Why Florida bans books on fantasy football…
…at least in their prisons
Inspired by this story: A reporter’s memoir of her jail time gets banned in Florida prisons
The Buccaneers were criminals,
They pillaged, raped, and sacked.
They might do so with Letters of Marque
Whilst scourging, scrounging jerky snacks. +
More kindly Dolphins, once beloved
Get mauled by tuna fishing nets
Those days when Flipper proudly flew
The broader world all but forgets.
Neither offers rehabilitation
To incarcerated felons or parolees
Florida bans books on fantasy football
Along with Corrections in Ink.
- Tom Tordillo, © 2022. All rights reserved.
NPR’s editors thought it was really interesting that Florida prisons banned a journalist’s memoir about her rehabilitation from prison.
It’s probably more troubling that certain books do not get banned — Mein Kampf, the Turner Diaries — while others do. Does that suggest someone appointed prison officials who are defensive about certain forms of hate?
NPR erred by focusing on Keri Blakinger’s memoir, rather than the ban on fantasy football in Florida. Fantasy may be problematic for inmates generally.
After all, Michigan banned Dungeons & Dragons books. Just watch one episode of ‘Stranger Things’ and you can appreciate how fantasy games can unleash hell.
But banning fantasy football books? Seriously?
NPR may be a bunch of journalists worried about a screwed up delivery of another journalist’s book — but there’s a lot more football fans out there, even than Dungeons & Dragons fans. When’s the last time a journalistic Superbowl filled a stadium?
+ Re the term “Buccaneers”
’Buccaneers’ were named after a group of poachers who hunted wild boars that overran several Caribbean islands once the locals were wiped out, smoked the meat, and then went around robbing (mostly) Spanish fleets.
Histories acknowledge the role 17th century buccaneers played, but tend to deemphasize how that role influenced shifts in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as the Dutch, English, and Portuguese nations suddenly found themselves swimming in cash that magically appeared out of nowhere from their personal Capitalist hard work which had no connection whatsoever with the slave trade (and if you say otherwise, you too may get banned in Florida).
Possibly because of little passages like the following:
…They stood then for Cape Lopez, and in the way mett with a small portugeese, laden with slaves from Angola. they tooke some Cloathes and silkes from them and gave them some provisions which they were in want of. att Cape Lopaz they only bought Honey, and sunke the little shipp, the men not being satisfied with the Commander…
John Franklin Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (from Project Gutenberg).
Buccaneers sank a ‘little ship’ laden with slaves from Angola because they weren’t happy taking clothes and silks? Did they fire a few cannon balls because the clothes didn’t fit?
And people are proud of that mascot?
