In recent years, when entertainers, comedians in particular, are engaged to entertain on some college campuses, they are given an ever-growing list of topics they cannot use in their bits. And some have been oddly removed from the stage when discussing a personal topic it has been deemed they actually have no right to discuss (e.g., a homosexual man discussing homosexuality).

If it offends you, don’t attend, or if you are already there, walk out. Don’t watch. Don’t listen. Don’t read. Why must those not offended have to miss out, as it were, because some small group of people with the power to impose their will have deemed it offensive for everyone?

That an author’s words are being rewritten because they offend current sensibilities is just another (big) step towards Newspeak. Will we stop with fiction? Have we stopped with fiction? No. Journalists around the world have their words deleted (if not their lives) because of truths they tell. Governments shut down media outlets, remove blogs or essays posted on social media written by their citizens, limit access to the internet (with all its good and bad). There are those who would rewrite history, who don’t want certain books read because the truths told might make some feel badly, or others look bad. Does wishing something never happened make it okay to white it out of existence? Why not read and discuss? Discuss one’s feelings. Discuss why one has those feelings. Discuss why and how we should work to keep history from repeating itself.

Or why calling someone “enormous” is better than “enormously fat.” Or “nutty little boys” is better than “nutty little idiots.” Or why “Cloud Men” is somehow demeaning and should be made “Cloud People.”

Roald Dahl wrote wonderful children’s literature. Why not allow parents the opportunity to have teaching moments with their children rather than play god with a dead man’s words? He wrote what he wrote. It was another time, and we get to know that time and the writer through his words. His words.

For those of you who never read 1984 by George Orwell, (it was the 13th most banned book in the United States in the 1990s and is still banned in some states), Newspeak was the language created by the regime that rules the country where the story takes place. It was designed to limit people’s ability to express themselves. The regime believed that by controlling language, they could control people’s thoughts and behavior. In that society, words were constantly being eliminated and replaced with new ones. The ultimate goal? To eliminate the possibility of independent thought.

Hmmmmm…

*I will need to be brief, like a piece abridged. Apologies in advance!

It seems to me that works which are "sanitized," are tampered with not to be made "clean," but to be made "quick," eliminating the "messy" bits, which would require/ and build-up our mental muscle. Such exercise is not much desired, because a strong audience has greater demands and asks for more (more nuance, more originality). These are attributes which poorly suit mass-production for mass-consumption, and the prescribed uniformity that follows.

Absence doesn't teach... The gaps remaining create anxiety, not a bridge to understanding. Fat, ugly, dumb do not disappear. Instead, each concept is apt to fester as a sore on the self-esteem, becoming doubly hurtful without proper wording to define "it." We are better advised to name it, identify it, and ask why its distinction is of such importance to us.

On a personal note, I have been teaching at Head Start since 2019... things have been rough as teacher/ psychologist to traumatized tots with families suffering from poverty, homelessness, and all forms of abuse. These children enter preschool minimally verbal, their first language being physical aggression (hitting, biting). Instinctively, they are protecting their little selves from the “unknown.” As they gain words, they very soon banter "stupid," "ugly," and assorted profanity, articulating an underlying fear-of-worthlessness as reflected by their closest adults. Would removing these words from books change children's vocabulary??? No, their daily life has more influence than any language trapped in books—books incidentally which they might never read at all.

The bruises and behavior reports got so bad in our classroom that we side stepped prescribed curriculum (God bless!) and read aloud Sleeping Ugly, a spin on Sleeping Beauty featuring beautiful Princess Miserella (who is selfish and cold on the inside) and her counterpart Plain Jane, who treats everyone the same— in fairness most becoming. The kids gasped at every pointed use of Stupid! and Ugly! that spilled ungraciously from Princess Miserella's mouth, asking to see the pictures again, and again, in fascination. And then, in what is called Choice Time play, they would balk when a peer "forgot" the lesson, saying "Him/ Her actin' like Miserella!" It is a slow go, but it's a start. (*We're working on the grammar too, sigh, but is not the priority*)

Books can only have value if there is some depth of discussion around them. The authors, and their content, are resultants of an upbringing, too, worthy of respect and evaluation in context. We love Roald Dahl at home. The BFG is one of Rémy Niko's favorites, especially when read with theatrical gusto by his Papa... and Mama makes sure to take an opportune moment to question the whys and examine the "we don'ts." Like we don't call people names; and violence of any form is not okay.

