of why you might want to have a book in a library my why you might not want to have a book in a library both ideologically and just like you can't have every book in a library there's literally not enough physical space and it might not make sense for your community to have a book in a library right so it's like when it's more about the principle of the thing than actually carrying

about what books are in or not in your collection. I was like, okay, this is, we haven't changed at all in 50, 60 years. Yeah. The way we've always formulated it is it's not that you put a book there because it's good or bad or that the community has the fortitude to withstand bad ideas. It's usually something like queer people are cool. People need to learn about it. Whether or not there's represented queer people in our community, you need to learn about

them. There is sort of a coercion in particularly public school. You are coerced. You are forced to learn about things you don't want to learn about. And the public library also has a semi-coercive nature of, we are going to put things here that will challenge you. And there's a reason for that. And it's because it is for ultimately our good, so we believe.

And that the underlying ideology behind that might be kind of wishy-washy. But I think you can move beyond liberalism and say, like, look, there's a reason we have to learn about other people. And that's sort of like an anarchist dream of like, We need this radical interdependence to be able to run without hierarchy. So I think it's totally consistent. I also didn't see this as an anti-McCarthy film at all. This film felt more like the only problem with McCarthyism is that it gets, quote, innocent people. If it got just the communists and stuff, that would be fine.

Like that's like with her like, oh, she was in those organizations that turned out to be communist fronts. Well, but we didn't ask when or why she joined them or when or why she left. And if we just knew that, then, oh, she's innocent. She's being besmirch. She can't be actually a communist, right? She has to be innocent. And there's a very liberal sense of like this, this totally like Apollonian political landscape.

Like the organizations she was a part of that were known communist fronts were like the the people's association for community smiles or something. Like they're just these like an hedonic things. And in the end when all the books burn in the library and it's this, it's a very like, it's an effective like horror sequence. of seeing all the zoom ins on the titles and the spines through the flames. But it's the most like the, it's the books that I would draw if I was making a children's cartoon in the background of the library, just so they know it's a library.

It's like Shakespeare, like one of the books was like something like medicine for people or something. It was like a bunch of fake book titles. The mind of man, Dickens. Yes. When you said religion. Yeah, religion. Won't somebody think of the folio edition of the works of Voltaire? Oh, not my Dostoevsky.

No. My Barnes and Noble Moby Dick is going to be destroyed by McCarthyism. This sucks. I do like those Barnes & Noble editions. I have one of Hamlet. They're so pretty. I'm so conflicted over those because they're so pretty, but it's like, I don't want to own the Barnes and Noble edition, because I'm petty.

So it's the great war inside of so many queer people. Pretty versus petty. Which one do I let win? Yeah. I did have kind of like a question for the group if we wanted to kick this around. So to the best of my knowledge, the communist dream is not a real book. I tried finding it. I could not find any book with that title.

So what do we make of them being too big of cowards to actually put the manifesto in the film? My thoughts is that if they actually put real politics, they don't talk about about what communism stands for or what might be in the communist dream. It's just the word communist, like, communism and that's scary, if you were to actually put the Communist Manifesto or some other, like, communist real text in there that had actual real politics in it, you couldn't just use it as, like, a spooky boogeyman thing that is kind of devoid of politics. Like, it would have to be a real object that people would have to talk about

and not just some sort of way to talk about, oh, well, we have to have ideas we don't agree with in the library, right? I put the communist dream in a World Cat, and I set the limiter to 1956, and it just immediately took me to the page for Storm Center, so I do not think this book exists. Perfect. I think it's a level of abstraction.

Yeah. They were afraid to, if you, I think they were a little bit of a contempt for the audience, where they thought, This was in contemporary reviews, too. They're like, eh, it's a little preachy, whatever. But they thought maybe if you solve the manifesto, you would just lose your mind and stop paying attention, which is actually fair.

That's called a worldview defense. If you have something that challenges your worldview, you do shut off. So it's a rhetorical technique. I think it makes sense if you're trying to make a point. And there's a wider kind of representational problem here, right, which is that you can't, within the ideological framework of any mainstream American culture, you can't represent communism as an actually existing thing, right? You can't do that, right?

This is, it's, it's why you, this is a horror movie. This is a horror movie and it's about the spec. It's literally about the ghost of communism that is haunting the imagination of small town America, right? Like, I, I just was thinking of Brecht's famous poem in praise of communism. Brecht's, you know, it's a very simple poem. And it's like, no, communism is very simple. You can grasp it because you're not an exploiter.

it is the simple thing which is hard to do. And it's like, so necessarily you can't have it kind of concretized. It has to remain sort of spectral because ghosts are easier to manipulate. And something I find interesting is that like, as critical as we all are of the sort of like liberal intellectual freedom defense that's in this film, at least that defense is taking all readers, including children, seriously. And their ability to compensate. apprehend things that they might not agree with.

Like it, like this film still assumes that someone reading the communist dream wouldn't automatically make them a communist sadly. Right. Like it's still like, well, people can read this and know what's in it and be fine, even a child. Like it weirdly is also making that argument. So I don't know then why it doesn't take its actual real audience as seriously as it does the fictional audience that's of like, of readers in the film. Well, you did mention before we started that the Hayes Code was still in effect.

