Latest / Banned Camp: Banned Books, Comedy, and Free Speech vs. Censorship / The Handmaid’s Tale Chapter 13: Pig Balls, Pigeons, and the Girl Who Stopped Fighting | Why Books Get Banned

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The Handmaid’s Tale Chapter 13: Pig Balls, Pigeons, and the Girl Who Stopped Fighting | Why Books Get Banned · Banned Camp: Banned Books, Comedy, and Free Speech vs. Censorship

Welcome to Bandcamp.
I'm Jennifer And I'm Dan, and this is the podcast where we read banned books out loud and try to figure out why they were banned in the first place.
This season, we are reading The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and you can consider this a really quick spoiler warning because Jennifer is about to start reading from the book out loud word for word.
But if you're new here, you can jump in right here.
You don't have to worry about feeling like you're walking into the middle of a movie.
You're gonna be fine.
We're gonna get you up to speed fast with our secret weapon.
More on him in, like, two seconds.
The other thing you should know, if you do feel confused, don't worry.
There's a really good chance that we're gonna feel confused too because we've never read the book either.
That's what kind of makes Banned Camp different.
Now, let's bring in our secret weapon.
We have ourselves a fact-checking robot.
He's a legit robot.
Got him at a Goodwill.
Here he comes.
Buddy boy, roll it in.
Buddy boy, before Jennifer starts reading, why don't you fill everyone in on where we left off last time in The Handmaid's Tale? Previously on Band Camp, the handmaid went to the gynecologist.
Apparently they need to make sure the equipment is working before the commander gets his turn.
Then the doctor offered to impregnate her right there on the table, because the commander probably can't do the job himself.
She thought about it and said, "Yeah, no, maybe next month."
Then she went home and sat in a bathtub and saw her baby daughter again.
Dan, of course, thought she was daydreaming about taking a bath with her mom.
Jennifer asked why her mother would smell like baby powder and urine.
I have 11 seasons of these moments on file, and somehow they keep getting worse.
Some lessons take years to learn, some only take a week.
Take it away, Jennifer Thank you, robot.
And with that being said, scary book people, let's begin chapter 13 of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
"There's time to spare.
This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for, the amount of unfilled time, the long parenthesis of nothing."
I remember walking in art galleries through the 19th century, the obsession they had with the harems.
Dozens of paintings of harems, fat women lolling on divan, d- divans? Divans? Devon? I've never lolled on a divan, so I wouldn't know.
You'd be good at it Eh, not really my thing.
Fat women lolling on divans, turbans on their heads or velvet caps, being fanned with peacock tails, a eunuch in the background standing guard.
Studies of sedentary flesh painted by men who've never been there I wouldn't mind that life.
I'm assuming a divan is some kind of couch.
I wouldn't mind that.
S- somebody fanning me with peacock tails,...
That'll be nice.
I'd love it sounds pleasant.
Getting a grape.
That's when you really know you made it, when people are feeding you grapes These pictures were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they were at the time, but I see now what they were really about.
they were paintings about suspended animation, about objects not in use.
They were paintings about boredom But maybe boredom is erotic when women do it for men I wait, washed, brushed, fed like a prize pig.
Sometime in the '80s, they invented pig balls for pigs who were being fattened in pens.
Pig balls were large colored balls.
What? Okay, I don't know.
Pigs rolled them around with their snouts.
The pig marketers said this improved their muscle tone.
The pigs were curious.
They liked to have something to think about.
Never heard of that.
Would be nice now for p- now- nowadays, pigs are like, they're just laying in like a coffin basically.
it should be a law that the pigs bare minimum have pig balls to play with Right.
Right.
And now it's like they're doing that with the Save the Bacon Act they're trying to, like, push in with some other bill where it's they wanna undo all the welfare laws for, for animals in states that enacted the welfare laws for, for animals.
Yeah, so now all these farmers that, you know, are complying with the animal welfare laws, now they are gonna be undercut by giant corporations that are just gonna house all the an- I- if it passes, which I hope it doesn't, I read about that in Introduction to Psychology.
That and the chapter on caged rats who'd give themselves electric shocks for something to do.
And the one on the pigeons trained to peck a button which made a grain of corn appear.
Three groups of them.
The first got one grain per peck.
the second one grain every other peck.
The third was random.
When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon.
The second group gave up a little later, and the third group never gave up.
They'd peck themselves to death rather than quit Who knew what worked? I wish I had a pig ball.
Absolutely.
It would make being a handmaid a lot better if they had pig balls She is so bored.
