The case of the disappearing library books

Ed. here. Walt returned early this morning from a tear through les Cantons de l'Est du Québec in the company... dangerous company... of Poor Len Canayen. He dropped on my desk a sheaf of scribbled notes which is going to take me some time to decipher. While you wait, here's something to think about....

Have you visited your local public library lately? If so, did you find any new books to read? I know new books are being written, for I see reviews in any number of publications, excluding the New York Times Review of Books, which I never read. And one could, if one were rich, buy them online. (Finding a bricks-and-mortar book store would be more difficult.) But the selection of new books in our public libraries becomes smaller by the week. I asked a librarian last week, "Have you stopped buying books?" Her dismaying reply was "No. It just looks like it."

At the library to which I refer (not "reference"!), the space formerly given to displays of new books has been turned over to displays of low-brow fiction, e.g. the latest works of Danielle Steele, and of new CDs and DVDs. Books, particularly non-fiction, seem to be on the way out. Print isn't dead. It's just not being made as readily available to the public.

I thought at first this saddening phenomenon might be peculiar to out-of-the-way places like Fort Mudge, but complaints are emanating from other, larger burgs. A WWW reader from Idaho sent us the Letters page of the Wall Street Journal of 7/9/18, with a letter from Nicholas A. Vlisides, of Northville MI, highlighted. Mr Vlisides writes:

As a full-time lecturere at a local university in Michigan, I can confirm Danny Heitman's lament on the elimination of books in libraries ("Don't Close the Book on Books", op-ed, Aug. 30). Last year, to my surprise and dismay, I entered our library in search of texts on economics and found half the shelves empty. When I asked what had happened, the librarian told me that the facility was undertaking a program to eliminate all the books that had not been "checked out" in a long time. Books written by Galbraith, Friedman and Sanuelson were missing. Further, I was told that the same procedure was being undertaken for literature, music, science, philosophy and more. I was keenly saddened and voiced my opinion that books need not be sacrificed for technology, but it was too late.

The elimination of books for internet research is a Faustian bargein and I am sorry for those who may never know the pleasure in the discovery of a book not cited by an internet source. I'm reminded of a Mark Twain quote: "The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read." Internet literacy isn't a substitute for book knowledge, and our society is the poorer for it.

Well said, sir! I trust you have made your opinion known to your local library board, and encourage Walt's readers to do the same.

Footnote: I hope readers will appreciate my self-restraint in not making a pun involving a two-syllable word for a piece of furniture in which books are kept.

Mark Twain's War Prayer

Now that the FBI (etc) is "investigating" the San Bernardino massacre as "an act of [adjective deleted] terrorism", Walt guesses some folks in San　Berdoo (and Washington, Arlington and surrounds) are thinking about what degree of revenge would be sufficient to appease the Americans who think the Prez has been soft on Muslim fanatics.

It's all a bit like South Park: The Movie, isn't it? Let's see... Who should we attack? The Islamic terrorists -- for that's what they were -- were Pakistanis. OK, he was born here -- a Paki-American -- and she was in the USA on a K1 (fiancée) visa. So should we bomb Pakistan?

And how many should we kill? It is a time-honoured principle that 1 American life is worth at least 100 foreigners' lives, and usually more like 1000 or even 10,000, as in the First Iraq War. The Muslim fanatics killed 14 Americans, so...

While we wait for details of the coming retribution, let us all bow our heads and repeat the following War Prayer, composed by Mark Twain.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writing in pain; help us to lay waste to their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst. Amen.

Source: Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race, ed. Janet Smith (Hill & Wang 1994)

Book review: More on stupidity from Bill Bryson

More on stupidity... More on... Geddit? Moron!

I am working hard [hardly working? Ed.] on a review of Bill Bryson's latest book The Road to Little Dribbling (Penguin Random House/Doubleday 2015). My problem is that I keep running into long(ish) passages that I want to quote verbatim. I've already done that twice this week, and feel I'm now in danger of posting the whole book, a page or two at a time. The publishers wouldn't like that. So I content myself with copying one last excerpt.

An underlying theme of Mr. Bryson's latest "travel" book -- really a text in sociology and philosophy -- is the deep and abiding stupidity into which the world is falling. Although the book is ostensibly about Britain and the British, the author takes a few potshots at America and Americans along the way. (Being an American himself, he's entitled to do so.) Here's his account (from pages 284-285) of a visit to Austin TX.

Going to America always does me good. It's where I'm from, after all. There's baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don't obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective.

Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house [in Britain] doesn't have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: 'City?'