Even ripping out words from a page.

I think Americans might be too loyal to exist. After another Superbowl has recently been fought and won, the Chiefs over the Eagles, I can't help but think back on the guy who showed up to the party wearing a Browns shirt, and the woman in her Cowboys jersey.

That's loyalty, friends. When your team is out, but you're still flying their colors during the big game, there's no question where you stand. The Browns! The Cleveland Browns have had winning seasons (winning more than 50% of their games during the year) only five times since 1989... and let's not forget the 2017 season when they lost every single game! But my man, James... still a die hard fan.

It's all about the money. The only thing that matters is getting fans into the stadiums. Franchise owners will pull all kinds of stunts to get more fans--free stuff is the biggest draw. If you can get someone to put on your team's jersey, the rest doesn't matter. Your team can fumble every ball, drop every pass, lose every game, and the die-hard fan will still wear the jersey, no matter what.

There's something to be said for that kind of loyalty. The home team! Right? Regardless of the track record, we root for our team. No matter how insane it is to think: This is the best team, we still root for our team. Not only is our team the best, any team that dares to enter the field to challenge our team is a bunch of pansies and cheaters and cocky bastards, too!

The refs are a bunch of idiots! They're either incompetent or bought and paid for, right? When our team is held, but the refs don't call it, we're furious. When the our team drops the pass, that was pass interference! When the other team drops the pass, and pleads with the ref to throw the flag, they're just a bunch of whiners and cry babies. Fairness doesn't matter. We. Want. To. Win.

Our coach... friggin genius. The other teams' coaches... a bunch of brown-nosers who would stab their own mothers in the back to get the position--suck-ups who played politics and stole the job from someone more qualified, but didn't fit the mold.

And speaking of politics... I've been talking about politics this entire time.

Americans will never learn to stop rooting for their favorite team, even in spite of its horrible track record, and unlike in American football, there are only two teams. Each franchise will always have a shot at the Superbowl. Which one is better... doesn't matter. Which one is actively subverting, changing, and ignoring the rules... doesn't matter. Mental acuity, ignorance, stability... none of it matters. The people in power know: no matter what they do or say, no matter how incompetent or illegal their actions, no matter how despicable or how blatant their intentions, first and foremost, above all logic or duty or justice, Americans always want their team to win. Always.

Even while they watch it all burn.

Throughout history, the evil ones have been those who try to change language and rewrite history in order to justify their actions and warp the minds of the youth. Who will they rewrite next? It doesn't matter what they do because they will never be held accountable, and half of America doesn't even know who "they" are.

In my second year at grammar school, I decided to become a school librarian. There were several perks to being a librarian. For instance, we had a small kitchenette annexed to the library - about the size of a boot cupboard, really - in which we could make tea and toast at break-time. Another perk: we could easily ‘check out’ as many books as we liked. But the greatest benefit of being a member of this select band was that we had unfettered access to the ‘black books’ contained within the ‘forbidden section’ - a glass-fronted locked cabinet that contained various volumes to which access was carefully controlled. Unless you were a librarian, that is.

What books lay within this inner sanctum, this Unholy of Unholies? There were various graphic illustrated sex education manuals (well, graphic to the mind of a twelve-year-old lad enrolled at an all-boys grammar school in 1970s Britain: hardly sensational stuff by today’s standards). More interesting was the slang dictionary of the English language, which I eagerly scrutinised for the plethora of intriguing words that, curiously, were omitted from our standard school dictionaries. Restricted access or not, certain pages were blatantly more well-thumbed than others. Which was also the case with the most notorious tome that had been deposited amongst the other ‘black books’: DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley's Lover. By the time I came to read it, almost twenty years had passed since the famous prosecution of Penguin Books for publishing this infamous work: perhaps the greatest cause célèbre in the battle against censorship in the 20th century.

