Lift Up Your Hearts!

It wasn't long ago that I wrote the following:

People who buy extra toilet paper, or cans of soup, or bottles of water for storage rather than immediate consumption are not hoarding, they are wisely preparing for any interruption of the grocery supply chain, be it a hurricane, a pandemic, civil unrest, or some other disruption. As long as they buy their supplies when stocks are plentiful, they are doing no harm; rather, they are encouraging more production, and keeping normal supply mechanisms moving.

Plus, when a crisis comes, and the rest of the world is mobbing the grocery stores for water and toilet paper, those who have done even minor preparation in advance will be at home, not competing with anyone.

It's always fun to come upon someone who not only agrees with what I believe, but says it better and with more authority. Lo and behold, look what I found recently, in Michael Yon's article, First Rule of Famine Club.

Hoarders, speculators, and preppers are different sorts, but they all get blamed as if they are hoarders. Hoarders who buy everything they can get at last minute are a problem.

Preppers actually REDUCE the problem because they are not starving and stressing the supplies, but preppers get blamed as if they are hoarders.

Speculators, as with preppers, often buy far in advance of the problems and actually part of the SOLUTION. They buy when prices are lower and supplies are common. Speculators can be fantastic. When prices skyrocket, speculators find a way to get their supplies to market.

I hadn't thought before about speculators. I'd say their value is great when it comes to thinking and acting in advance, but the practice becomes harmful once the crisis is already on the horizon. Keeping a supply of plywood in your garage and selling it at a modest profit to your neighbors when they have need is a helpful service, but buying half of Home Depot's available stock when a hurricane is nearing the coast is selfish profiteering.

Do you have books from your childhood that have been loved into reality, like the Velveteen Rabbit? Think twice before trading them for newer editions. The same advice holds for any book you value.

I've already been hanging on for dear life to my copies of C. S. Lewis' Narnia books with the original American text. The modern, modified versions are interesting—I believe they are the British versions—but I still prefer the American versions, which contains Lewis' later revisions. What I really don't like about the currently-available books is the way they are numbered in chronological order, rather than publication order, as I strongly believe that they make much more sense in publication order.

Far more important than these minor changes, however, is what is being done to books now. This Natural Selections essay, "The Age of Censorship," gives some examples of what has been done to the new editions of Roald Dahl's works.

Many of the changes are of a type. For instance, more than a dozen instances of the word “white” were changed. White was changed to pale, frail, agog or sweaty, or else removed entirely. Because, you know, a color can be racist.

In one book alone—The Witches—The Telegraph counted 59 new changes. These run from the banal—”chambermaid” is replaced with “cleaner”—to cleansings that appeal more directly to modern pseudo-liberal sensitivities. The suggestion that a character go on a diet, for instance, is simply disappeared. And this passagage,“Even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman,” has been changed to, “Even if she is working as a top scientist or running a business.”

It’s hard to know what even is believed by the censors who made these changes. Do they mean to suggest that nobody should go on a diet, or that no woman has ever worked as a cashier or a typist? And what, pray tell, is a “top scientist.” I’m guessing that none of the censors could provide a working definition of science, but that when asked to conjure a scientist up, they imagine someone with super science-y accoutrements, like a white lab coat and machines that whirr in the background. Sorry, that would be a pale lab coat.

Dahl's final book, Esio Trot, contained this passage, not in the text but in an author's note: "Tortoises used to be brought into England by the thousand, packed in crates, and they came mostly from North Africa." This was replaced by: "Tortoises used to be brought into England by the thousand. They came from lots of different countries, packed into crates."

I'm beginning to suspect that the real reason for these changes is to dumb down the language, the quality of the writing, and the readers.

It's not just children's books that are being rewritten. This Guardian article explains how Agatha Christie's books have been subjected to the censors' edits.

Among the examples of changes cited by the Telegraph is the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, in which the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that “they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children”.

This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.”

Really? Is there some sort of requirement that when one dons a censor's hat, one must forget how to write interesting prose?

Back to Natural Selections.

There are many things troubling about the creative work of an author being changed after his death. It interferes with our understanding of our own history. We live downstream of our actual history, which did not change just because censors got ahold of our documents. Having the recorded version of history scrubbed interferes with our ability to make sense of our world.

Post-mortem revisions are also bad for art. These edits raise questions of creative autonomy. Of voice. Of what fiction is for. Fiction is not mere entertainment. Fiction educates and uplifts, informing readers about ourselves and our world, and also about the moment in time that the work was created.

When our children were young, I noticed that the newer version of Mary Poppins had been scrubbed of a chapter that was decidedly inappropriate to more modern sentiments. I didn't think too much about it at the time. But now I'm utterly convinced that even young children deserve to know—need to know—that not all cultures and times have had the same values and priorities that we do now. That while we may find other beliefs and practices horrifying, many other cultures would find our own beliefs and practices equally horrifying. What's more, and most important of all, that people in the future will look at us with the same patronizing disgust with which we see our predecessors. We are not the pinnacle of civilization.

That's an excellent topic of conversation for parents and their children, and what better place to start than with a beloved book?

I've reviewed a couple of Rod Dreher's books (Live Not by Lies and The Benedict Option) and find him on the whole a wise voice in the wilderness. A friend sent me an article that he wrote about the opening ceremonies at the Paris Olympics: "A Civilizational Suicide Note on the Seine." I disagree with Dreher that the spectacle was blasphemous, on the grounds that I don't think you can blaspheme any gods other than your own, and France has not been a Catholic country for a very long time. 

However, I'm certainly disgusted by what little I saw, which was enough to show me that I didn't want to watch any more. That they could claim they had no idea a very large number of people would find the show abhorrent reveals a great ignorance—of history, of art, and of their audience. What is most offensive to me, however, is that the parade was so obviously not safe for children—and the opening ceremonies are often the part of the Olympics families most eagerly watch together.

I figure God can take care of himself, but we have an obligation to protect children from sights inappropriate to their age, and in this, Paris and the Olympics failed them.

(I'm not taking the time to pull quotes to publish here, but it's a good article if you want to follow the link. Dreher is an American journalist who lives in Budapest.)