He forgot to mention Savonarola
You knew it would happen eventually. Today Joseph Skibell equates cutting newspaper book review sections with Nazi book-burning at Critical Mass.
The Nazis knew how important books were to a free and liberal society – and that’s why they burned them. The Soviets as well. Not only were books suppressed in Stalinist Russia, but writers were rounded up and shot. The Soviets believed writers were simply too dangerous to the system. You see this again and again. Whenever a despot comes to power, the first people to go are the writers.
In America, however, we silence our writers in another way. We silence them through indifference. We claim that their only function is entertain us, and then we complain that they’re boring. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, writing – literature – books – is less important than the crime beat in Marietta or Gwinnett or the Buckhead Society page.
No books are burned, no writers are murdered by the state, but through this great and terrible indifference – through this terrible belittling of the Western Intellectual Tradition – a tradition based upon the importance and primacy of books – based upon the importance of ideas in books – of ideas circulating through books – our basic freedoms are eroded and, in this case, willingly surrendered – and here surrendered by the fifth estate, by the newspapers whose job it is not only to report the news, but to reflect a city back to itself.
….More is at stake than just one talented woman’s job. More is at stake than just the latest reviews of the newest detective novel. Our very sense of who we are is at stake. We can either stand with the Nazis and the Soviets and the Taliban – who destroyed books and burned them and belittled them – or we can stand with the Jeffersons and the Franklins and the Whitmans and the Faulkners who knew that a book – that funny little oblong object – is perhaps all that keeps a society, a city, a nation free.
It’s time to invoke Godwin’s law.
Edit: To end on a positive note, here’s the best thing I’ve read about the NBCC petition drive so far.
I was going to make a condescending remark on whether we could hype this to the level of a genocide and the get the UN involved, but my eyes wandered over to your “currently reading” list and I noticed Don Quixote.
You should check out the DQ reading group that just started over at Tilting at Windmills some time.
Thanks for the tip! I need a little encouragement with DQ.
I don’t read newspaper book reviews. It’s like reading a movie review (I also don’t read those). All I want to know about either is the basic plot line. I don’t care what someone else thinks about it. I will form my own opinions. Perhaps that means I too am one of the bad people.
I think it’s literary socialism to suggest that each and every writer (and/or idea a writer has) is worthy of being exposed to the national public via a book review.
I’ve been thinking over the past week — how often do I read newspaper book reviews? Not very often, I don’t think. I’ll skim a review to see what a book is about, but in general I prefer the in-depth coverage you get from magazines and journals.