The chief prosecutor in that famous trial, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, had become a laughing stock by suggesting that this was not the kind of book ‘you would wish your wife or servants to read.’ Britain was on the cusp of a social and sexual revolution that would shortly consign Griffith-Jones’ world-view to the dustbin of history. He wasn’t alone, of course, in being unprepared for this; as the great Philip Larkin mournfully expressed a few years later in his poem Annus Mirabilis:

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me)

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

Once I had read the book for myself, I must confess to a certain disappointment. It wasn’t a patch on other works by Lawrence, like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow or Women in Love. Yes: here in the text of a novel, for the first time, I was able to read some of those ‘forbidden words’ I’d previously been looking up in the aforementioned slang dictionary. But, on reflection, I didn’t really understand what all the fuss had been about.

In the same year that I read Lady C, I also read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, followed soon after by his masterpiece, 1984. What had been a vague unease with the idea of censorship now hardened into an unyielding opposition to it. More than forty years on, my feelings on the matter are stronger than ever. As Winston Smith, Orwell’s protagonist in the dystopian nightmare world of 1984 writes, in his diary:

‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’

Revisionist views of literature, art and music are no less dangerous than revisionist views of history. And, in my view, the rewriting of Roald Dahl (yes, I got to the subject of this Challenge in the end…) is nothing short of monstrous. Or - to use a very Dahlish word - beastly.

Less than a week has passed since I first read, in an article published in The Guardian on February 18th, that new editions of Dahl’s work had been published (in which, amongst other things, Augustus Gloop is now ‘enormous’ rather than ‘fat’; Miss Trunchbull is now a ‘most formidable woman’ rather than ‘most formidable female’; and Mrs Twit is no longer ‘ugly’). And I’m still fuming.

It seems ironic to me that these changes have been made by Dahl’s publisher Puffin, itself an imprint of Penguin - the very publishing house that was once willing to champion DH Lawrence in the battle against censorship. How the mighty have fallen!

Now, it’s important to distinguish between changes of language that might be required for the purposes of understanding and clarity, as opposed to alterations motivated by a desire to bring the thinking of the past into line with whatever happens to be the prevalent attitudes of the current day. Clearly, these are the principles that should be applied when translating from one language to another. Even then, there remains the clear understanding that reading the original text in the original language of composition is always to be desired, if possible.

My understanding of the New Testament, for example, has been greatly enhanced by my reading the text in the original Greek, as I and a few friends have regularly been doing together on a weekly basis for over four years now. CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and various friends once did exactly the same, almost a century ago, when they gathered week by week to read the Icelandic Sagas in their original tongue, as part of the Koalbiters’ Club (a precursor of sorts to the later Inklings). Much as I love Tolkien’s masterful translations of some of the foundational texts of Middle and Old English (not least that superlative epic poem, Beowulf), I know it cannot compare with the original. If I really want to appreciate Beowulf fully, then I should learn Anglo-Saxon (I have tried, actually!); and then I should read the original text - a text that has not changed for a thousand years. But I shudder to think what text of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory will be available for future readers in a thousand years time; and how similar (or not) it will be to what Dahl originally wrote.

Translating is not, therefore, the same as rewriting. Nor is adapting. I mentioned, in the previous paragraph, JRR Tolkien - surely one of the greatest philologists and wordsmiths of the 20th century. Tolkien’s greatest work, The Lord of the Rings, has been adapted for radio, television and film on numerous occasions. Sometimes, these have been faithful adaptations (such as the wonderful BBC radio version, made in 1981). Two decades later, the Oscar-winning Peter Jackson film adaptation worked under different constraints from those of a radio studio, albeit with a far greater budget; yet that too was also a loving and thoughtful production. Both productions were faced with hard decisions about what to omit, what to retain and what to re-purpose from the source material. The large-scale action scenes were, of course, realised with far greater effect in the film adaptation that would ever have been possible within the confines of a radio studio. By contrast, the radio drama retained much more of Tolkien’s poetry from the epic; a much-loved element of the novel that many of the film’s aficionados, like myself, nevertheless missed from Jackson’s version of the tale. Interestingly, both adaptations completely removed the Tom Bombadil sub-plot (wisely so, in my opinion - some of course will disagree). But I have a great deal of respect for both adaptations, making the very best use as they did of their contrasting dramatic forms.

