RIGHTBURG

The town of Rightburg prided itself on being the quintessential slice of Middle America, where old-fashioned values were so heavy you could smell them in the air. Some of the residents had the headlights mounted on the rear so they pointed backward rather than forward. The town did have one token liberal who had been waging a fruitless campaign for many years to make it legal for drivers to make left turns.

This Sunday afternoon was a very special occasion since an emergency meeting of the Library Board had been called. The townspeople had become concerned over items in the news from other places that said children were being corrupted by exposure to evil influences emanating from the printed words in books found on library shelves. They were determined that this was not going to happen in their town. So the board was meeting to determine what action to take to resolve this situation. One older gentleman suggested that just removing certain titles from the shelves would not be adequate, because he had heard that in some books if one read the words backwards and read them very slowly, the devil might just jump right off the page and take you over.

Another suggested that all books in the library should be re-bound, with titles assigned to the books on a random basis, so that The Catcher in the Rye might end up being titled A Study in the Economic Structure of the Pacific Southern Rim. While this would still leave the bad books somewhere on the library shelves, no one would know exactly where they were and would find one only by chance. One lady protested that this would make it hard for someone who really needed to find a particular book to do so, but most folks allowed as how they figured they'd done about all the book learnin that needed to be done in this town.

Someone else suggested that certain words should be removed from all the books, because the words themselves were bad influences. These included words such as "live," which is "evil" when read backwards. And other words like "nataS," which is Satan spelled backwards. Of course no one knew if there really was such a word as "nataS," since no one could recall having seen it before. In that case, a definition would have to be made up for it so it could be considered a real word and then be banned.

At first, this Sunday afternoon gathering decided they needed more time to study the possible actions and voted to table everything to a subsequent meeting two weeks hence. But after it was pointed out that the word "table" spelled backwards contained the word "bat," and that bats were often associated with witchcraft, they decided to delay rather than table the motion, since no one could come up with any objection to the word "yaled."