That's also true. To what extent do you think that might have impacted it? I mean, the Hays Code was also sort of getting onto its last legs, right? Like famously sort of like some like it hot was sort of the last nail on the coffin of the Hays Code because it was just like, we don't know what to do with this, right? So like it's nearing the end, but like the fact that it can even talk about communism and even paint it like obviously I would not call this a pro-communist text at all, but it's still defends the right for a library to have a communist text in it and for people to read

said communist text, which I think is still saying something for a Hollywood film at the time during McCarthyism. So part of me just thinks like some things that would get around the Hayes code were because the sensors didn't know what was going on because they were all stupid. So maybe they just like didn't know what was going on or the fact that it like wasn't real communism or the fact that it paid lip service to like communism being bad, that that that was fine or something, because it gets kind of very patriotic about, well, this is what democracy means and this is what being an American is, yada, yada, yada. Communists wouldn't allow you to have the communist stream in the library, but we do, you know. Yeah, it's very, it's very blue-tick

liberalism. Yeah. Like, which is, I think the, the criticism of the time was that, like, it's, it's very preachy. It's a preachy, very heavy-handed and didactic movie of, like, isn't small town 1950s republicanism good? And you go, but what's interesting, I think watching it now from the left is that you have to go, actually, there are some things here which are useful from a left point of view. The principle of actual equity of access is extremely important and was a big reason why the real life librarian that this is based on was fired, was her providing access to the library for black Americans in, I think she's in Oklahoma, right?

Like, so there are useful things there and there are ways in which, you can kind of see like leftist politics is not necessarily just the, not just the kind of overcoming of the quote unquote liberal humanist project, but is in fact, it's completion and actual proper universalizing, right? So you go under, under communism, would there still be libraries? And you go, yeah, of course they would. But they would actually be libraries that everybody could access and everybody would have the time and resources to access in whatever way that they needed to. So I don't know. I think it's, I think it's a kind of, it's a weird. weirdly preaching movie, and I think the...

But I'm like, for a first go of an anti-McCarthy mainstream Hollywood film, boy, it could have been a lot worse. It honestly kind of reminded me of this propaganda film from 1951 called Face to Face with Communism. I don't know if you've seen it. It's only 30 minutes long, but it's very funny propaganda film. Basically, what happens is, you know how in Canada they would have those invasion days where, like, the Nazis would invade and...

the town was taken over by the Nazis. Well, basically this guy, like, wakes up, or he's, like, comes into town or something, and he wakes up, and, like, the communists have taken over, and he's, like, going through his days, bewildered, and he eventually, like, gets tried in a court, in a, like, a Soviet court for crimes against the people, and then he wakes up the next day, and then it's, like, everything's back to normal, and he's like, oh, everyone's like, oh, wow, that was really, that was really a great performance you put on yesterday. I guess they teach you all sorts of things in the army.

That's right. He's an army guy who was going through town. And it was very strange, very surreal, very funny. I highly recommend it. But this was sort of like a, it reminded me of it because it was very much like, what if this town just started losing their minds about a book called the communist dream? And everyone is sort of slowly turning on each other, turning on the little boy, turning on the librarian.

And as the movie sort of reaches further towards the end, it just kind of turns into a horror movie. And it's very strange why it's, I don't know, I just pulled a lot of comparisons for me as if, like, were they drawing from that artistically or was it just a coincidence? Yeah. Weirdly what the end reminded me of was gone with the wind. Actually, you know, I'll never go hungry again. And, like, you know, Atlanta burning behind her and everything. And like, especially since this was inspired by a real librarian who, what she was actually fired for was like desegregation stuff. I don't think there's a single person of color in this film, right?

This is a very white film. And so it's like this like legacy of desegregation and the civil and like civil rights and like race in America. And like how our institutions are structured around race is as haunting of this film as like an absence. And then that like shot at the end of like the library burning and her being like over my dead body or something. I was like, okay, Catherine O'Hara. Like it was just very, very that kind of like American spirit Atlanta burning behind her thing. Ignoring any, you know, like we just care about the white women now. Like we don't care about anybody else.

So like that's which I mean, gone with the wind is also a horror movie. But yeah, like just like legacies of the absence. of discussing racial politics is very absent present in this film. My metaphor is getting away with me, but you know what I mean. Yeah, totally. I completely dig it. I think that's very apt to latch on to like the fact that this was, I think it's like Ruth Brown was her name, the librarian that this is like loosely based on the life of like being

fired for like doing civil rights activities like years before the civil rights movement proper would be kicking off. And like to have that be completely absent from the film, I think reflects the film's broader political discourses. Because at just about like every turn, like I think there's a, for the most of this movie while I was watching, I was like, oh, they're doing something cool with Alicia Hall's character, right? You know, like, this is before women could have bank accounts. And here she is like the leader of this library.

She's got her own home. She's like going toe to toe with the city fathers over some planning issues. It's like it's a little basic, but we're doing some cool feminism stuff. And then at the end of the movie, like, it's like, oh, no, all of her goodness, all of her virtue. It's, it's because of her dead husband who was so paid. that even his patriotic friends were kind of freaked out by it. And so it's like, oh, no, no, she still needs that.

She still needs to carry the dead weight of ghost husband around forever. Yeah, I think in my notes near the end, I literally wrote Lee Edelman has entered the chat. Yeah, I think I was like, she's a war widow, you idiots. Yeah, it's like that retroactive. How do you, how do you justify the Cold War? Well, we go back to the Second World War. How do we justify that? Well, we go back to the first one.

And like there's always this kind of retroactive Because really, like that That whole point is not just about legitimating her, but it's about legitimating the quote unquote goodness of America, right? Don't you know, we went through, we fought our war against them. And it's like, oh, okay, so we're gonna, that's, that's our sort of retroactive historicity

where in fact it goes, you, you always ground these liberal principles on an act of violence and death at the end of the day, right? But he was so patriotic. That's why he went off to be murdered by another state. It's good, you guys. We were married for two minutes, and then he died a hero. I mean, you joke, but that is sort of like the Whiggish view of American history you're taught in school.

