Re: [silk] bookburners are alive and well

[Ramu Narayan <ramunar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Nothing suggests a comparison with the
rise to power of the Nazi Party in Deutschland
__________
I'm with Chris Kelty. "The Rev. George Bender said Tuesday that he never
thought a little book burning would get so much publicity." Precisely. He'd
never intended to go nationwide with this, let alone worldwide, as could
well happen. He and his many adherents were hardly putting on an exhibition
for the media, or making a megalomaniac play for power, or using this as an
issue for inflaming a wider populace; they were legitimately giving vent to
their private literary criticism in a fashion finally far less destructive
than being trashed in the New York Times Literary Supplement by someone
wielding a wicked pen. No one's endangered by a little local irrationality
except the locals, most of whom seem to have been party to the auto-da-fe
anyway. Those who weren't have the wonderful love-it-or-leave-it freedom
that the US offers.
Brides, widows and low-castes get burnt alive just about every day
somewhere or the other in India. I'd regard that as far more worthy of
notice: except that, in India, it's pretty routine, and not really
deserving of media attention. Some Rev George Bender in some US hick town -
who is, pound for pound, the exact equivalent of the headman in one of our
villages, but better dressed - gets to be featured on this list, because
this is happening in the US, and is therefore of supposedly global
significance. He doesn't deserve any kind of attention; ignore him, and
he'll fade away as he should.
Their burning of volumes that they'd paid for is no more significant than
my own neglect of my own books (re termites). They would never have made
the news if they'd simply disposed of these unwanted volumes in a garage
sale. It's the theatrics that catch our attention, but let's not get our
knickers in a twist about that.
'Gambit' by Rex Stout opens with the great detective Nero Wolfe  - highly
recommended for those who don't know him - burning the latest Webster's
dictionary in his fireplace because, among other offences, it offers
'contact' as a verb. And he'd bought the edition bound in buckram, because
he knew in advance that he was going to burn it, and the leather-bound
wouldn't burn so satisfyingly. I too have ripped to shreds at least three
books which disgusted me: one was a Creationist tract (about 200 pages);
one was a manual about Reiki which was instrumental in my wife's dying of
cancer; and the third was a Japanese comic obsessed with degradation of
women and sexual violation of children.

Ramu

Ramu