It’s now official: leftists are the actual book-burners.
In Field of Dreams, Ray and Annie Kinsella face down supposed right-wing fascist censors who want to ban books by black author Terrence Mann. This prompts 1960s uber-leftist Annie to call her opponent a “Nazi cow” and then exclaims, “Who’s for Eva Braun here? Who wants to burn books? Who wants to piss on the Constitution of the United States? Anybody? All right. Now, who’s for the Bill of Rights? Come on…who thinks freedom’s a pretty good thing?”
It turns out that if Annie had actually been real, it’s more than likely she’d be banning To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. According to WAVY in Virginia, a parent complained that both of those books had excessive racial slurs, and that the books should be removed from the library. The parent explained, “I keep hearing, ‘This is a classic. This is a classic.’….I understand that is a literature classic. But at some point, I feel that children will not – or do not – truly get the classic part – the literature part, which I’m not disputing. This is great literature. But there (are so many) racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.” The parent added that the very use of the words validated them, teaching that they were acceptable.
This is insanity.
The entire point of Huckleberry Finn is that racism is evil and wrong, even if the majority of a society believes it to be decent. The point of To Kill A Mockingbird is that racism can infuse the criminal justice system when a society decides that skin color matters more than content of character. According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, To Kill A Mockingbird is still the most banned book in the United States.
Why are books being banned? Because they’re offensive. But that’s the point: books that are offensive are often the most important books to read, debate, and discuss. An intellectual climate that focuses more on protecting feelings and viewpoints than on analyzing and discussing ideas isn’t intellectual at all. It’s just a bubble. And bubbles don’t survive in the open air of the real world.