Is a series of wars and great patriots. So, I mean, yeah, this could be a propaganda film. I think that's probably why it reads like one. It's like, this could be a propaganda film shown to children and just one that's a little. little more liberal in its outlook. What do we make of the way that this film frames the threat of this communist text and like everything, the book bannings, like everything? Like, how do we view this film's, I guess, like, portrayal of like the child or the capital C, right? Because I have opinions because I was like, this could have been made today with a lot of the things they were saying about

Alicia Haldol the librarian and like the way that she was interacting with a child. who I would argue was a very queer-coded child. I think both Sadie and I in our notes independently were like, is he, you know, like, oh, this is a tiny gay child? Because he doesn't like the sports, you know. Oh, my God. And he hangs out with librarians. Like, yeah, I know it's like, I've been there.

Little Freddy Slater doesn't play baseball like the other boys. No, no, no, no. So, yeah, like, what do we make of like this, like the way this film like frames the child, capital C? I actually thought that this was like, I have no way I could ever prove this, but I was sneaking suspicion that this is totally unintentional. But like, so the first time we meet the Slater family, we've got the absolute loveless despotic marriage between Laura Slater and George Slater. And then we've got little Freddy, our little chipper little lad. And the first thing that we see is Laura is going to take a train to go see her mom alone without the rest of the family.

And this has dad very upset. And I'm just like 100% Babe, go see Mommy. Get the fuck out of there. Get out of that house. As long as your spear in the fridge and books in the library will be good. I had that line highlighted. My favorite quote in the film is you can always get another father,

but a good book is hard to find. It's another one that I. But the movie, like, George is this like unredeemable villain. He doesn't even have that like spark, spark of complexity that we see in like, you know, like the Rochester's of the world. like your classic Gothic patriarch villain types. He's just like a horrible dad, a horrible husband, a horrible member of his community. He's like this like bitter, biting little dude.

And I found that like really effective that it's not like Freddie's corruption is not being centered on this librarian and her regardless of what your politics are, her choices of what books to stock in the library. But it's like 100% on this dude being a terrible dad. See, I wonder, you said that might not be intentional. I wonder if he was not meant to be a little sympathetic to all the 50s dads out there to be like, yeah, yeah, I'd tell my kid to fucking stop being a queer, like it did him no harm. But yeah, you might be right. That library does know, that could be good.

Maybe the contempt of the movie is coming through again. But there's that scene, there's that scene where, like, you know, our poor, poor little boy has a nightmare, full of its, you know, again, very queer-coded, all of the phallic imagery of snakes. Snakes and fire. Like, it's Freud 101. And actually, there is, there's the, what makes it even worse is that it's the moment afterwards of a kind of like actual positive male interaction, whereas dad's like, hey, let's go for a walk. I'll buy you a soda.

Oh, by the way, the communists want to get inside of your head and burn everything to the ground. And it's like, it's, that shot. Oh my God. shot of like the industrial machinery because it's like you know what what was the socialist Soviet republics to America it was

communism plus industrialization right that was the whole thing that was the whole drive of the USSR was towards industry and so it it's political horror it's and it's like it's designed to basically melt this poor child's mind into into ideological

suit and like the the great tragedy that that's the great tragedy of the entire film is Betty Davis being yelled at that she's a communist in public until she slaps this child in face. That's like the all is lost moment. The thing that got me was after that scene when there, it's, it's George and what was a Laura and like, he's like, where did we go wrong? How did we end up with a boy like this? And it's like, truly? respectfully

respectfully I also the one good redeeming moment for the dad is when he takes the advice of the librarian she was the one who said why don't you take him for a walk and buy him a soda do you know if he likes soda and so that's where I thought

like oh he's like coming around I thought this was his turn but then the horrific scene happens with the we got one of those down at the plant you never know I don't I don't really understand what's going on in this scene, really, except that the child is, like, losing his last shreds of sanity. Well, Dad has just finished binging all of Ben Shapiro's YouTube videos,

and now he is inciting stochastic terrorism and a young man. Like, this movie reads too well for 2023. And that young man grew up to be Dennis Prager. I mean, like, really, like, they basically go, they do everything but call Alicia Hull a group. in this. And it's like they don't say anything about like in like the sexual context that like it's being used now. But like there's not a difference between like grooming your child, grooming a child to be a communist and whatever like those are the same thing. Oh yeah. In the minds. Like even if you say, oh, we're not doing the sex thing that you are accusing us of. But just our existence as queers as communists and everything. That in and of the self is grooming according to like the far right or just even liberals, right? Like that in and of itself. So it's like, They basically, this is like a narrative of a librarian being called a groomer. And I'm trying to be like, no, I swear to God, I'm not a communist.

I'm just trying to be a good librarian. And like, that's already conceding the argument. Right. Like we say this all the time. We have to stop being so defensive in how we respond to book challenges and being called groomers and all this stuff. Like we have to say like, no, like we have to be affirmative and proactive in how we are framing the ideology of our collection development and of our identities that we bring into being

librarians. Because they're going to call you this anyway, right? Isn't this something she learns in the course of the film? Or it's like, you know, I found out they were a communist organization. So I resigned because I'm actually a good American, like, left liberal. It's like, no, they're going to call you a communist anyway. So, like, what does it matter if you go, no, please, I've done everything that you already wanted me to do. I mean, you're quite right.

That same thing is going to happen. Yeah, there's a lot of gender happening in this film. I actually started making a note. There's some gender and some pronouns happening. But I had a thought, which was, I think the reason we have, like, this dysfunctional family, like the dad is a piece of shit. The mom is doing her best. She, like, loves to play the piano, and he's like, stop banging on Pianney.

