Tuesday, April 25, 2017

April 24, 2017

Gary Stein
The Sun Sentinel

RE: Wait, wait…Don’t tell me what not to read! Some comments on your achingly familiar Sunday AM Jeremiad about the wascally Wepublicans, homophobic racists plus climate change deniers all, and their Trump-led jihad to ban and burn books.

Big Stein,

Ah! The beauty of culturally disabled modern American Liberals as they do their unique dance, the “eclectically indignant”, down the convenient memory hole, two step.

As you point out in Sunday’s homily, the usual suspects, John Steinbeck, Maya Angelou, Judy Blume, John Irvine, inter alia, having been rounded up by the usual Cossacks, we are now distracted by the sound of a big old turd bobbing in the modern American Liberal punch bowl: non Right-Wing censorship.

Black folk don’t much like Huckleberry Finn.

Some “stiff necked” Sons of the Desert don’t much like Shylock.

What to do, what to do?

I know.

Fuhgedaboutit

Your dudgeon overflows about Harper Lee but not about Mark Twain. Can I toss Shakespeare into the stew? Don’t they count?

[I was shocked, shocked when a non-Caucasian columnist called me a racist when I suggested that despite a fascinating bio Maya Angelou was not a very good poet. Maybe he was still mad when I suggested that Truman Capote and James Baldwin had many intriguing parallels in both their personal and professional lives. And, to add insult to injury, I said that if Zora Neale Hurston had been White her books would have disappeared long ago.]

Speaking of brown-shirted book burners, people whose idea of reasoned discourse at its most civil revolves around a boot on a neck, people who begin your part of the dialogue by telling you to shut up, see if you can track down a copy of “Sexual Suicide” by George Gilder. It, and he, were sent to the isolated island reserved for writers who make you feel uncomfortable, an island from which no writer ever returns.


Speaking of friggin’ hypocrites, I haven’t been in Books & Books since December, 1996. It was a marvelous store filled with, you guessed it, Books & Books. I was in the poetry section when I asked where Ezra Pound was hiding. “We don’t carry him,” I was told. “Why not?”, I asked. “Ask him”, I was told. “Him” was Mitchell Kaplan, the gaunt, bearded owner and renowned champion of free speech. “He was an anti-Semite so I don’t carry him.” Since it was his store who was I to tell him who should be or not be on his shelves. I haven’t been back since.

2 things:

#1 – I was a lay missionary in Mexico in Mexico in 1963. My main mission was to build a 6-bed clinic in Huejutla. I learned how to thread a pipe because I knew, having done it, that hauling water uphill coolie-style was a waste of time and talent. Plus, it hurt like Hell. Also, a wandering gringo became a prize catch for rich peoples’ dinner tables. In addition to the great chow I became a piñata upper middle class Mexican who suffered from “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”. They loved to lecture me on the evils of my country’s racist policies. That they were delivered by well-dressed ladies with hair hanging from their armpits made their earnest hectoring just a tad redolent. Women would not shave their armpits until the hair reached their elbows. Visible arm pit hair was the easiest way to show that there were no Mestizos in your genetic woodpile, that you were blanco puro. Pure White. Just like the little White girls that Senator Ervin, Senator Fulbright, and Senator Gore spent their entire adult lives trying to stop little Black boys from going to school with them. 

#2 is easy. As my aunt [by marriage] from Hester Street always said, “Don’t pee on my back and tell me it’s rain”.

I don’t know what the modern American Liberal position on using secondary boycotts is – Yes, I do. Ask Bill O’Reilly – but if Pound is verboten shouldn’t Joyce, Eliot, Hemingway, and Yeats get the silent treatment also. Each of them was indebted incalcubably to Pound for his editing. 

Ask Little Stein, your perpetual college student, what 20th century literature would have looked like absent Pound.

Was it Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson who used the term “hook-nosed diamond merchant”? Isn’t it true that many children of “hook-nosed diamond merchants” become “New York lawyers” a la Bernie Nussbaum?

If Little Stein has found the library ask him which dead male Greek said, “Free men speak with free tongues”. I wouldn’t want to get him confused with Antigone.



Kevin Smith
WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET






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