Baby Be-bop And The Badassed Bigots, Pt 3: Enter Bette Davis

Epilogue

Library censorship has been alive ever since Christian zealots burned the Great Library of Alexandria in 391 CE.* So its not surprising that a movie was made about library censorship and has some subtle parallels to today's West Bend circus act. The movie was Storm Center. Its star was Bette Davis. The meme at the time (1956) was Communism since it was made at the tail end of the McCarthy era. Davis was remarkable in the role of a librarian who refused to take a book about Communism off the shelves. In the scene below, she gives her favorite youth a bitch-slapping like you wouldn't believe, but one that even James Dobson might approve of ...if he were to be publicly rebuked by an eight-year-old.


*Regarded as one of the greatest disasters to befall knowledge, some 400,000 scrolls were lost - works collected from all of western civilization - because they were housed in a building (the Serapeum) that had been a temple.