Thought for Today

"The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age."

~~~~~ Isaac D'Israeli

Thought for Today

"Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading."

~~~~~ Rufus Choate

Thought for Today

"In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish."

~~~~~ S. I. Hayakawa

Thought for Today

"The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age."

~~~~~ Isaac D'Israeli

Thought for Today

"Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading."

~~~~~ Rufus Choate

Thought for Today

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is."

~~~~~ Allan Bloom

Thought for Today

"In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish."

~~~~~ S. I. Hayakawa

Thought for Today

"Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own."

~~~~~ Charles Scribner, Jr.

Thought for Today

"The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."

~~~~~ Moses Hadas

Thought for Today

"You know when you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend."

~~~~~ Paul Sweeney

Banning of Pre-1985 Children's Books

It seems that relatively few people are aware that as of February, 2009, it has become illegal to distribute children's books printed before 1985. The Washington Post wrote a comprehensive story about it last March 24th, Book Dealers Told to Get The Lead Out by Michael Birnbaum, but the rest of the mainstream media, even including the New York Times, ignored it.

Now, we're stuck in a classic, Kafka-esque example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Unless they are willing to spend $300 to $600 per book to ascertain that its lead content is within safe limits, no one can legally do anything with a pre-1985 children's book except throw it away. The penalty has been set by law as a fine of up to $100,000 for each violation.

Meanwhile, no one has yet come up with a single case in which exposure to a pre-1985 book has ever caused any child to develop an elevated blood lead level, much less a case of lead toxicity.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, has written an excellent discussion of the problem for The City Journal, The New Book Banning. He has also posted about it several times on his personal blog, Overlawyered, most notably here: CPSIA and Vintage Books. For all of his posts on the subject since February 24, 2009, including dozens of links to other useful resources, click here.

Among Walter Olson's many excellent links is this outstanding article in The New Atlantis magazine by Elizabeth Mullaney Nicol, Keeping Books Safe: A Bad Law Threatens Our Past. Here are Olson's comments on the article in Overlawyered, CPSIA and books: “A bad law threatens our past”.

More recently, Jonathan Adler, Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University and one of the group responsible for The Volokh Conspiracy blog, posted The End of Vintage Kids' Books?

The CPSIA law itself is immensely complex, leaving its enforcement open to considerable bureaucratic discretion and arbitrary caprice. As you will learn, to date, no one has been able to get reliable information on exactly what the law means in given situations. In fact, the CPSC's Guide to the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) for Small Businesses, Resellers, Crafters and Charities (PDF) is quite nebulous about precisely which measures are necessary to assure compliance in a given situation. Compliance would be difficult enough in a large organization with a separate Compliance Department. In a tiny one- or two-person business, it would be an impossibility.

At the time it was passed and signed into law, few realized the devastating effects of this new law. By November of 2008, though, the word had begun to circulate among libraries, dealers in used books, small manufacturers of children's toys, and thrift shops. Many of these people deluged the Consumer Products Safety Commission with thousands of justified, well-documented complaints. As a result, on January 30, the CPSC issued a stay postponing enforcement of the law for one year. However, there is far less to the stay than there seemed to be at first glance. It merely affects the enforcement of the law, not the requirements for compliance with its standards. In other words, its practical effect is more to agree to look the other way for a year – to relieve the CPSC of responsibility for policing violations of the law – than to excuse businesses from compliance.

For example, while the CPSC will not prosecute a used book seller until 2010, and that seller is not obligated to test his books for lead content, he is nevertheless obligated to insure that all of the books he sells after 10 February 2009 do not exceed the 600 ppm lead level which went into effect on that date. How he is supposed to be certain of compliance in the absence of testing, as well as what may happen to him in 2010, are left to his imagination.

A few days ago, I posted about this issue on the forum at Distributed Proofreaders. One respondent, who does not seem to comprehend the seriousness of the problem or the lack of any scientific justification for this book ban, wrote:

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the agency charged with enforcing the act, lead in the books' inks could make its way into the mouths of little kids.

My reply to her was as follows:

Let's apply a modicum of common sense here, please.

First, we do not need an agency of the U.S. Government to tell us that anything that will fit can make its way into the mouths of little kids, as well as into their nostrils, ears, and other body orifices. Just ask any pediatrician. But does that mean, for instance, that just because dried beans can make their way up children's nostrils and require surgical extraction, we should outlaw dried beans?

Second, even in the unlikely event that a child were to ingest several entire pages from an old book at once, the dose of lead he would absorb even under a worst-case scenario is orders of magnitude below that which would cause toxicity.