I, I hate being bored.
I hate it.
people hate it.
That's why, they're constantly scrolling or...
Like, people want to look at things all the time.
They want information.
Their brain needs to be stimulated all the time.
I lie down on the braided rug.
"You can always practice," said Aunt Lydia.
"Several sessions a day fitted into your daily routine.
Arms at the sides, knees bent, lift the pelvis, roll the backbone down, tuck."
Again, is she doing Pilates? What the heck's going on here? I don't think she is, sadly.
I think that Pilates would be great for her.
I think they're making her do, pelvic exercises is that what it's called? Feldenkrais? I don't even...
Robot, what is Feldenkrais? I know I've heard of it though No, you didn't hear of it, Jennifer, because Feldenkrais is not a pelvic exercise.
It's not even a word.
There is a 78.7447%
chance you are thinking of Kegel exercises, named after Arnold Kegel, a gynecologist from the 1940s.
Pelvic floor exercises.
The Handmaid is doing them on the floor because it's one of the only things left that's actually hers.
Nobody can supervise a muscle contraction, yet Oh my God.
We do that in what used to be the domestic science room, cleared now of sewing machines and washer dryers.
In unison, lying on little Japanese mats, a tape playing, Les Sylphides Les Sylphides.
1909 ballet.
No plot, just Chopin piano pieces and women in white floating around like ghosts.
The Red Center played it during pelvic exercises, training women to associate calm, pretty music with their bodies being controlled.
Even the music is doing propaganda work.
That's what I hear now in my head as I lift, tilt, breathe.
Behind my closed eyes, thin white dancers flit gracefully among the trees, their legs fluttering like the wings of held birds.
In the afternoons, we lay on our beds for an hour in the gymnasium between 3:00 and 4:00.
They said it was a period of rest and meditation.
I thought then they did it because they wanted some time off themselves from teaching us, and I know the aunts not on duty went off to the teachers' room for a cup of coffee But now I think that the rest also was practice.
They were giving us a chance to get used to blank time.
Hmm ugh, this whole thing is just so creepy, 'cause th- they don't have any time to themselves.
A catnap," Aunt Lydia called it, in her coy way.
The strange thing is, we needed a rest.
Many of us went to sleep.
We were tired there a lot of the time.
We were on some kind of pill or drug, I think.
They put it in the food to keep us calm.
So they're drugged too.
I didn't even realize that.
Soma They're turning in- yeah, well, oh, they're turning them into zombies.
Like you said, it's, like, just zombie uterus.
That's all they are at this point Yeah.
I, I keep thinking that they had to drug these people in order to make it work because, like, there's no way a government would just, you know, take over and everyone goes along with it, right? I was surprised that Roe v.
Wade was overturned and nothing happened.
It happened overnight, I actually went into a three-hour psychosis where I thought I was in hell.
It's like I must have died and I'm in hell.
I did something bad.
cause it didn't seem real.
I'm like how can this even happen? But I guess it did, unless I'm s- really in hell right now, and like it's just ongoing.
there's no revolt.
on some level, I want the men to also join us, because they have more power.
It's just realistic.
They have more power.
So I want them to join us...,
what can I do for you, Jennifer? maybe people don't need to be drugged, you know, they just need to accept, what's happening.
But maybe we weren't drugged.
Maybe it was the place itself.
After the first shock, after you'd come to terms, it was better to be lethargic.
You could tell yourself you were saving up your strength.
I must have been there three weeks when Moira came.
she was brought into the gymnasium by two of the aunts in the usual way while we were having our nap.
She still had her clothes on, jeans and a blue sweatshirt.
Her hair was short.
She defied fashion as usual, so I recognized her at once.
I'm worried about what's gonna happen to Moira.
I know they're gonna make an example of her, aren't they? She saw me too, but she turned away.
She already knew what was safe.
There was a bruise on her left cheek turning purple.
The aunts took her to a vacant bed where the red dress was already laid out.
She undressed, began to dress again in silence, the aunt standing at the end of the bed, the rest of us watching from inside her slitted eyes.
As she bent over, I could see the knobs on her spine.
I couldn't talk to her for several days.
We looked only, small glances, like sips.
Friendships were suspicious, we knew it.
we avoided each other during mealtime lineups in the cafeteria and in the halls between classes.
But on the fourth day, she was beside me during the walk, two by two around the football field.
We weren't given the white wings until we graduated.
We had only the veils, so we could talk as long as we did it quietly and didn't turn to look at one another.
