IN DEFENSE OF BOOK BURNING: A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR UNITING LEFT AND RIGHT
Censors have always been on the right side of history. It's time we unite in our collective hatred for the written word.
Times are tough. America, as always, is at war, both with itself in a domestic Culture War and overseas in a proxy war with those damn Ruskies. The Culture War (which we have needs fight in order to avoid a Class War) has reached a fever pitch in recent months. Over a dozen bills have been proposed to remove books from libraries and schools deemed offensive by Conservative Christian groups, while Woke culture warriors are re-editing classic works by legendary authors to removed offensive language and make them more “inclusive”.
It seems like a lot of bother to go through when you can just cut to the chase and BURN THE BOOKS. All of them. Have you ever been to a library? Who has the time to read all those books in order to ascertain which ones are offensive to whomever when you can take care of the entire mess with a single match?
Now, I do realize that book burning has certain negative connotations, mostly due to a certain Right Wing political party that seized power in Depression era Germany. However, the Nazis didn’t invent book burning, and I suggest it is a moral imperative that we take it back from them. Sometimes even really bad people have great ideas.
And I can hear some of you Negative Nellies whining, “But if we burn all the books, where will we get our history and information from?” From the Internet, you morons, where else? Unlike stale old books where facts are carved in typeface, history and facts are malleable on the Internet! They change all the time! Why be stuck with dusty old tomes like Gibbons’ RISE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE when not only history but reality itself can be whatever you want it to be? I’m planning a vacation to Wakanda this summer and it is going to be awesome! I’ll bring you back a piece of Vibranium.
Same thing goes for Science and Biology, which are more controversial than ever! In fact, they’re so controversial I’m not even going to discuss them! As good a reason as any to
BURN THE BOOKS.
“What about the great works of literature?” Please. PUH-LEASE. Have you ever seen the Riverside Shakespeare, the complete works of The Bard in hardcover? That thing is dangerous. Literally. When I was an English Lit major at Uni I dropped that giant cinderblock of a book on my foot and it nearly broke my little toe!
Then there’s this stupid little story called THE ODYSSEY where the hero spends half the book eating and never gains a pound! Clearly the author was Fat-Phobic and a self-hating vision-impaired person when he threw in that one-eyed monster. If he had just stuck with turning the white males into pigs and ended the story there, he might have had something.
Context, as every educated person knows, is completely irrelevant, which is why we need to ban books by people who had backwards notions about minorities and women back in the 1800’s. Did you know that H.P. Lovecraft named his cat with a racial slur when he was six years old? Rudyard Kipling wrote an ode to colonialism called “White Man’s Burden”! I know it might seem a shame to have to throw THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH and THE JUNGLE BOOK onto the bonfire but, like the saying goes, throw the baby out with the bath water.
BURN THE BOOKS.
If you’ve checked your electric bill recently you’ll know we’re having a little bit of an energy crisis right now. It’s a worthy sacrifice in order to keep that proxy war with Russia going (Lockheed Martin and Boeing aren’t going to feed themselves!), but it’s tough on the wallet. We need to see a return to that venerable home heating device of old, the humble fireplace. But wouldn’t that mean cutting down trees? Not at all!
BURN THE BOOKS.
They’re trees that have already been cut down! Some of them decades or even hundreds of years ago! The Riverside Chaucer alone would keep a family of four warm for a month. Don’t allow those Canadian forests that were decimated to print all those Stephen King novels to have died for nothing.
Another benefit of book burning is that is saves activist-minded publishers the bother of re-writing them. Recently there was a big rigmarole over the publisher Puffin editing the text of Roald Dahl’s children’s novels for modern audiences and modern sensibilities. A noble effort, to be sure (describing Augustus Gloop as “enormous” instead of “fat” and using gender neutral pronouns for the Oompa Loompas is a step in the right direction for achieving world peace), but you can avoid all that hard work and silly controversy if you, say it with me now:
BURN THE DAMN BOOKS.
But the last, best reason to bring back book burning is that it alone can give us the one thing we need most right now: National Unity. Imagine, blue-haired Right Wing Christian Fundamentalists and blue-haired Social Justice Warriors coming together around a bonfire to toss J.K. Rowling’s books into the purifying flames. For different reasons, to be sure, but with the same noble goal and purpose: protecting the rest of us from Thought Crimes.
Well-known censorship advocate Ray Bradbury said it best in his Utopian fantasy novel FAHRENHEIT 451:
“Coloured people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator.”
So I repeat: BURN THE BOOKS!
Just don’t come for my books. My home looks like library and functions as one for my friends. Come for my stash and you will be introduced to my close associate Mr. Remington 870. Once everyone else’s books have been reduced to harmless ashes, imagine how I’m going to clean up on the black market!