Modern testing methods have become so exquisitely sensitive that we can now detect a minuscule trace amount of nearly anything anywhere. However, it's important to maintain one's perspective in evaluating those test results. We should not jump to the unwarranted conclusion that barely detectable trace amounts of toxic substances ought to be of just as much concern as physiologically significant amounts which are orders of magnitude greater. Indeed, certain minerals -- not lead, but, for example, selenium, are essential nutrients in trace amounts, but deadly poisons in higher doses. "The dose makes the poison."

CDC considers a blood lead level of 10 µg/dL or greater to be significant in children. Its recent data indicates that since the late 1970s, average blood lead levels in children have dropped approximately 80%, essentially to the background level of between 2 and 3 µg/dL. The remaining pockets of high blood lead levels in children occur in those living in poor urban areas, in old housing, and in conditions of rank poverty.

Bottom line: While there are still a few areas of the U.S. in which children may have unacceptably high blood lead levels, there has never been any association ever demonstrated between high blood levels in children and exposure to books printed before 1985. Destroying those books will not help those unfortunate children at all. On the other hand, though, destroying them will most assuredly deprive future generations of children of the cultural enrichment they might have absorbed by reading those books.

While it's true that SOME of the old books have been reprinted in new, guaranteed lead (and phthalate)-free editions, for economic reasons, most have not and are not likely to be. In addition, most of these newly reprinted books have not been reproduced in their original form. Instead, they have been re-edited – bowdlerized, rendered politically correct, and thoroughly disinfected of any language that might possibly cause offense to one of the many professional offense-taking groups out there. In many cases, even the original illustrations are replaced by balanced, politically correct substitutes. Therefore, these reprinted versions cannot possibly convey the same experience as the originals did when we read them as children.

I thought it was interesting that in a post on the topic of the CPSIA and its effect on children's books and toys, ShopFloor blogger Carter Wood linked to the Project Gutenberg text of the classic 1922 Margery Williams Bianco story The Velveteen Rabbit. He considers it an allegory to the CPSIA situation:

The Velveteen Rabbit captures so well the horrible, even cruel effects of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which has led to destroyed toys and children’s books. Excerpt:

And so the little Rabbit was put into a sack with the old picture-books and a lot of rubbish, and carried out to the end of the garden behind the fowl-house. That was a fine place to make a bonfire, only the gardener was too busy just then to attend to it. He had the potatoes to dig and the green peas to gather, but next morning he promised to come quite early and burn the whole lot.

As he so often does, Mark Steyn came up with one of the most succinct explanations of why this book banning is so wrong that I have yet seen:

A nation’s collective memory is the unseen seven-eighths of the iceberg. When you sever that, what’s left just bobs around on the surface, unmoored in every sense.

Last March, James Lileks, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's great columnist and blogger, wrote Whoa! Lock up those kids' books chock full o' lead, including this great line:

The law seems to presume that children, having read and enjoyed a beloved story, will eat it.

It's hard to believe that something like this could happen under the radar in this once-free country, but nevertheless, it has. Now, we must do what we can to cope with this new reality.

Members of the public who have learned about CPSIA and its many (presumably) unintended consequences have been deluging the CPSC with angry complaints. In truth, though, their complaints are misdirected; the Commission's hands are tied. The language of the law is so specific and so strict that it leaves the Commission very little room to exercise any degree of discretion, to say nothing of common sense. The only way that we will ever get relief from this onerous, nightmarish new law is to insist to our Senators and Representatives that they act to amend it as soon as Congress reconvenes. Time is truly of the essence. 10 February 2010, when the one-year stay (itself of questionable legality) expires and the CPSC begins full enforcement, will be here before we know it.

8/9/09 19:30 CDT UPDATE and BUMP:
Commenter Wacky Hermit was kind enough to inform me about this useful site, What is the CPSIA?, which deals with the broader effects of the CPSIA, and doesn't concentrate solely on books.

The New Widget

The Wall Street Journal's editorial site, OpinionJournal.com, is, in my opinion, one of the most indispensable places on the web. Every day, it manages to be simultaneously informative and entertaining, while avoiding the useless pop-culture fluff that clutters up so many otherwise worthwhile websites.

OpinionJournal.com has just come up with a neat little widget – an attractive interactive device including clickable links to its latest articles. For your convenience, I have added it to the features available on this blog. You can see it in the sidebar, just beneath the other new widget, the Skype button.

I hope you enjoy it.

A Troubling Tale

Alex Lickerman is a practicing physician who blogs at Happiness in this World. Last week, he posted a short story, "Cause and Effect," – a mini-masterpiece with an O. Henry ending.