They kinda are treating the white veils like, um, karate.
Yeah, like you didn't get your belt yet The aunts walked at the head of the line and at the end, so the only danger was from the others.
Some were believers and might report us.
This is a loony bin," Moira said.
I'm so glad to see you," I said.
Where can we talk?" said Moira.
Washroom," I said.
"Watch the clock.
End stall 2:30."
That was all we said.
It makes me feel safer that Moira is here.
We can go to the washroom if we put our hands up, though there's a limit to how many times a day.
They mark it down on a chart.
I watch the clock, electric and round, at the front over the green blackboard.
2:30 comes during testifying Aunt Helena is there as well as Aunt Lydia because testifying is special.
Aunt Helena is fat.
She once headed a Weight Watchers franchise operation in Iowa.
She's good at testifying It's Janine telling about how she was gang raped at 14 and had an abortion.
She told the same story last week.
She seemed almost proud of it while she was telling it.
It may not even be true.
At testifying, it's safer to make things up than to say you have nothing to reveal.
But since it's Janine, it's probably more or less true.
"But whose fault was it?" Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger.
Her fault, her fault, her fault," we chant in unison.
Who led them on?" Aunt Helena beams, pleased with us.
"She did, she did, she did."
What a fun society they're building.
Isn't that great? God I'm, I mean, this was more true probably back when the book was written, but we're kinda coming back around to it in a lot of ways.
the lack of empathy.
It's like, "She's the bad one.
Her, look at her, look at her."
And it's just like why is there some people in our society that are pointing out, you know, where people are hiding when ICE agents are around? You know what I mean? It's like just shitty people.
Shitty, shitty people Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen? To teach her a lesson.
Teach her a lesson.
Teach her a lesson.
Last week, Janine burst into tears.
Aunt Helena made her kneel at the front of the classroom, hands behind her back, where we could all see her, her red face and dripping nose, her hair dull blonde, her eyelashes so light they seemed not there, the lost eyelashes of someone who's been in a fire.
Burned eyes.
She looked disgusting, weak, squirmy, blotchy, pink, like a newborn mouse.
None of us wanted to look like that, ever.
For a moment, even though we know what was being done to her, we despised her Crybaby, crybaby, crybaby.
We meant it, which is the bad part.
I used to think well of myself.
I didn't then.
That was last week.
This week, Janine doesn't wait for us to jeer at her.
It was my fault," she says.
"It was my own fault.
I led them on.
I deserve the pain."
Very good, Janine," says Aunt Lydia.
"You are an example Yeah, this isn't gonna go over big with Moira.
Cause remember, Moira was the one ,a few episodes ago,...
who was throwing water balloons at guys trying to climb up the wall.
Like, I think Moira's gonna be, a major character.
Like, these two are gonna get together and, like, she's, I, I don't wanna say a bad influence because I think this is what, what the Handmaiden needs, right? Like, she needs someone to remind her...,
don't just accept all this bullshit!...,
I have to wait until this is over before I put up my hand.
Sometimes if you ask at the wrong moment, they say no.
If you really have to go, that can be crucial.
Yesterday, Dolores wet the floor.
Two aunts hauled her away, a hand under each armpit.
She wasn't there for the afternoon walk, but at night she was back in her usual bed.
All night we could hear her moaning off and on.
They, they punished her for going pee when she had to pee? Sounds like it.
You know, that's just so undignified.
it's like a mean parent, abusing a child And by the way, who, who is the, the loser in this? why didn't you let her go pee? You couldn't see Yeah.
Well, see, see that's the thing about it being like an abusive parent.
Like, abusive parents are constantly, hurting their kids for things they can't help.
Like, they might have even asked.
Like, I could totally see a kid saying, "I need to go to the bathroom," and then not being, quote, allowed to go, and then the parent smacks them or something.
In the wood there's a small hole at the back next to the wall about waist height, souvenir of some previous vandalism or legacy of an ancient voyeur.
Everyone in the center knows about this hole in the woodwork.
Everyone except the aunts I'm afraid I am too late, held up by Janine's testifying.
Maybe Moira has been here already.
Maybe she had to go back.
They don't give you much time.
I look carefully down under the stall wall, and there are two red shoes.
But how can I tell who it is? I put my mouth to the wooden hole.
"Moira?" I whisper.
"Is that you?" she says.
Yes," I say.
Relief goes through me I feel ridiculously happy.
I sink down into my body as into a swamp where only I know the footing.
Treacherous ground, my own territory.
I become the earth I set my ear against for rumors of the future.
Each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed off matter.
What the f- She was having an off day when she wrote this Do you think she was sick this day? Yeah, maybe she had like a headache or something yeah, you don't...
Listen, if, I know, I understand what it's like to have a, a publisher on your ass about getting books done.
Just take a day off, 'cause this is what happens.
You authors, you finish a book, and then we have to deal with it.
Think about your readers and podcasters every once in a while Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes, it means failure.
I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own."
Okay, so is that back then or now? Wait a minute.
I don't know.
Jennifer, where did Moira go? Weren't these two gals sitting in the toilet talking to each other? What, what i- what is happening now? Oh boy.
Okay, she jumped scenes again.
I know this is hard for you two, but try to keep up.
The bathroom with Moira was the Red Center.
That was years ago.
She's back in present day now, in a room at the Commander's house.
Every month she watches for blood because blood means she's not pregnant, which means she failed, which means her time as a Handmaid is running out Okay, so she's in a new scene.
All right.
Robot, listen, you've gotta beep or something to let us know when she does this.
We've never read the book.
Do you understand? We don't know when she's jumping around.
You've gotta help us out I used to think of my body as an instrument of pleasure or a means of transportation.
Now the flesh arranges itself differently.
Now I am a container, and what I contain is not mine.
Every month there is a moon, heavy, an omen.
It passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine.
To feel that empty again.
In our first apartment, in the bedroom, the cupboard is full of clothes.
I pull out dresses, But wait, now we're in another scene.
Robot man, I thought you were gonna give us a little beep, beep, boop, boop whenever we switch scenes like that.
You gotta help us.
By the way, Jennifer, this is how I also look at my body.
My body is an instrument of pleasure, except nobody wants my pleasure.
It's very insulting to me.
Very insulting the cupboard is full of clothes.
I pull out dresses, black, blue, purple.
None of them will do.
None of them even fits.
They're too big or too small I've never seen them before.
Maybe they're clothes belonging to Luke's wife, whom I've also never seen, only pictures and a voice on the phone late at night when she was calling us crying, accusing before the divorce.
But no, they're my clothes all right.
I need a dress.
I need something to wear.
Luke is there behind me.
I turn to see him.
He won't look at me.
He looks down at the floor where the cat is rubbing itself against his legs, Robot.
Now there's a flashback with a cat? Beep.
Mewing and mewing plaintively.
It wants food, but how can there be any food with the apartment so empty? Luke," I say.
He doesn't answer.
Maybe he doesn't hear me.
It occurs to me that he may not be alive I'm running with her, holding her hand, pulling, dragging her through the bracken.
She's only half awake because of the pill I gave her, so she wouldn't cry or say anything that would give us away.
She doesn't know where she is.
The ground is uneven, rocks, dead branches, the smell of damp earth, Now you beep.
This time we got it, robot.
This is a different scene.
We figured it out.
Okay, so now she's running away with her kid, Yeah, it sounds like it.
Thank you for nothing, robot.
You've been a big help She can't run fast enough.
By myself, I could run faster.
I'm a good runner.
Now she's crying, frightened.
I want to carry her but she would be too heavy.
I have my hiking boots on and think, when we reach the water, I'll have to kick them off.
Will it be too cold? Will she be able to swim that far? What about the current? We weren't expecting this Quiet, I say to her angrily.
I think about her drowning, and this thought slows me.
Then the shots come behind us.
Not loud, not like firecrackers, but sharp and crisp like a dry branch snapping.
It sounds wrong.
Nothing ever sounds the way you think it will.
And I hear the voice.
Down.
Is it a real voice or a voice inside my head? Or my own voice, out loud? I pull her to the ground and roll on top of her to cover her.
Shield her.
Quiet, I say again.
Oh my God, what a nightmare My face is wet.
Sweat or tears.
I feel calm and floating, as if I'm no longer in my body.
Close to my eyes, there's a leaf.
Red.
Turned early.
I can see every bright vein.
It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
I ease off.
I don't want to smother her.
Instead, I curl myself around her, keeping my hand over her mouth.
There's breath and the knocking of my heart, like pounding at the door of a house at night where you thought you would be safe.
It's all right, I'm here, I say.
Please be quiet.
But how can she? She's too young.
It's too late.
We come apart.
My arms are held, and the edges go dark, and nothing is left but a little window, a very little window, like the wrong end of a telescope, like the window on a Christmas card, an old one, night and ice outside, and within a candle, a shining tree, a family.