I replied: 'London.'
'Can you spell that please?'
I looked at her and saw that she wasn't joking. 'L-O-N-D-O-N,' I said.
'Country?'
'England.'
'Can you spell that?'
I spelled England.
She typed for a moment and said: 'The computer won't accept England. Is that a real country?'
I assured her it was. 'Try Britain,' I suggested.
I spelled that, too - twice (we got the wrong number of Ts the first time) - and the computer wouldn't take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn't think of anything else to suggest.

'It'll take France,' the girl said after a minute.
'I beg your pardon?'
'You can have "London, France".'
'Seriously?'
She nodded.
'Well, why not?'
So she typed 'London, France', and the system was happy.

I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: 'Excuse me, was that the lobby back there?'
'That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.'
'Shoot,' she said and looked chagrined.

Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can't identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it's spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.

Having now passed on three excerpts from The Road to Little Dribbling, -- this one, "Bill Bryson on declining standards of punctuation and grammar" and "Bill Bryson on rising levels of stupidity" -- perhaps I can be excused from writing only a few more lines in praise of the book.

I'm not sure if Mr. Bryson set out to be a curmudgeon. Perhaps one doesn't "set out" so to do. With me, it just happened naturally as I watched the world around me sink into the muck of tastelessness, political correctness, and the other stupidities of which Mr. B complains. He pokes fun at our Western society and "culture" with a large pitchfork, in the manner of H.L. Mencken, but with even more humour.

The Road to Little Dribbling purports to be a travel book, the genre which Bill Bryson does best. It does describe his zigzag rambles up "the Bryson Line" from the English Channel to Cape Wrath (and considerably beyond), but, as noted before, the book is not so much about places and things -- although both are described in detail and with great wit -- but about people. Like Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, it is a work of serious philosophical inquiry wrapped in dry humour. Don't fail to read it.

Further reading: Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain. The Project Gutenberg e-book, FREE.

Mark Twain reflects on the folly of trying to civilize barbarians

Winston Churchill's A History of the English Speaking Peoples has a place of honour on Walt's bookshelf. I have been an English-speaking people since the age of five. (Like Stewie Griffin, I at first spoke only to the family dog. But I digress...) I am quietly proud to be a member of the race -- please forgive the term -- which has brought what passes for civilization in its highest form to the nether regions of the world.

The trouble is that what we think of as civilization and civilized behaviour does not always equate or accord with concepts of the same held by the denizens of such nether regions as Africa and the Middle East. We have long eschewed cultural practices such as female circumcision and stoning people to death for adultery or blasphemy, yet these customs are still followed in places like Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan [That's enough backward places. Ed.]

This is not a new thought. Over a century ago, Mark Twain thought and wrote about the failure of the English-speaking peoples to impose their Christian religion and cultural ideals on the natives -- please forgive the term -- of places like... wait for it... Australia. 

As I thought about the idiocy of our "mission" to being civilization and democracy to the Middle East, I recalled a story the great American writer told in Following the Equator (1897). He describes the efforts of one George Augustus Robinson -- "The Conciliator" -- to find and bring in the last remaining natives of Tasmania, to enclose them in a reservation so that they might enjoy the benefits of civilization etc etc. And so he did, with predictable results. From Chapter 27, emphasis mine....

The Natives were not used to clothes, and houses, and regular  hours, and church, and school, and Sunday-school, and work, and the other misplaced persecutions of civilization, and they pined for their lost home and their wild free life. Too late they repented that they had traded that heaven for this hell....

In a very few years nothing but a scant remnant remained alive. A handful lingered along into age. In 1864 the last man died, in 1876 the last woman died, and the Spartans of Australasia were extinct.

The Whites always mean well when they take human fish out of the ocean and try to make them dry and warm and happy and comfortable in a chicken coop; but the kindest-hearted white man can always be depended on to prove himself inadequate when he deals with savages. He cannot turn the situation around and imagine how he would like it to have a well-meaning savage transfer him from his house and his church and his clothes and his books and his choice food to a hideous wilderness of sand and rocks and snow, and ice and sleet and storm and blistering sun, with no shelter, no bed, no covering for his and his family's naked bodies, and nothing to eat but snakes and grubs and offal.

This would be a hell to him; and if he had any wisdom he would know that his own civilization is a hell to the savage -- but he hasn't any, and has never had any; and for lack of it he shut up those poor natives in the unimaginable perdition of his civilization, committing his crime with the very best intentions, and saw those poor creatures waste away under his tortures; and gazed at it, vaguely troubled and sorrowful, and wondered what could be the matter with them.