The story begins like this:

Athena stood before a full-length mirror in her drab one bedroom apartment, an attractive woman in her late twenties, staring at her image critically, scanning it for flaws. She was dressed in casual evening wear: short skirt and pantyhose with a low-cut blouse showing just a hint of cleavage. She took in a deep breath. This would have to do.

She exited her apartment building to find the night moonless and dark. Taking a quick glance to the left and right, she approached the bus stop at the corner. She looked up at the bus schedule and then down at her watch. The summer breeze blew warmly on her skin. Impulsively, she decided to walk.

I won't spoil the ending for you. If you want to know how it turns out, you'll need to go read it for yourself.

Media Bias and Our Servicemen

The Weekly Standard has just come out with a great read for Memorial Day. It's in the unlikely form of a book review by Mackubin Thomas Owens, a professor at the Naval War College who earned a Silver Star as a Marine Corps platoon commander in Vietnam. In the article, "Americans Under Fire ," Owens reviews three books (Moment of Truth in Iraq: How a New 'Greatest Generation' of American Soldiers is Turning Defeat and Disaster into Victory and Hope by Michael Yon, House to House by David Bellavia, and Hard Corps: From Gangster to Marine Hero by Marco Martinez), but also offers an authoritative explanation of how a biased media has managed to besmirch the reputation of our servicemen through selective reporting.

It seems that Americans have forgotten how to honor their war heroes.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, most boys knew the story of Lt. Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of World War II. Indeed, after the war, he became a fairly successful actor. The public, including Hollywood, recognized him for what he was--a hero. Most of us also knew the story of Marine Sgt. John Basilone, who earned the Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal. He was brought home to help sell war bonds but kept asking to go back to the Pacific. His superiors finally relented. He was killed on Iwo Jima. The American public recognized him for what he was--a hero.

No more. Americans have performed extraordinary feats of bravery in Iraq and Afghanistan, but with the exception of those who regularly read military blogs, who knows about them?

Things changed with Vietnam. Although Americans fought bravely there, the press, if not the American people, began to treat those who fought in Vietnam as either moral monsters, victims, or both. The dysfunctional Vietnam vet became a staple of popular culture. Despite the fact that atrocities were rare, My Lai came to symbolize the entire war; and thanks to the press's preoccupation with the anomaly of My Lai, Lt. William Calley became the poster boy for Vietnam. The honorable and heroic performance of the vast majority of those who served in Vietnam went largely unrecognized.

For example, how many Americans know the story of Marine Lt. John P. Bobo, who received the Medal of Honor for his actions in Vietnam? Here is part of his citation:

When an exploding enemy mortar round severed Lieutenant Bobo's right leg below the knee, he refused to be evacuated and insisted upon being placed in a firing position to cover the movement of the command group to a better location. With a web belt around his leg serving as a tourniquet, and with his leg jammed into the dirt to curtail the bleeding, he remained in this position and delivered devastating fire into the ranks of the enemy attempting to overrun the Marines. Lieutenant Bobo was mortally wounded while firing his weapon into the main point of the enemy attack but his valiant spirit inspired his men to heroic efforts.

The reason for this disparity in coverage is simple. My Lai fit the conventional narrative of the antiwar left: Bobo's story did not.

Things haven't changed much since then. The conventional wisdom concerning Vietnam has been absorbed by today's press, even by those too young to remember our Southeast Asia misadventure. The result is a troubling predisposition to believe the worst about those who are willing to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan.

By all means read the whole thing, but with this cautionary note: Mac Owens' article is not for the squeamish. He is, after all, reviewing three excellent first-hand accounts of combat in Iraq, and includes an exceptionally graphic account of the death of a terrorist at the hands of one of the authors, David Bellavia. You'll come away with a heightened respect for our remarkable military personnel, along with a replenished supply of outrage and contempt for the media weasels who knowingly and deliberately set out to cast our soldiers in the worst possible light.

For your convenience, I've set it up so you can order any of these books by clicking the appropriate link. All come highly recommended, but Michael Yon's is outstanding (as anyone would know who's ever read his blog, Michael Yon: Online Magazine) and promises to become a classic of military literature.

UPDATE: Check out this story of extraordinary heroism by combat journalist Jeff Emanuel: "Return From Samarra."

Caught completely by surprise and outnumbered at least ten to one by heavily-armed fighters, the four young soldiers -- Sergeant Josh Morley, Specialist Tracy Willis, and then-Specialists Eric Moser and Chris Corriveau -- fought a pitched and protracted rooftop battle that left at least a dozen terrorists dead, and made the surviving Americans into heroes.

Sergeant Morley and Specialist Willis lost their lives in the encounter. Morley left behind an infant daughter he had never met.

On Reading

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.

~~~~~ Francis Bacon, "Essays: Of Studies"