The SGM Subversive Reading List

(Thanks to Human Events Online...well, kinda "thanks," kinda "fuck you hillbillies.")

Since Nate posted a reading list over at Southernfried, which I have been informed is now a crappy board, I figured I'd post this here since the board recently started sucking.

You can click on the link above to read the full article, which includes summaries of the books, although most of these books are pretty well known. It's pretty sad that something outranked the book written by Hitler on a list of "dangerous books" and I'm not sure what constitutes a "dangerous book" unless you're considering mass and sharp edges which could facilitate injury. I've got some pretty heave literature anthologies from my days in academia that I could use to bludgeon someone, but I don't see Norton's Anthology of British Literature on here. Also, some of the crap in that book could bore you into a coma or drive you to madness trying to figure out what the fuck they were saying. What I'm trying to say is this: fuck this anti-intellectual bullshit from the right-wing in the ass. I realize they're fine tuning their political rhetoric to appeal to the Dawn of Hope demographic, but the drawback that educated people might say WTF?!?!? is just something you have to deal with.

1. The Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels
2. Mein Kampf - Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao - Mao Tse Tung
4. The Kinsey Report - Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education - Dewey

(From the summary: "In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking “skills” instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation." I just wanted to point out that these people are a) claiming that a book is dangerous because it promotes thinking skills and that b) they're still hung up on Clinton. He got a blow job, you know. In the Oval Office. A blow job. A BLOW JOB! A BLOW JOB! Never forget that. Or 9/11.)

6. Das Kapital - Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique - Friedan
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy - Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil - Nietzche
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money - Keynes

Honorable mentions

The Population Bomb - Ehrlich
What Is To Be Done - V.I. Lenin
Authoritarian Personality - Adorno
On Liberty - Mill
Beyond Freedom and Dignity - Skinner
Reflections on Violence - Sorel
The Promise of American Life - Croly
Origin of the Species - Darwin
Madness and Civilization - Foucault
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization - Webb
Coming of Age in Samoa - Mead
Unsafe at Any Speed - Nader
Second Sex - Beauvoir
Prison Notebooks - Gramsci
Silent Spring - Carson
Wretched of the Earth - Fanon
Introduction to Psychoanalysis - Freud
The Greening of America - Reich
The Limits to Growth - Club of Rome
Descent of Man - Darwin

I ran across this list a few days ago and thought about mentioning it and then forgot about it because I was busy playing "Animal Crossing" because that doesn't make me want to cry or scream or die, but this afternoon I was watching C-Span and Ralph Nader was on Washington Today and a caller mentioned this list and Nader laughed about how ironic it was that his book was being considered dangerous when it led to driving/safety laws that have saved millions of lives in the last half century. Then another caller said she was upset that people like Nader call Bush and Cheney things like "draft-dodgers" and question the war and that she believed Bush had our best interests at heart and I wanted to cry and scream and die, but unfortunately I had only rented "Animal Crossing" and took it back to Blockbuster yesterday so the first thing I'm doing when I get paid Friday is buying that game, unless my first trip to the psychiatrist Thursday ends with my getting a lobotomy and I'm not sure if there's a difference or that I care.

Also, I'd like to point out that the majority of those books either attack or otherwise threaten business or religion, if that makes things clearer for you.