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Sadly, my post yesterday about the number of Americans who think the First Amendment goes too far in protecting freedom was all too timely. We now have people across the country throwing conniption fits over the cover photo Rolling Stone used for its story on accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
 Evidently some people believe the photo somehow glorifies Tsarnaev, even suggesting it evokes the iconic photograph of Jim Morrison and means Rolling Stone is trying to glamorize Tsarnaev or make him a celebrity. The outrage has gone so far that some stores — such as HyVee and CVS — are refusing to sell this issue of the magazine. But this is self-righteousness without reason. In fact, I think the anger and fear stem from the fact the photo humanizes Tsarnaev.
The RS article is about how a bright and popular young man was drawn into becoming a terrorist. As a result, the photo, taken by Tsarnaev himself, shows a young man who appears entirely normal and in step with his peers. If we know where he ended up, doesn’t it make sense to see him as he was before? In fact, as Rob W. Hart of LitReactor observed yesterday, “… isn’t that sort of the point? That’s not just a photo. It’s context. It’s perspective.”
 To counter the photo, pictures of Tsarnaev’s capture, including some showing a sniper’s laser dot on his forehead, were released. That’s fine because that, too, is perspective. As Washington Post columnist Erik Wemple observed, the RS cover photo “is a version of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that’s just as real as the weary, bloody version that we see in the police photos. It’s merely taken at a different point in his life. No amount of gory manhunt photography will undo the fact that Tsarnaev was once, by all accounts, a gregarious and well-adjusted part of our society. Rolling Stone set out to tell that story.”
And isn’t it a story we want to hear? Don’t we want to get some clue about how Tsarnaev went from typical American high school and college student to accused monster? Yet knee jerk reactions that the photo might offend victims or lionize Tsarnaev started before the story even hit the magazine’s online site, let alone store shelves or mailboxes. If we’re that afraid of looking at a young man before he somehow embarks on a road to terrorism, then we are missing the point. In fact, we may just be guaranteeing more victims in the future.
Anger blows out the lamp of the mind.
Robert G. Ingersoll
To say I am flummoxed by the results of a new poll by the First Amendment Center would be an understatement. Some 34 percent of Americans say the First Amendment goes too far in protecting freedom, according to an annual survey by the First Amendment Center.
Imagine, a third of our population believes that the Bill of Rights does too much to protect freedom of speech, press and religion, to name a few of the rights it guarantees. (Thirty-six percent of Americans cannot name any of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, according to the State of the First Amendment report.) The First Amendment Center points out that the survey was taken shortly after the Boston Marathon bombing and so the views of the First Amendment may well reflect “Americans’ increased willingness to give up their rights and freedoms in return for greater security when they feel threatened.” This would seem to correlate with the fact the shortly after 9/11 more than 40% of Americans thought the First Amendment went too far.
Interestingly, 47% of 18-30-year olds think the the First Amendment goes too far. I’m still pondering how that may relate to something else I observed recently. Reports indicate young people are least offended by the NSA’s massive spying on Americans. I speculate that occurs because younger people already splash their life all over social media so aren’t as offended about potential exposure of details of their private lives. I’m curious, though, what prompts the attitudes toward the First Amendment.
Also interesting is that 47% of people say freedom of speech is the most important freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment, followed by 10% calling freedom of religion the most important. On the religion front, 51% of those surveyed believe the Constitution established a “Christian nation” while half that disagree. Sixty-five percent of Americans agree that freedom to worship as one chooses applies to all religious groups regardless of how extreme or on the fringe their views may be while 31% disagree. That is the highest percentage to say the freedom to worship does not apply to extreme and fringe groups since the survey was first conducted in 1997.
The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point.
Justice Anthony Kennedy,
Int’l Society for Krishna Consciousness v. Lee
Who would have thought a book called Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought” would have been the beginning of an online revolution. Yet 18 years ago today that was the first item sold on a website called Amazon. Today is a behemoth, not only in the world of books but in the world of online retail sales. In fact, it may be an excellent reflection on how online shopping evolved.
The sale came a year after Jeff Bezos incorporated the company. Originally, the website “was little more than a Web page of text separated by headlines, underlined and bolded in blue.” The business consisted of a few people packing and shipping boxes of books from a two-car garage in Bellevue, Wash. Within five years, it had gone public, gone international and branched into music, DVDs and consumer electronics. This year it had a market capitalization of $140 billion and its gross revenue last year was $61 billion (yes, both with a “b”). Its gross profit, $15 billion last year (again with a “b”), has doubled since 2010 and nearly tripled since 2009.
I use Amazon a lot. I buy books, ebooks, music, movies, Christmas gifts and computer hardware and software from it. I’m an Amazon Prime member. And all my purchases at the store are on my Amazon branded Visa card (the points from which have allowed me to “buy” a variety of electronic gadgets for little or nothing, including an ASUS tablet for less than $7). But behemoths of any kind can cause fear and loathing or, for someone like me, twinges of guilt and unease.
As much as what happened nearly two decades ago started something groundbreaking for readers and shoppers, what it led to has been heartbreaking, and often backbreaking, for independent bookstores. So the next time you price a book on Amazon remember that if you forego the discount once in a while and buy from your local bookseller, you’re contributing to the survival of brick and mortar bookstores.
The terrible thing about the internet and Amazon is that they take the magic and happy chaos out of book shopping. The internet might give you what you want, but it won’t give you what you need.
Tom Hodgkinson, Jan. 5, 2007
This is delayed due to travel (and coming within minutes of spending last night in the Denver airport).
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
Weird Shit of the Week
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
Again and again in American history the public has been told that civil liberties must be sacrificed to protect the country from foreign threats.
Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate
I can honestly say I never gave up on any of the top five “most abandoned” books at Goodreads or even the top five abandoned classics. Of course, that’s because in each case I read two of the five and never started the other three.
The top five most unfinished books I’ve read are Wicked and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Those I’ve not started are J.K. Rowling’s Casual Vacancy, Fifty Shades of Grey and Eat, Pray, Love. For me, the reasons for never starting the last two is simply they aren’t the type of books I like. Some of the reasons for giving up on the books do make you wonder. My favorite is the person who said Rowling’s book is a “far cry from the Harry Potter series.” You only need read the dust jacket or any article about the book and you would have figured that out. At least one person abandoned Wicked because it wasn’t like the Broadway show. I’d agree with that — and venture that the musical is far better.
For classic abandonment, the most abandoned books, in order, are Catch-22, The Lord of the Rings, Ulysses, Moby-Dick and Atlas Shrugged. I’ve read the first two and think I read both of them while in college. I’ve never been tempted to read Ulysses and bulk kept me away from the other two.
Boredom appears to be the leading cause of giving up on a book. Interestingly, though, 38 percent of the readers say they always finish a book. One person admitted, though, that it may be “years later.” If someone is going to abandon a book, nearly 35 percent do so at 100 pages or between that and 50 pages while about 16 percent give up after fewer than 50 pages.
I think it would be interesting to know if people abandon more books they borrow than those they buy. Sometimes, a monetary investment may lead to greater time investment.
What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading.
Alice James, Alice James, Her Brothers–Her Journal
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