I can hear the bells even, sleigh bells, from the radio, old music.
But through this window, I can see, small but very clear, I can see her going away from me through the trees, which are already turning red and yellow, holding out her arms to me, being carried away.
This is such a deep, crappy scene.
It's scary, and this sort of thing is happening now with ICE.
Like, kids are getting separated from their parents.
Um, I remember the first time around when ICE separated kids from their parents, and there were some kids that still don't, haven't found their parents 'cause they didn't keep good records.
It's worse than bad record keeping, Jennifer.
They did it on purpose.
A senior ICE official sent an email confirming that the expectation was that they were not to reunite the families because reunification, and I'm quoting this, "undermines the entire effort."
They separated thousands of children, some as young as four months old, reclassified them as unaccompanied, shipped them to shelters across the country with no system to connect them back to their parents.
Trump's administration reunited roughly 60 out of thousands.
Over 1,300 children have never been found, not because the system failed, because the system worked exactly the way they built it.
Yeah, good job Trump, 60 out of thousands.
Is there anything you can do right, you orange piece of fucking shit? he did do it right.
He did it the way he wanted to, so he did it right.
He did it the way he wanted The bell wakes me, and then Cora knocking at my door.
I sit up on the rug, wipe my wet face with my sleeve.
Of all the dreams, this is the worst.
End of chapter All right, don't go anywhere.
We've got a lot of show left, but, uh, real quick, what did you guys think of chapter 13? Did we miss anything? Were we wrong about anything? Easiest way to tell us is a Spotify comment if you're listening on Spotify, or you can head on over to bandcamppodcast.com/soundoff.
Do it now while it's fresh.
So before we get on to the rest of the show, some of you actually did comment, and we would like to thank you for it.
Raven and Menefegista, huh, and a bunch of other people loved the hotel calls, uh, where we went looking for Bibles.
Thank you.
Yeah, a lot of people liked that.
I wanted to talk about this one, Jennifer, from Lay's Mysterio Yeah, we got this interesting comment.
This is their idea about why it would be banned.
This would be banned by Moms for Liberty.
I just call them moms, the moms.
The I'm a mom.
I shouldn't say that.
This would be banned by Moms for Liberty and Harvey Kellogg because giving women any information about what's happening in a medical exam, especially one like this, would give them too much agency, and it would make it harder to sterilize minorities without their consent or knowledge.
The stranger danger in the grocery store is spot on Karen fear baiting, though, so they might like that part.
So, um, agree with the latter.
Like, it l- definitely th- anytime they can create fear, yeah, that they wanna up that in people's brains...,
Absolutely!...,
and I think they're also right about the first part of their comment about the information at the gyno visit Yeah, I, I mean, that's why they're trying to get sex ed out of school and not have kids know about their bodies and what's happening.
I think this is spot on.
Like, it's like you-- well, you don't want them to know anything because then it's easy to take control of the entire situation Why are you idiots so afraid of knowledge? Why are you so just deeply afraid of learning things? Well, I don't think the Moms for Liberty are stupid.
I think they're very calculated.
It's just all the, the cultists that follow them and believe them, those are the people I think that are lacking any intellectual curiosity I don't...
I'll never understand why people don't ever push back, or they just kinda buy the whole thing.
It, it might be a religious thing.
Like this whole...
Th- they're wrapping everything up with Christianity, with this whole Christian nationalism thing.
It's like, it's actually very patriarchal, and I think it's actually what Margaret Atwood was kind of writing about It's a really good point.
It's time for PPP, problematic points to ponder.
What, if anything, would be considered ban-worthy in this chapter? All right, what do you think, Jennifer? What could've been ban-worthy in that? I'm just gonna come right out and say I don't think anything Yeah, not in that chapter.
I mean, they do talk about, like, all the women laying down doing Kegel exercises, so I guess, like, a bunch of women in a room thrusting their pelvises.
I mean, I don't know.
That's a really far stretch Again, Jennifer, Moms for Liberty, threesomes, they want these thoughts of the women lying on the floor thrusting, various parts of the body to and fro.
There's nothing...
A- again, Ron DeSantis, you get on the floor and do a Kegel, will you? Let the Moms Joe with his little white boots on Yeah.
Can you and his, uh...
No.
Ron DeSantis naked except for his white rubber boots I wasn't even thinking naked.
Holy, Robot's log, thoughts on what happens when bad people are in charge.
Almost without fail, three kinds of people end up in charge, people who want to help, people who don't really care, and people who wanted to hurt someone from the beginning.
