We all know that books will burn -- yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory...
So said Franklin Roosevelt in his address to the American Booksellers Association in 1942, back when progressives didn't like book-burners.
8 comments:
It's not quite the same when you throw a kindle on a bonfire.
Amazon is kindling the bonfires--removing content with a mouse click.
I burned two books recently, long story, but I got them both from a family friend my brother met back in '55. I have known him my whole life, and after that particular brother of mine died I reconnected with this guy.
Since he worked his entire career as a government drone I figured he was a leftist. Turns out he is a flat out commie. He sent me an email late last year about the 25th amendment and I blocked him.
Then, the other day, as I was cleaning out my book shelf, I found the books I had from him - one was written by the lying liar and prevaricator William Manchester, the fake Marine who though his lies about Tawara and Guadalcanal besmirched the honor of my uncle who was actually there and, like many veterans, never spoke of it. So into the fire that book of lies went.
The second was a book that Tommy himself had written, about a train crash just outside of DC. I proofread it and found it full of logical and math errors, not to mention continuity problems and other assorted retarded illiterate shit. I let him know the errors I found, I was gracious, but once he announced his love for our current "president" I knew that book had to go.
What can I say, you can call me Adolph, you can call me Pol, but damn, burning those bad books was an actual treat.
I apologize to all of you who find the preceding offensive, but our side can rid the world of lies and agitprop just as readily as the left.
Appreciating the blog link.
Books aren't the issue (much as with the Depression and WWII, Roosevelt didn't get that one right, either).
It's ideas. You can't burn an idea or torture it or shoot it or gas it.
You can, however, discredit it. Fascism's many flavors were discredited, but we're still working with socialism.
You can resurrect a once-discredited idea only one way. See if it works.
See Trump, Donald John.
PS Sixty, you forgot Okinawa IIRC.
Manchester claimed that he saw action on Okinawa, and I never read anything to discredit his reporting of events there. Tarawa and Guadalcanal were both fabricated out of whole cloth - he didn't even land until the shooting was mostly over, after my uncle killed the Japs who were trying to kill him. So I took that personally. Okinawa was brutal, and if he made it through that, then more power to him.
But for me it goes back to the old legal phrase, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. That poor deluded narcissistic sombitch could have told the truth, but deliberately chose to lie. It was a hardcover, it burned nicely.
Manchester wrote a book about the Krupp family. I had read it when I met Big Bertha's grandson in Germany in the 1990's. Friedrich was impressed by my reading it bit much less impressed by Manchester's book.
A few months ago I ordered three old Punch Magazines from Ebay to use for a collage-making assignment I'd found in a book in which Punch magazines were recommended as good source material. Two were published in black and white (with red on the covers)in 1947 and the third came out in color in 1960. Although they contain much in the way of letters, words and drawings that would work well in a collage, I haven't yet been able to bring myself to tear them up and use them for that purpose. Something about doing that doesn't sit right with me and I think it has to do with the power they once held to influence thought.
After one of the SonsM picked them up to marvel at their contents (published weekly) and comment on the wherewithal needed to read through them and take in the tiny print and lengthy articles and opinions presented along with the cartoons, I realized they represented the cultural shift I've experienced in the way information, knowledge and opinion is presented. At one time, the ability to read, along with reading comprehension, was the only way other than word of mouth to receive news and information. There's some weight and honor to that, along with a sense of sadness and loss, and I wonder if that might be behind my reluctance to tear them up?
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