OIKOPHOBIA IN ACTION: Jesse Walker: I think I accidentally started an urban legend. My bad.

Someone once said that if a spooky legend catches on, it says something true about the anxieties of the people who believe and repeat the tale, even if it says absolutely nothing true about the subject of the story itself. My yarn may be more funny than scary—that’s what I was aiming for, anyway—but the idea that people would prohibit a harmless children’s book is still pretty frightening. And it’s not hard to imagine what underlying worries might be at work here.

Many educated elites live in fear of Bible-thumping troglodytes haunting the hinterlands, some great redneck beast slouching towards Washington to make Sarah Palin president. Book-banning stories are tailor made to fit that terror. Palin herself had to deal with rumors in 2008 that she had fired a librarian who wouldn’t remove offensive texts from the shelves. The Guardian once ran an Amanda Marcotte editorial under the headline “The Tea Party moves to ban books.” The editorial contained exactly zero examples of Tea Partiers trying to ban anything.

There really are crusaders out there whose fear of demons leads them to try to suppress speech. Just ask the American Library Association. But there are also people whose fear of demons leads them to imagine book bonfires where none exist.

Yep.