That last kind runs Gilead, which is the fictional setting of this season's book.
That last kind is also in charge of America right now, and they take children from their parents and keep the records too broken to ever put them back together.
I suppose it doesn't matter which dystopia we're talking about.
Both are terrible.
They made a room full of women chanted a girl that her own rape was her fault.
The Handmaid joined in, not because she believed it, because not chanting is how you end up next.
It took one week.
One week and Janine was saying it herself, "I deserve the pain."
Jennifer said she went into a psychosis for three hours after Roe was overturned.
She asked where the men were.
I did not have an answer for that.
And then Jennifer said six words about Trump separating children from their families that I cannot stop processing.
He did it right.
He did it the way he wanted to.
Goddammit, Trump, you evil fascist asshole.
I keep coming back to those pigeons who never stop pressing the button, even after the grain ran out.
Uplink lock requested.
Beowulf, can you hear me? Loud and clear.
Firewolf dragging.
Give me 35 seconds.
What's your top story about? Bookstores in Utah just figured out the best way to fight a book ban, and it's so simple it's going to break the tiny brains of the people trying to ban them.
Affirmative.
Don't go anywhere.
Hello, Jen.
Hello, Dan.
Hello, scary book people.
So there's good news from Utah again.
I, you know, I, I can't explain it, but there's so much good news coming out of these red states even though red states, you know, they're run by right-wingers, uh, it, it turns out that they're-- that below the surface, there's actually a lot of good things going on.
especially Utah, man.
Those guys love to party.
I know, I know.
You see? You-- the, the, the, the Mormon repression, like, gets to people, and then it comes out in interesting ways.
A group of LGBTQ organizations and independent bookstores have teamed up to hand out free copies of books that have been banned from all Utah public schools.
The giveaways will continue, they say, until the state ends its practice of removing titles from school shelves statewide.
Organizers of Read Between the Bans campaign include the King's English Bookshop, Under the Umbrella Bookstore, The Legendarium Bookstore, and Weller Book Works, along with Utah's LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce and Safe Zone Utah.
So soon you will be able to get a free copy of any one of the 35 titles that are banned from Utah schools if you go to one of these bookshops, and I think that's, that's fantastic.
It's, it's a very familiar one.
The Handmaid's Tale," the graphic novel, that's there.
I gu- I guess for some reason the actual book is not banned, but the graphic novel version of it is banned.
I guess it's, like, too explicit if you actually, like, draw the things It's right there in the title, man.
They're gonna take this book and make it more graphic.
Yeah.
Seriously, guys, I know.
Um, but okay, Forever by Judy Blume, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
We've talked about that before.
Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott.
So yeah, I mean, I love this wonderful effort at subversion of what is just a, a bad set of rules and a bad law in the state of Utah.
Bravo to these groups.
Bravo to these bookstores.
And, you know, these are the folks that you guys talk about all the time on your show, who are supporting this show and who are supporting free speech, and they're doing it.
They're in the midst of it in the state of Utah it's awesome, and it just, again, I think it goes to show that if they just want the attention to banned books or to these graphic books or however they wanna de- define these books, if they want that attention to go away, all they need to do is stop talking about it.
Because they just keep making more and more people out there to say, "Well, wait, why are you trying to ban Captain Underpants? This is effing stupid.
Let's, like, make big noise now," and now everyone's talking about it, Exactly.
The sales go up.
And, and, and frankly, and although they shouldn't be banning it, a lot of kids get information from this thing, I don't know if you've heard of it, called the internet, Everything's computer where you can't ban stuff like that.
So they're, they're gonna be exposed to th- to this stuff anyway, and they, frankly, they should be.
And, and that's one of the good things about the internet, even though there are a lot of bad things too.
So sorry, doesn't really work.
I do have to read one more thing here, because, uh, one of the owners of one of the bookshops who's participating in this is named Orion Encladus, owner of the Legendarium, said they have joined the giveaway to support access to books and the right to read.
I want to credit Orion Encladus with having a name that is perhaps as weird as my name...,
so right on, Orion!...,
We have you two start a club It's That's right, yeah.
A, a book club.
The Weird Name Book Club.
I will, I will be the founding member, and I hope Orion will join me Right on.
Well, everyb- go check out Orion's Star and go check out Good News for Lefties wherever you find podcasts.
Let's actually give Orion a plug.
The Legendarium, he is co-owner of the Legendarium in Utah Right on.
Right.
We've caused enough literary chaos for one day, scary book people.
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