So the Tangerine Tyrant and Nobel Peace Prize hopeful has just launched attacks on Iran. 

God help us all. 

Of Hearths and Salamanders: in which paper continues to burn.

 As one periodically revisits horrors from the past, I find myself often thinking of this horrible story from the CBC, about the Peel District School Board pulping its library books. 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-library-book-weeding-1.6964332

It's not just that they decided to weed the books, which all libraries do, however much it may pain antiquarian hoarders such as myself. It's that they decided to destroy the books, rip off the covers and pulp the lot, that burns me. 

I particularly love the Board's justification: " "they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate."

For those reasons, the documents say the books cannot be donated, as "they are not suitable for any learners." 

Not suitable for any learners? No word on the doubtless vigorous process by which they came to this conclusion; I'm certain some deeply careful and qualified individual read every single page before deciding said book failed to meet their well-defined and public criteria. Thank goodness we have these self appointed guardians to protect our we widdow bwains fwom hawm. Nope, not even a garage sale. Junk the lot!    

That was three years ago, and it still makes me mad. 

Of high minded protecting chaperones protecting the delicate public, there are many precedents though.

 From 221-206 BC, the first Emperor of China, Qin Shui Huang decided to burn every book in his kingdom (or at least the ones which predated his reign), the authors that wrote them, and the scholars that read them. Partly because he didn't want any histories circulating that he didn't write, and partly because he thought poetry was a waste of time. 

Who was it who said “Those who burn books will soon burn people”?

This of course reminded me of Hitler’s Deutsche Studentenschaft making massive bonfires of All Quiet on the Western Front, amongst countless other titles – anything worth reading really.

From there, I couldn’t help thinking of the less dramatic but much more destructive weedings of the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press under the Council of Ministers of the USSR – Glavlit (don’t you just love Soviet acronyms?) who pulped some 24, 138,799 books between 1938 and 1939.

While looking up those figures I found that more recently Buddhist mobs torched some 97,000 books at the Jafna Public Library in Sri Lanka. Shades of Alexandria. . .

I don’t off hand have the figures for Mao, Pol Pot, or Texas, where school libraries are being emptied of anything that smells gay. Suffice it to say, there is a long time-dishonoured tradition of destroying books, and everyone who’s ever done it has thought it the socially responsible thing to do.

Naturally, this all brings us to Bradbury, whose Fahrenheit 451 is the final word on the subject. Bringing that up seems a cliché, like bringing up Kafka or Orwell, but I think there’s an aspect of it most folks don’t fully appreciate. Indeed, the burning of the books, “the blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history” (page 1!) provide the novel’s most arresting images.  But it’s icing on the cake. In the sick, soulless, and slowly dying society of Bradbury’s dystopia, books, along with anything else beautiful or meaningful, lose their value and are quite casually tossed aside.

We’re approaching a post literate society, one very much like that in 451. Addicted to screens and permanent noise, oblivious to nature, frivolous, forgetful. I’ve had more than one student who got through English class without having to read a thing. The teachers are giving up; society won’t back them up. Books aren’t considered important. Even as masses flock to big budget adaptations of Frankenstein, or Wuthering Heights, by directors who haven’t evidently read them.

“You have to burn books,” said Bradbury. “You just stop people from reading them."

The Peel Board can kiss my ass.

 

References:

https://swarajyamag.com/world/remembering-the-jaffna-public-library-destroyed-by-sinhalese-extremists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Directorate_for_the_Protection_of_State_Secrets_in_the_Press 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/brief-history-book-burning-printing-press-internet-archives-180964697/

Wasterman, Frank. Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia. New York: The Overlook Press. 2011

Of Genteel Self-Immolation: In Which the Author Revisits Conspiracy Theories.

            There are days when I contemplate middle-age, and rejoice in my ever-more apparent mortality. It means I will not have to long inhabit the ap-addled abattoir that society is building for itself, and which the poor kids will have to inherit. I swear I would rather jump from a moving bullet-train into a burning sulphur-pit than face the feckless future the tech-bros are planning for us.  

            Such a moment cam upon me again the other day, shortly after a grade-9 student told me in all sincerity, that Stranger Things was based on a true story. That by itself was not the moment of my all-encompassing weltschmerz; that came later. At first, I merely iterated, in the admittedly condescending manner that grown-ups will often inadvertently adopt when confronted with childish fancies they are not altogether in the mood for dealing with (around the time when the elapsed hours since lunch are roughly equal to the remaining hours before dinner, and the longing for caffeine is slowly replaced by the longing for alcohol), that it was “just a story”.