I wonder  if President Obarmy has ever read more of Twain than the adventures of Tom Sawyer and (maybe) Huckleberry Finn. And what about Kipling? In The Man Who Would Be King, Peachey Carnehan describes the residents of Kafiristan (real place, part of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan) as "savages, one and all". Do we really think we can turn them into somewhat darker copies of ourselves?

Wise words about liberty from Mark Twain

Walt stumbled upon this quote from the great American writer and humorist, Mark Twain.

I believe we ought to retain all our liberties. We can't afford to throw them away. They didn't come to us in a night. The trouble with us in America is that we haven't learned to speak the truth. We have thrown away the most valuable asset we have -- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when by one's self we believe them to be in the wrong.

Got that? Don't call Ron Paul, Mark Steyn, Matt Taibbi, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Friedman et al. [Who's Al? Ed.] unpatriotic. Count them, instead, among those who refuse to utter the mindless shibboleth "My country, right or wrong!"

Footnote: Walt must add to the list of those who dare to point out that the Emperor -- read: the Prez -- has no clothes, the name of Michelle Malkin. See "Obama’s bloody Yemen disaster" for her take on the latest failure of US foreign policy.

Canuck hopes American stupidity isn't catching

Walt chuckled as he read media reports on the emasculation of Owen Honors and Mark Twain by the puritanical American thought police. Michael Den Tandt, a columnist for Canada's Sun newspapers, got angry.

"[The pillorying of Honors and "revision" of Twain] all suggests moral rot," he writes. "That doesn't augur well for America, or for us [Canadians]."

Writing yesterday in the Toronto Sun and its sister newspapers, Mr. Den Tandt opines that a "virus of pathetic and hypocritical stupidity...seems to have overtaken the chattering classes down south. Common sense? Intelligence? Forget it. Both gone."

He goes on to dissect the punishment of Capt. Owen Honors for making some mildly raunchy and not very funny home videos. "To fire him now, four years after the fact...is patently gutless and wrong-headed." Indeed.

As for the removal of the word "nigger" -- Walt isn't afraid to say it -- from Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, Den Tandt says "to change it because some delicate moderns can no longer stand the sight of the ugly word is an abomination". Just so.

Walt confesses to failing, in previous posts, to take seriously enough the implicit threat of censorship of not just writing and speech, but of all thought. But I don't think "moral rot" is the right way to describe the syndrome.

It is, rather, an excess of puritanical and hypocritical moralizing -- not "morality" but "moralizing" -- not seen since the Salem witch trials. Start building the stocks, Rev. Mather. You're going to need them to lock up the millions who want to speak their minds without regard to the tender sensibilities of vizmins, Muslims, gays, feminists and all the other so-called persecuted minorities.

As one anonymous reader wrote to Walt yesterday, this is all about limiting -- or eliminating -- the freedom of speech. Books are rewritten or burned. Videos are "cleaned up" or not shown at all. Letters to the editor and comments on stories in the press are censored. Even access to the Internet is restricted, now, if those in power don't like what is being said. Case in point: Wikileaks.

In his 1941 State of the Union address -- now known as "the Four Freedoms Speech" -- Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed four fundamental freedoms that people everywhere in the world ought to enjoy. Number one on his list was the freedom of speech and expression.

FDR concluded, "That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create...."

Sadly, it seems that President Roosevelt got it wrong. The new millennium has brought us the very order of tyranny -- including tyranny over thought and belief -- of which he spoke.

N-bomb explodes, kills Twain

In a display of political correctness rare even for American "educators", the N-word -- NIGGER -- will be replaced by "slave" in new editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, to be published later this year.

The Bowdlerization of the books is supposed to boost their "acceptance". Since only millions of copies of Twain's classics have been sold in the century-plus since he wrote them, this move is clearly needed.

The new editions are to be published by an outfit calling itself "NewSouth Books". The argument is that Huck and Tom don't represent the "new south", in which all folks are equal, anyone can ride in the front of the bus if they want to, and there are no more niggers.

While they're at it, NewSouth Books should update the settings -- how about downtown Atlanta -- and make the lead characters 21st-century dudes, southern-fried Beavis and Butthead types.

In case it's not clear, my point is that Twain was writing about the south as it was in his time. Are we really trying to pretend, now, that the Old South never existed? Not only is America (as a whole) not racist now, it never was so! Not even in the 19th century. Next thing you know, the PC police will be doing a remake of Gone With The Wind, and rewriting the history books to assure us that the Civil War was only a dream.

Footnote: Mark Twain always chose his words very carefully. "The difference between the right word and the almost right word," he wrote, "is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug."