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cnmne's avatar

I mean, the real problem is that almost every single book or author before our present time (literally our present, as in today) harbored some kind of socially objectionable thought or content in their lives or work. Not a hyperbole - literally everyone in the past was imperfect: abusive, ethnocentric, homophobic, transphobic, religious, crude, sexist, racist, ableist, or exclusionary in some way. Don't worry if you can't make the connection easily, just keep reading harder and the problematicness will reveal itself (e.g. JRR Tolkien is antisemitic because his dwarves are secretly a veiled commentary on Jews).

Right now, the only thing preventing every author and book pre-2021 from being cancelled and pulled off shelves is simply... effort. It takes a whole campaign - you've got to be motivated enough to deploy some big wet victim tears, get a crowd of loud people to high-step behind you, and gain enough critical mass to explode into the media mainstream, like this Suess thing did. But just imagine if cancelling a book were an easy frictionless process, like say if every activist had access to an app that let you pull a book or author from circulation by selecting a reason and tapping a button... most of the world's literature (from the classics to the harlequins) would disappear overnight. All we'd be left with is wordless baby books and impenetrable postmodern academic doorstops.

I follow a bunch of these people on Twitter, and they are implacable. If they had that magical button, they'd push it for every single book above and all the others. Because the world is spinning off its axis and everything's going to shit and nobody with a conscience can do anything substantial to materially improve it anymore, so whining to get our overlords to cancel some financially unimportant villain of the day is the closest they'll ever feel to having power. And each of them will cheer for it until it finally turns on them.

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A. N. Owen's avatar

If you'd told me 20 years ago that the Democratic party would be militarizing the Capitol and their progressive allies banning Dr. Suess' books, I wouldn't have laughed, I'd have looked at you very strangely, thinking you were off your rockers. The Republicans circa 2000, with the evangelical wing, perhaps, yes, I could have seen that.

I really don't have much more to say beyond that it's sad and tragic. It's not funny, it's not humorous, it's tragic.

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