Fire is Bright, and Fire is Clean
I recently found out that Disney has banned the use of the song Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah at theme parks in the USA. Here is one such article I read. The reason was that the film it was made for (Song of the South) was deemed racist. I've never actually seen the film - it seems it wasn't even released on video because of the controversy so probably not many people have. But yeah, let's just ban the song too, because it was part of a bad film.
I finished reading My Antonia (and it was beautiful, I give it ★★★★★) but while I read, I started getting nostalgic for the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which I loved as a child. I looked the series up to see if the time period was as close as I thought and it was. But what interested me more was the fact that the series was banned and the author's name taken off the American Library Association Award. Here is the article.
Is that the right thing to do? Erase them all from history and pretend they never existed because they don't fit our time or maybe even pains us to read/listen? Do people really just want to be happy? Not discuss or ponder anything? Do we want our children to grow into adults that can't think for themselves? Or not allowed to express their own opinions or thoughts out of fear that they may say something that would insult another? Do we want to live in a society that doesn't have any history? Where books and music are banned if they are not thought to be politically correct?
You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right?
Coloured people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it.
If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him give him one. Better yet, give him none.
(Fahrenheit 451; pgs 78 - 80s)
And all this time, I thought the threat was just a possibility in the future or at least of another political system.
Books are an art form that delight us with a beauty or strength found in style or description. Books are about feelings, ideas, and imagination, thoughts and philosophy. Books are also about history and often how people perceive it as it is happening (Life, basically). You can't always write a point of view that makes everyone satisfied, especially if you live through it yourself.
There is a story about Blind Men and An Elephant. A group of blind men come across an elephant. They all touch different parts of the elephant and describe what they think it is. But each part is different from the rest and so their descriptions do not match. They argue and fight over it, accusing the others of lying, when in reality if they saw the whole elephant they would realize that they were just describing parts of the whole. An elephant is big, a person is small, and the only way to understand all that an elephant encompasses is to combine the points of view to create a bigger picture.
The article above about the Little House series mentioned an award winning American author of Korean descent rewriting her own version of the series in which a Korean immigrant girl goes through a similar childhood in that same time period and sure, great! I mean, a modern author has the opportunity to go back with some facts and write a historical novel to their liking to address issues or make them feel better/happy but it is like a person with sight who describes the elephant from a hill far away. They can see much more of the elephant and maybe even where each of the blind men is/was, why they describe it as they do and what is wrong with it. They can make a brilliant description of it all and use it as a parable or to make a point. But they haven't felt the rough skin or the smooth, hard tusks, felt the small swishy tail or the long snake-like nose, up close and personal. It's not the same, nor can it ever be a replacement or complete portrayal of the awe filled (or horrific as the case may be) experience of those blind men.
Don't burn books. Just saying.
End of rant.