Burn the books?...or use them as a bridge?

In my pantheon of troubling things certainly ranking right up there is the number of “things” that were once either invisible or benign and are now troubling. . Enjoying a near second in my rankings are things that I detect on my travels that I immediately react to and find troubling. Like the knowledge that Tom Wayne, owner of Prospero Books in Kansas City, Mo, finds it necessary to burn his books in order to lighten his inventory.

Am I serious? Burn books? Isn’t that some Fascist acting out? Or an example of a Pope overstepping his bounds?

It seems somehow a step backwards likening this event tragically to the book burnings of the Middle Ages that led to one poet named Milton writing a classic speech turned into a book called the Areopagitica which seemed to halt book burnings for awhile—or at least until Hitler showed up on the scene…

In the Middle Ages, the Pope ordered the burning of books for what he thought were good reasons: there was just too much information out there and not was all healthy for someone who presumed to be the spiritual father of all humanity.

Today, apparently, the reason given by Mr. Wayne for book burnings : It’s people who no longer value culture and intellectual pursuits Not a good sign for a purportedly progressive society that must compete in the world.

People started burning books almost as soon as they came out in supply as a result of the printing press suggesting that they carried ideas that might be construed as dangerous to a malleable society. Even Luther had to run from country to country to find a printer who would print his bible and not be threatened with prison or burning at the stake.

Why is Mr. Wayne burning his inventory of 20,000 books? He explains that he has run out of space in his warehouses and that nobody has shown a scintilla of interest in buying them. Imagine burning 20,000 books; that’s about ten times more than Sir Thomas Moore had who had the largest collection of books in the world; and about twenty times the library of Henry the VIII one of the most well read men of his time.

This seems beyond senseless but so many things seem to add up to senseless today that it is hard to get any more steamed up than I usually am about most things in this country where American Idol is the new standard by which all things should be judged..

This would have been my preferred vision: Wouldn’t have it been inspiring to learn that some farsighted government official buys the whole lot and decided to ship them to the Middle East where school children would be able to gain an insight about what Westerners are really like? This is what Hamas and Hezbollah did: They invested in school books and schools to influence the local youth and lunch programs to win them over. And now look at where Hamas stands relative to the West. What a wild and wooly idea! It’s been suggested that had we done as Hamas and Hezbollah did and invest in books for school children we might not have had the death squads and hatred towards the West that we find today….

Book burnings never did sit right with me. They remind me of Hitler’s book burnings, which I equate with totalitarianism and attempts at ‘mind control.’ And subsequent views of the world as envisioned in 1984 and Farenheit 451 where reading books was banned.

Fortunately, we have short and convenient memories for such things and when they come out with books on plastic cards, we will find a way to destroy them, too, but by then people will be watching the equivalent of American Idol from dawn to dusk.

Les Aaron