And I think he does say Piani, because I wrote up my notes that way. I think one of the threats, I don't know if the movie did a good job of not making this look like a threat, was the undermining of the patriarch by the public services. So like by women in these public service roles saying, hey, your kid's fine. Hey, little kid, go read what you want to read. Being a surrogate parent in the community. And sort of that makes the family kind of lose its hope in the child. And the child, once he's turned against that positive role model sort of goes off the deep end.

But it's very interesting because I don't know if they tied that up very well, if they wrap that up. Because there's two kind of gender storylines happening. I think one is the family. And then the other is the young anti-communist who's trying to unseat the establishment politician. And who is dating a library. He is dating a librarian, the up-and-comer. So that's why I think Ben Shapiro will come back in to this once we get to that storyline. I think he's much more of a current right-wing kind of guy.

And I think that was a really good choice by the movie to make the political nature of the challenge that, like, this was just some fuckhead trying to get one over on the established. guy who's really nice and everyone likes him and he's put in his years of public service. And yeah, he used his girlfriend saying, oh, we didn't throw that book away as an ability to go burnish his anti-communist credentials. And the film explicitly says that. I thought, well, that's pretty interesting, actually. And she leaves him over it.

That was like, good. I was like, good for her. And then she went to go work with the desk set librarians, right? There you go. He looked like Colin Firth and it bothered me the entire movie. I was just like, I cannot unsee this. I was really worried at the end that they would get back together. Paul, Paul Duncan, our evil politician and other librarian, God, I'm forgetting her name.

It's like Martha or something, Margaret. Martha, I think. Like, I was so worried that they were like, they're having like this fireside, literal fireside chat as the library burns down. And he's like, oh, whoopsie doodle, I guess politics is a little strange. And she's just like, what the fuck are you saying? and just dumps them flat right there. That was just, it mirrors Alicia's life story really well because she also loses her husband,

husband to be early on in her life, and now Martha's doing the same thing. But it's kind of like a more positive, a gentle twist on Alicia's biography. So it is a cool little, there's some spice in this film that kind of makes it more interesting than a, I don't know,

center-right anti-Macartheist, anti-communist film would be a question mark. Yeah. I always like these little sort of thing, because this is two years before desk set. Oh, wait, only two years? Yeah. What?

The original star for this movie, I think, dropped out because they thought it was going to be in Technicolor. So it makes the film look older than it is. But, yeah, in that movie as well, there is some strange, like, there's a strong sort of feminist base there. Yes, we're showing women in these traditional pre-war roles. We're kind of, like, trying to push them back away from the manufacturing roles and stuff. but they're still there in positions of authority. But in this movie, it's just not as well articulated of, like, everyone is sort of kind of just pities the librarian character and doesn't really take her seriously.

From the very beginning, she shows up, she's so excited for the children's wing, she's got all her documents, she takes it to the pub where they're having the city council meeting. She took the library building's course in grad school. Like, she's ready to go. And everyone's like, calm your tits, eat some lobster bisque or whatever. it is we're eating up here. It was like, there's some throwaway joke, too, about her weight, I feel like. It was like, she, she had two whole things, a lobster bisque.

And I was like, was that necessary? Well, bad guys can say bad things, I guess. They're allowed to be villains. But that was just a really strange line that I was like, that I miss hear that. But anyway, the whole movie, she's sort of a pitiable character. She's not really, she's shown to be very kind person. Also, sort of saintly suffering more than a agent of herself. Yeah, like I got really upset when it, because it was like, despite them not taking her serious, like, despite like the city council not taking her seriously, I felt like the movie was taking her seriously at first and like showing her principal than being in the right and everything like and showing clearly that we should be on her side.

At least that's how I was reading it until like it just reduces her down to this like, I'm going to go to California and eat nut burgers and I'm going to cry about the children, T.M. and like just that's all that she's reduced down to is this like pitiable like woman without a purpose who doesn't even have children and the her surrogate children are now taken away from her like it just like this whole film it's like at first it was like a film about like childhood liberal like a child's right to read what they want to read and taking their ability to do that seriously because like this kid could read whatever he wanted and like she was even let him take home like a rare book knowing it might get damage and it did but like She let him do that. She took his desire to read like seriously. And I was like, yeah, like, this is things we've talked about on here like with like the guys from seriously wrong, right? Of like child autonomy and like children's rights. Right. And I was like, oh, okay. Good job movie. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. And then it just it takes that kernel of like something good and just turns it into her being like hysterical and childless. And I was like really movie like it totally removed any of her principles or anything until her little. not Catherine O'Hara, Scarlett O'Hara, God, a Scarlet O'Hara little speech there at the end is the library burned, right? Yeah, isn't it, what is it that one of them, the judge says, she should have had 20 children. Oh, yeah.

It's like, oh, okay, so once again, we're back in the realm of, like, reproductive labor, right? Yeah. And the point that you made, Jay, is like the capital C child being not just reproductive labor, but also ideological and political reproduction, right? And it's like, how do you, what is it, the child is this element of the future and the future is open to contestation, which again, brings it back to the point that you were

making about Lee Edelman. Yeah, it was very strange where they were in that scene and there's the young woman who's like on her side because she grew up in the library. And then the judge goes, she was so smoking hot, like even smoking hotter than you, young woman. And then he starts singing this and I was really confused. Apple chips you talk of the little Big ass booty that's an apple bottom

Apple pie I hate you so much What was the best part of the movie When that song came on too Yeah It was really good The clip of the little library theme song That they sing like

Why don't libraries have themes Oh yeah They did the 14 words little pageant We must protect Our library Mother folk Oh, dear. This is the thing they did in the 50s.

Like, it was a legitimate, like, that was actually really, thanks for bringing that up, because that was really a genuinely, like, major thing that, like, I think, like, it was part of Nixon's campaign, too, was putting, like, white women on stage and white dresses and white gowns and saying, like, look at this purity that we have. So, yeah, that was a good, that was really interesting that they put that in there in But, I mean, we've already mentioned that Ruth Brown, the real librarian, was pushed out for being a member of pro-civil rights organizations. And it would have been really interesting if they had

somehow moved that into the movie in some way, where like, you know, the new up-and-coming guy was a segregationist. And the guy in power, the judge in power, was not because he was older and more conservative or whatever, more principled. That would have been an interesting. angle to throw in to show like, look, this is all about something else. But instead, they were just like, oh, it's about, it is about something else, but it's just about political rat fucking. That's really the major danger here is that conservatives love to rat fuck each other. It isn't that awful. And it's like that, okay, everyone's solutions and everyone's ideology is so individualized in this movie, or it's like, if only we just had good people, then we wouldn't have this runoff

problem. That's actually, so when I watched this, I watched this with Leon from Hereby Media. And something he like said was like this what i wrote it down in my notes but that like this whole movie could just be something of as individual approach over community approach even towards like the concept of a book ban right like and this is actually something we talked about with emily knox who was a scholar of book challenges when we had her on that was last year yes where it was like i brought up the point that like you know anytime we talk about like book challenges or like a collection development. It's always so like this single book and what it does rather than like its place in a community and everything. And so it's like as long as you alienate everything and make everything an

individual thing instead of its role in a larger ecosystem and how everything works together, then it's like, oh, then I guess communism can't happen then. Yeah, there's no, there's no collectivity, right? You can't have. You know, you know what I was thinking of watching this is like there are no actual communists here because they would actually have, there's an incredible story in the book Hammer and Ho by Robin Kelly and Robin Kelly tells a story of going to visit Alabama sharecroppers

in the 1920s and how the clan used to try and run black farmers off their land and he asks one guy, you know, how did you stop them? And the old guy just pulls out the drawer in his side table and pulls out a box of 12-gauge shotgun shells and a copy of Lenin.

Because that's how. But box of shotguns and Lenin's what is to be done. And it's like, yeah, that's, that's, that's what an, in the context of, of like, mid-20th century, racialized American capitalism, that's what, that's what, that's what, the actually existing communism of the, of the, of the, of the time was. And it's like, I think this point about individualization is really important because you see kind of, like, contemporary traces in it in, like, capitalist realism and

responsibilities, right? If only librarians were making better choices. Like there's a joke in Futurama which I was made to think of watching this movie which is from the episode Bender should not be allowed on TV but right at the end after Bender's had it like a super offensive run on a sitcom

because parents, have you ever thought about turning off the TV sitting down with your children and hitting them? Most perhaps all the blame rests with the parents. That's right, you. And so I am.

I ask you this one question. Have you ever tried simply turning off the TV, sitting down with your children, and hitting them? We're just so busy. Well, make time. Because this is always, this is always the argument, right? If only we had good individual people

who would make the quote unquote right choices, which are not political, because you can't think about it in a political sense. No. Then none of these big political problems would exist anymore. I'm sorry, John, did you mention capitalist realism? I inevitably did, yes. Just making sure.

Cross it off the horror vanguard bingo card. Yeah, that's what people don't know is my signboard is just a big bingo card. You are an artist, a maestro with that thing. Thank you. Yeah, like, kind of like going back to what Jay was saying about Alicia Hull and her character arched out the movie. Like, I mean, like, it's, it's really misogynistic what they ultimately wind up doing with her.

The, like, you know, oh, she was widowed and now she's the, like, the second her husband died when she was 19, she transmogrified into a grandmother dotifully watching all of these wayward children in the library slash orphanage. And then, like, she's just absent throughout the whole middle of the movie. She's doing nothing. And she's just like, oh, well, I guess, I guess I'm a horrible communist now. and I'm going to move out of my house or whatever. And by the end of the movie, they kind of pivot to this like,

Mott and Nemola kind of first they came for the communists thing. No, I should have stood up when I had the chance. It would have been better then. But like the whole middle of the movie doesn't support that ending. Like the grandstanding by the end of this movie is just, it's just standing on like almost nothing. Yeah, it is really limsy at the end, I would say. It's kind of jumped in with this at the beginning.

But it really is sort of the thesis question of this podcast. which is like, what resistance can liberalism put towards a reactionary, towards reactionary and fascist tendencies? And is that resistance sufficient? And we've had a long time to think about it where it's very much like, what are our answers, right? Like John said, you're not throwing away the liberalism, you're making it live up to its promise. You know, that took a while for me to kind of suss out in my head. It's like, okay, what do you do with like these liberal ideas that are pretty good? And then how do you sort of make them the outcome that they should be? I think a really good example of this.

I've just been writing about this, actually, is in the context of the Haitian Revolution. So the Haitian Revolution is the successful revolution is generations in the making, obviously, when France is in control of the island. And it is Toussaint-Lovituir who leads the successful Haitian Revolution. And Lovitur and Desolene and so many of the other Haitian revolutionary leaders, explicitly take, in terms of their rhetoric and explanations of why they're doing what they're doing, they take elements from the French bourgeois revolution, right? Liberty, equality, and brotherhood.

And they go, well, if you take that seriously, that means universal emancipation. And in order to enforce and complete those values, that necessarily requires revolutionary struggle. So I think really that's what we mean when we talk about the kind of completion or proper universalizing of those. ideals. Like, the problem was, the problem is not that the ideal was bad. The problem was that French racism and French colonialism was actually an impediment to the implementation of that ideal. So, yeah, I mean, Loveture and, like, that, what that ultimately leads you to is the necessity of what Mark Stephen writes about in their new book, which is the literary history of class war, right? The idea that actually the antagonism that emerges in the struggle over what those values

mean and how they should be implemented is kind of necessary. a revolutionary one. Yeah, there's a series of lectures I always bring up, which is Rick Roderick, and you can find them all on YouTube. And one of the lectures has a bit that I always think of. He says the real threat to a system is that people are actually going to hold you to what you say you believe. This is as much a threat to the Soviet system as it is to the liberal system, that people are really going to take you seriously and try and live up to those values. And that's always going to destabilize, but also give potential for a new revolutionary movement. Yeah, and I think it's worth it to situate the kind of like the specific clade of liberalism

we're dealing with in Storm Center, too, because this is right off the heels of World War II. This is a great time to be an American living in the United States. Everybody's got money. There's a good economic boom. And that's about to slowly start giving way. We're about to hit the 60s in the civil rights movement. and then we're going to get introduced to really cool, fun ideas like Reganomics.

And so we're like, this movie is kind of like uncomfortably seated, very uncomfortably seated between like the kind of peeking, this cresting moment where like, you know, like the American self mythologizing worked for a lot of people, also didn't work extremely for a vast, vast majority of them. But then it's going to just go into free fall after that.

And so this movie is kind of like, we're seeing like, These are like the teasing threads at the end of American liberalism starting to get pulled apart by its inability to talk about its own political conditions. Yeah, because it's like, it's not that Hollywood movies before this time, like, didn't ever have politics or even good politics. Like, even like fairly made, like, Casa Blanca is like kind of an anti-fascist film in a lot of ways. They shoot a Nazi in it. Like, and like, you know, they are, it is the first Hollywood film to mention the existence of concentration camps. Like, while the war was still happening, they didn't even know if, you know, who would win.

the war at the time. Most of those actors were like refugees. They were like Jewish and Eastern European like refugees, right? Like Hollywood was making films that had like semi-decent politics like during World War II. So like it's not that that was an unheard of thing to ever happen. But I guess we won the war. So we don't have to do that anymore. We don't have to have politics after the war. Let's go back to shooting Nazis and movies though. Like whatever happened to that, you know? Where's my movie where a librarian shoots Nazis? I volunteer, you know. Wait, are there Nazis in the mummy?

I haven't seen the movies since I was like seven. No. It takes place pre-Nazi. I think it's a... It's pre-Nazi, okay. I thought you meant the mummy starring Brendan Fraser. That's where my mind went. That's what I meant, yeah.

Yeah, I'm like, does she, because she's a librarian. Does she shoot Nazi or anything in that movie? I don't think they have Nazis in that one. Alas. I haven't seen it's like seven. That's why I'm not bisexual. I don't remember the money. I feel very called out at this moment.

Came out here to have a good time. Can I share just a very brief... I was doing some research about this film. Can I just share a very brief excerpt from a review of this film that I found on Letterbox. Oh, great. Is that okay? Letterbox review.

Absolutely. Three and a half stars. This film features a scene in which Betty Davis continuously bitch-slaps a kid after he hysterically accuses her of being a communist. Wow. What a moment in time. And the final one that I, the final thing that I found was just quite a long review,

four and a half stars, watched by Rosalie back a couple of years ago. If anyone ever tries to remove a book again, they'll have to do it over my dead body. So much greatness in this one. Note to self, I am well on my way to becoming a communist. Yes.

So maybe, maybe, you know, we've been a little, a little uncharitable. If even now, if even, you know, decades and decades after its release, for all of its didactic heavy-handedness, you can watch it and still feel kind of moved by it. This was a film not made for librarians. Yeah, because I just got so caught up and they're like this bullshit liberal intellectual freedom

without actual ideology bullshit. Oh, of course they're going to bring up Mindcough on the shelves. Are there any other bad books that we can think of? no, I guess not. Just mind comp. That's always the one we have to fucking defend, right? And so, like, I just got so caught up in that while watching those. Because it's, like, still the same bullshit arguments we have today.

The thing I think that struck me the most was I was kind of eyebrows up the whole movie because of the heavy-handedness. And then the thing that really got me was that that final line, the over my dead body. And my only thought was just, bitch, they already. do. Like as bodies as just like workers as commodities is not something we've solved. We're, I mean, we see it all of the time with throughout the pandemic. There's been a rash of bomb threats against libraries in the Chicago area.

So like that statement was supposed to be so powerful at the end of the movie. And to me, it just felt like resignation. As a public worker, yeah, it's going to be over my dead body because that's how far they'll go for it. It didn't leave me with the hope that it was trying to convey, which is why I say it's not a movie made for librarians. It's a movie made for people to look at their libraries and feel that way. It's not made for the people who are already doing it over their dead bodies in some very literal senses. This is the movie version of every author who gets asked to keynote at a library. conference and the only thing they can talk about is their public librarian when they were a kid that showed them their reading was magical. Oh my God, yeah. And that we all author, if you are this author and you are listening, we hate you.

Please come up with a new line. Just please. We've heard it. My librarian, like, I never had magical librarians. Like, that's not, yeah, anyway. I think it was, um, at ACRL 2019, we had a speech from Alison Beckdale. And that was probably one of the best. And that was probably one of the best. best ones I've heard from not a librarian because they were talking about, they made some off-end comment about gender and they're like, I thought we were like getting rid of that part of our discourse, but whatever, you know, it was just sort of a snide remark of how there was more of a gender radicalism as sort of being pushed back even in liberal discourse by repeatedly classifying people and reifying them into all these new gender categories, preference categories, and the point they were making was like, no, we don't need to do that. That categorization is unnecessary.

Metadata librarians, I hope you just heard that. I have a note that just says age before no-fault divorce. Well, and on that note, the young librarian Martha, when she's like, when he's like, oh, why won't you marry me yet? And she's like, well, I already did that. Like, how bad was that that she actually apparently got a divorce from it? So like, and then you're going for the politician? Bad choices. Yeah, going for, oh, gosh, like a Matt Gates looking motherfucker.

Oh, God. Oh, that is the most. brutal dis I've heard in a minute. I can just see him at his desk going, bring a bucket and a mop. Ash, are there cicadas where you are, or is that on Justin's audio? Oh, those are my cicadas.

I'm training them currently. Oh, good. To distribute copies of the communist stream to libraries across the country. You should teach them some arias. Yeah, some of me good recommendations for arias that cicadas can learn quickly. I was like, no, this sounds like that that bit. an empty man where there's all the cicadas and then they all drop out all at once.

The empty man would have never asked a librarian to take the communist manifesto off the shelves. I mean, he wouldn't have. That's why I vote empty man every time. I know it's controversial, but I'm going to keep doing it. Listen, he and Lee Edelman would get along so well with their fucking like queer negativity and death drive bullshit. Like, no, we're going towards nihilism. Like, reject, reject this reproductive futurism, baby. It's going to be a bloodbath. I am pro empty man now. He's actually a hero.

In so many important ways, the empty man has filled our hearts. Oh, self-ates. Oh, God. So, again, like, the liberal intellectual freedom thing is pretty hollow and is still kind of a hollow thing. And, like, we've talked about, like, you need to have, like, purpose and intention and ideology, especially with when you are having any sort of intellectual freedom discussion. but also like practically if you are a librarian and you have to write a collection development policy and like with statements about like book bannings and book challenges and stuff like oh well we keep mind comp even though we don't like it

like that's not that's not something you can put in a collection development policy right like these like are vague notions of intellectual freedom like they don't hold up on paper when you have some angry like astro-turfing mom who is sending a template email to every library in the country about a book about a gay kid Right. Like, but we've got mind confl. Like that doesn't, it doesn't fucking hold up. So it's like, what do you do? What do you put in your collection development that both is in line with the American Library Association's like stance on intellectual freedom and everything? But also does have ideology that does have intention and purpose that won't get you fired, hopefully, right? Like, like how do you say, no, we're not going to let Nazis use our meeting rooms. But also we do think intellectual freedom is important. You know, that's, I feel like, Like, this film is a good, this film is like a warning of like librarians. If you don't fucking have ideology behind your intellectual freedom, this is the shit that happens, right? Like this, this, it's not, it doesn't help you. You need to actually be proactive and intentional. And you just, you can't let Nazis use your shit, right?

Yeah, because if you go, oh, well, we've got mine count, even though we don't like it, you're going to get a readership that you don't want to have. new building. Like, it's a Nazi bar now, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you have mind comp and you're like, oh, I don't like having these Nazi books, but we do, you're going to attract people who like having Nazi books. Exactly. And it's also just logistics, too. Like, when you're talking about collection development, you can't buy every book. Like, no one can. So when it goes to a system, it's like, okay, one copy in the system of nine libraries might have mind conff because someone might need it to do research or like a high school history project. And we'll move that book. And we'll move that

book to you. That's the magic of inner library alone. But we don't need to have like if you donate your, you know, your little self-published. If it's self-published, it might have a good chance of getting on the collected. But if you're like your favorite conservative right wing grifter and you bring like five copies to the library, we're just going to throw them in like the donation bin and like ignore it because like we've got to catalog them. It takes up shelf space. Shelf space has a cost per year. It's not free to keep things on a shelf because you have to. shift shelves. That's a labor cost. Like, things don't just stay static on a shelf.

So there's tons of, like, of reasons to have, like, a complex understanding of collection development, which is why it's really funny that this movie ends. And she's like, I'm never getting rid of a book ever again, which is like weeding. It's a big part of our jobs. We throw books away a lot, actually. Yeah, I love it. We love doing it. Yeah.

We just stand in the back of the library where you can't see us and go, Bucket's. Code! Fuck books. Yeah. I mean, that's what you would think we do because all of the dumpsters full of books articles that come out every year when some concerned citizens. Yeah, those have God. Yes, we do throw books on it.

You don't. It's going to kill you. Don't take it out of the dumpster. You don't need a baseball encyclopedia from 1992. No, not really. We can recycle them, guys. It's fine. Recycling paper is almost infinite.

Like, so, and like, that's really the thing about book bands and book challenges and, like, especially with the way that this film ends with, like, a giant, scary, spooky fire that we see all of the physical books being burned as if the ideas contained within them is what is actually being harmed when it's like, for all of the critiques of Fahrenheit 451, if it got a thing right, it was that the idea is the important thing isn't the fact that it's paper and a physical item. There is a lot of meaning and. added value with something being a physical item and a book. But like if I like, I don't know, I've got lots of books right up there. And if I just grabbed one, if I like ripped it in half right now, nothing bad would happen besides I would need to buy it again. Right. Like, you burn even a library burning down, like there might be rare volumes in there. It would cost a lot to replace them. But like, you're not harming those ideas by a library burning down, even though it might hurt. Even though there is value in having physical items for things. This is not me saying, fuck books, we should all have e-books.

And that's not what I'm saying. But just burning a book, just like removing a book from a library, the communist dream isn't in a book. The communist dream isn't part of your listeners. And that's really what you should take away from this movie. It isn't what we read. It really is the friends we made along the way. Yes.