            “Oh no!” my little friend persisted, informing me that one of the actors of the program, the otherwise wonderful Gatan Motarazzo who brought the ever-so-loveable Dustin Henderson to life, told an interview that it was a true story.

            I felt my heart sink into my boots, and maintained in an even more condescending manner, that actors, bless ‘em, aren’t always the oracles of wisdom and truth we take them to be.

            “Yeah, but other people have said it!” came the paraphrased puppy-dog. At which point he whipped out his phone for indisputable proof, and I wished for the roof to collapse on top of me.

            “You Can’t. Believe. Everything. You Read. On. The. Internet.” I slowly, slowly squeezed through bitten-bleeding lip in what I hoped was my most condescending tone yet.

            “But there’s so much of it!” he says, and I wished someone would sticks dynamite up my nostrils and light the fuse.  (“You see how that’s worse? You do understand how that’s worse???”).

            I’d had just about had it at this point, and rather clumsily (for I was caught off guard and not prepared) threw out some such canards about verifying sources and evaluating veracity of information, when he’d opened up youtube to Mysteries Decoded: The Montauk Experiments, and I prayed for someone to dump liquid drano down my throat.

 

            We’re going to pause here for a moment, and in violation of those abhorrent 5-paragraph essay templates I am state-mandated to force-feed our innocent youth, get to my main point/idea/topic/thesis here, having failed to mention it any earlier, in the event my audience’s no-doubt formidable-but-not-infinite attention spans may waver. The point is not that Mysteries Decoded was wretched even by the abysmal standards of Youtube docs. Nor is my failure to dissuade my young charge from believing that the US government was conducting mind-control-time travel experiments in 1981 the reason I wanted to throw myself into a wood-chipper. It was that this young man, far from atypical, had no capacity to tell reality from fiction. No critical faculties. No ability or even willingness to flag fraud or fantasy.

            That fucking depressed me.

            You may ask what the big deal is, and what business I, who once obsessed over Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, have in judging?  Different times, different contexts, higher stakes, I would maintain.

            Look, when I researched my cryptids, I was much younger than he is today. I had to go to the children’s department at the library and sign out – a book. I had to read – a book. If nothing else, I was reading – a book. The benefits of which are manifold. I was also surrounded by adults who valued education, had years of science and media literacy classes ahead of me, and, well, other books. He on the other hand is barraged by videos, memes, and soundbites, every single hour, and he believes all of it. He will come across other, nastier ideas, with no greater ability to discriminate. Today it’s the Montauk Experiment, tomorrow it’s the Protocols of the Eldars of Zion. He will encounter voter fraud conspiracies, anti-vax tirades, 9-11 Trutherism, Sandy Hook denialism, Holocaust denial, New Age quakery, religious fundamentalism, great replacement theory, whatever the hell Putin’s pushing at any given time, and Q-Anon Pizzagate conspiracies.

            Indeed, compare nonsense. If a kid thinks there’s a plesiosaur in a Scottish lake or a hairy ape man wandering BC, it’s not much different from thinking there was a jolly toymaker living at the North Pole (which most of us recently believed). The Montauk conspiracy holds that the US government did mind-control time travel experiments on (unnamed) kidnapped children. It’s Pizzagate in germination. An unverifiable, unprovable, but unshakable conviction that genuine harm is being done to real people. Somewhere. Folks who believe that can be driven to extremes.

            I have no doubt that every government, and the US government in particular, does some pretty nasty things behind closed doors. But I’m much more concerned about what we know to be true than what almost certainly isn’t. I’d rather break open an ICE detention facility where I know children are suffering, than some empty lab in Montauk, Long Island. Those concerned with the latter show precious little concern about the former: they certainly don’t churn out youtube and tiktok channels about it. Nor about child-poverty, childhood leukemia, child casualties of war zones, nor indeed any genuine issue facing actual, verifiable, children. You know, the ones with names.  Energy and indignation are wasted chasing shadows. It’s maddening.

I am neither the first, nor will I be the last to pull out his beard with frustration at the baboons who for years obsessed over an imaginary child sex-ring run by a non-existent global elite, yet now seem to be fully onside with a genuine child-sex ring run by the actual global elite!  Yet this is what happens when critical faculties are turned off. This is the danger of conspiracy theories. Millions have died due to them; Democracy itself may not survive them.

I wish I were being hyperbolic.

That’s why I wanted to dowse myself in gasoline and light myself on fire.