Left bans books due to ‘bad behavior’
Like so many stories here in deep-blue New England, aka “America’s Attic For Nutty Liberal Aunts,” this story starts dumb and gets dumber.
It starts in Westbrook, Maine. Once a blue-collar community full of workers from the local paper mill, it’s now a hipster outpost in the Portland suburbs. Quill Books & Beverage is the sort of artsy bookstorecum-coffee-shop that tends to sprout up in these trendy havens and when one of the co-owners heard about Junot Diaz, she knew just what to do.
Wait — you haven’t heard of Diaz? Or the national controversy over whether this Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist “forcibly kissed a woman?” Or allegations that Diaz verbally abused others? Well, you obviously aren’t spending enough time with the “gender warriors and guys with goofy facial hair” set. Trust me — it’s huge.
So huge that Quill Books co-owners Allison Krzanowski and Matthew Irving have pulled books by Diaz and other writers accused of “bad behavior” — Jay Asher, the author of “13 Reasons Why,” novelist Sherman Alexie of the “Maze Runner” series, etc. — from their bookstore shelves.
When news of their book banning hit the media, they stood by their policy: “We have a safe space commitment that extends to our shelves,” they tweeted.
“Safe space book shelves?” That’s the intellectual equivalent of “music-free record stores” or “sex-free prom nights.” What do you think a bookstore is for?
If these avocado-toast types banned alleged sexual predators from their stores to protect staff from unwanted advances — fine. (Though I bet they’d host a Bill Clinton book signing in an Arkansas minute.) You’re paranoid about pervery, OK, I get it.
But to ban someone’s ideas because they’re “bad” people is borderline insane. You own a bookstore. Bookstores. Don’t. Ban. Books.
Period.
At least, they didn’t in the pre-“Social Justice Warrior” days. Now they’re going to ban books over the author’s behavior. OK — so where will kids go to get a copy of the Declaration of Independence? Or that sexist pig Will Shakespeare’s “Taming Of The Shrew?”
And don’t get me started on children’s book author Sen. Ted Kennedy (starring his dog “Splash.” No, I’m not kidding.)
That’s the “dumb” part. The “dumber” came when a group of professors, including several from Harvard and Wellesley, wrote an open letter decrying the treatment of Diaz as unjust.
No, they weren’t arguing that Diaz’s accusers were lying. These good campus liberals were careful to embrace the #MeToo moment rather than risk offending any feminists. No, they argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the condemnation of Diaz is “erasing a sustained attention to how the violence of racial hatred, structural poverty, and histories of colonialism extend into the most intimate spaces.”
In other words, when he was allegedly groping some girl in a classroom — that “intimate space” — it wasn’t his fault. It was the poverty! The race hatred! The COLONIALISM! Don’t blame alleged girl-jumping Junot Diaz — blame those evil white people and their racist European culture! Like I said, “dumber.” There’s something bizarre about the Left banning books because of bad behavior, then arguing that the behavior isn’t the writer’s fault in the first place because “the racists made him do it.”
But you know what’s even more bizarre? The people making these arguments are all college professors, aka “People we pay to make our kids smarter.” Yes, these idiots are getting paid to mold the minds of America’s next generation.
So who’s the real dummy here?