I'm surprised we haven't really brought up moms for libraries. or Moms for Liberty. Moms for Libraries is just a front for Moms for Liberty. We did a whole episode on them. I'll link it in the notes. But it's basically an astroturfing group by the Republican Party, particularly the pro-Santis wing of the Republican Party. And they are astroturfing challenges to queer books and books about race pretty much of any type. And they're quite prolific across the country, particularly because they're clearly getting funding from dark money resources that they aren't accounting for. We did the math on it when we did an episode on them and they say they make their money from T-shirt sales. Anyone listening who's ever sold T-shirts

knows that that's not possible because you don't make any money off T-shirt sales. You just do it to get a cool T-shirt your friends will wear. That's the main reason. And so their approach to having books in the library is very much like they have to have a control over children, which I think is like one of the themes in this is like the librarian is getting the kid's head full of ideas. He's learning about monsters. The librarian is the death drive. Yeah. And also there's a part of them that is particularly just like anti-library. They're like they're much happier to have a library closed than to reach a compromise. So they'll fire a director. They'll close down their local branch. That's it's totally, this is a completely anti-library book. They're not for libraries. They are for the

destruction of a public space that libraries represent. Like, there's really no other way about it, because it's much in the same way that homeschoolers run for public school board. They don't believe in public school. Like, you get these, like, fundamentalist homeschoolers, and they're like, the only thing I want to do is funnel money to charter schools and cut funding. And that's all I want to do, right? I'm trying to tie that back into sort of the McCarthyism of this movie, because I think the anti-communist angle is always still there. It's always kind of the same panics. It's always a lavender panic. It's always a racial panic. And the communism, I always feel, is sort of like secondary to that. The real threat is always like black communists

or women or something else. That's always kind of a bit more of a smokescreen. But they just choose whatever is, you know, there's some true believers, but not all of them. Yeah, communism is the floating signifier, right? You can just place it onto the, onto the outgrowing. where it's it's it's it's like it's the queers it's it's those feminists it's those civil rights acts like that or and if they are not willingly implicit then they're they're a communist front that you know they're trying to impose that all of these things right but it's like and again a lot of it from what you say about moms for libraries sounds very much like this idea of like the idea is not an abstraction it's the kind of concrete object which is the problem right

this idea of like, oh, it's the book that's the problem. It's the library that's the problem. It's that actual physical concrete thing that we can erase is the problem, when in fact actually, as this film quite convincingly shows, the ideas are powerful precisely because of their immateriality and the ability that we all have to instrumentalize and enact ideas and to make ideas kind of real. There is no building that if you were to burn it down,

people would not believe in the abolition of capitalism anymore, right? Unless you put all those people in that building. I mean, that's always where it ends up, isn't it? Yep. I mean, this literally just happened to Emily Dravinsky, who we mentioned this in an episode, but she's been on the show before. She is an amazing librarian in New York,

and she's very vocal about being a Marxist and a socialist and about labor organizing for librarians, and she is our current president of the American Library Association. And when she first got elected at the beginning of the year, or like last year, whenever she made that she made a tweet being like that she couldn't believe like a Marxist lesbian was now the president of the American Library Association. And fucking right wing chugs found it. And now all of these various state libraries are like attacking her and leaving the American Library Association, all of that because she's a Marxist and because she's a lesbian. And those are the same thing. Like there didn't have to be a distinction between like if she could have just tweeted that she was a Marxist, she could have just tweeted that she was a lesbian. It doesn't matter. Those are the same thing. Like the red scare was also the lavender scare. Those were not two separate things. Being queer and being communist are the same thing. I mean, obviously those are two me going and like doing a sodomy is not communism. But it could. But it should be. Right. But like, you know, those are the same kind of threat to the idea of America. right of the right wing of capitalism of all of these things like being a communist and being queer being any kind of other that is an inherent threat and it's good to be a threat we think like we defend the like when different library associations were like writing about what happened with emily they were like

oh well it's actually good to be a member of the american library association for xyz reasons and it never once defended her being a marxist or being a lesbian it just was like she's cool anyway you should join your library should be an ALA member. And we were like, no, it's actually really cool that she's a Marxist. It's actually really cool that she's a lesbian. Like, those are both good things to be. So I just always think of that tweet that was like, can you even be a Marxist lesbian? Are they going to kick you out of Marxist church for being a lesbian? Can you get gay, gay Marxist married? I thought that was against their religion. Wait, wait, this isn't what ML stands for. Have I been misled this? I thought MLM was Marxist lesbian mommy.

I thought that's what the whole thing was. Oh, man. Well, jokes on me. I feel like such a fool. You broke Jay. Let's go, lesbians. Let's go. When Shannon listens to this, Shannon is going to lose her mind.

Anyway, everyone, go support your local public library. Go support local public librarians. Go request that your library buys books about communism. Go run for your library board. Go do that, yes. Many of them are appointment, so you just fill out a form and you send it in, and then hopefully one day they'll call you. That's how it works for the last two cities I've lived in.

Even if you're not on the board, go show up to the meetings because you can, because they're open to the public as it being a public library. Often they'll be like, here's the Zoom link or whatever. Go be annoying. If there's one place on this earth, that you can be annoying, it is at your library's board meetings, and you should. Any final thoughts? Thanks for having us on this show to discuss a spooky movie and not a book.

I mean, once again, I feel haunted by the vanishing of an MLM movement in this country. And maybe the public libraries are where we should start bringing it back. But yeah, thank you so much for having us on. Also, Ash, we never do episodes about books. That would be... Fuck books. Rolls for the nose. We're definitely not having a very cool episode about a book coming up in October.

Not at all. That's true. But that was, that's a special book. And libraries have movies. Libraries have DVDs. That's right. That's true. All right.

Well, then. Fuck them kids. It's also what you should take away from this. Fuck them kids. And good night.