However, the less said about Amazon’s recent television series The Lord of the Rings: the Rings of Power, the better…

So, adapting is not the same as rewriting either.

What, then, about rewriting? What are the ground rules for this?

One word: Don’t.

Or - to expand slightly - in my view, there is generally only one person who has the authority, should they choose to do so, of rewriting (as opposed to translating or adapting) a work of literature. And that is the original author. Which in the case of the deceased Roald Dahl is now impossible.

It’s interesting to note that very few authors ever do succumb to the temptation - or the pressure - to rewrite their work, once finally published. One of the few recent exceptions I can think of to this is the fantasy author Neil Gaiman, who has published several slightly-revised ‘preferred texts’ after-the-fact of his original published works. There’s also the interesting example of science fiction writer Douglas Adams, who in his own lifetime (let’s forget posthumous travesties like the film adaptation) was creatively involved in several different versions of his most famous work, The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, in radio, TV, LP and novel formats. Sometimes these versions diverged from one another in quite significant ways. So, which one is ‘canon’? The short answer: All of them!

Generally, unlike Gaiman and Adams, most authors have resisted the temptation to revisit their published works; and that isn’t at all surprising, really, when you think about it. When one considers the amount of time and energy that is lovingly poured into crafting their works, you can see why authors, once finally reaching that cathartic point - It is finished - would generally rather move onto the next work, or otherwise take a well-earned rest. And this is still the case, perhaps even more so, if they are aware of the limitations and deficiencies of their work. Returning to Tolkien, the preface to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings contains these remarkably honest words:

The most critical reader of all, myself, now finds many defects, minor and major, but being fortunately under no obligation either to review the book or to write it again, he will pass over these in silence, except one that has been noted by others: the book is too short.

Amen to his last statement.

Sometimes - before publication - authors, dramatists and composers expend considerable energy on rewrites. They cannot bring their work to completion. They set the work aside - hoping to return to it, perhaps. Or sometimes admitting to themselves forlornly that it will never reach that final form. Afraid, even, to finish it. To say: ‘There! It’s done.’ For examples, think of The Silmarillion (Tolkien again). Or Schubert’s famously unfinished 8th symphony. And sometimes Death himself intervenes: none more poignantly so than in the case of Mozart, in the midst of writing his Requiem. Lacrimosa dies illa / Qua resurget ex favilla /Judicandus homo reus (‘Full of tears will be that day / When from the ashes shall arise / The guilty man to be judged’): possibly the final words of the Requiem score that he worked on.

(Let’s not get into whether unfinished works should be completed by other hands - even hands as respectful as Mozart’s pupil Süssmayr, or Tolkien’s son Christopher. That’s another controversy for another time.)

But Roald Dahl indisputedly completed many works. Many of them have become beloved classics of children’s literature. He did not feel the need to rewrite them. With what audacity should lesser writers (and publishers looking for a ‘fast buck’ from ‘new’ editions) feel the need to do so? It’s not ‘artistic reinterpretation’. It’s not reviewing the language ‘to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today’ (as the publisher's blurb maintains). It’s cultural vandalism - pure and simple.

Yes, there are plenty of controversial works in the vast canon of literature. Are we going to raise the age of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, or Nabokov’s Lolita, because they make us feel uncomfortable these days? Are we going to rewrite Huckleberry Finn, removing from Twain's work every use of the ‘N-word’? That’s the logical next step - it would seem - from trying to tell us that Augustus Gloop might be ‘enormous’, but he certainly isn’t ‘fat’.

Some commentators have suggested that Roald Dahl is being retrospectively ‘punished’ for his well-documented anti-Semitic views. Well, again, I don’t want to go too far down another rabbit hole, that of so-called ‘cancel culture’; but altering or invalidating another person’s work because of some supposed moral shortcoming in the artist - real or otherwise - is unbelievably facile. Caravaggio was, possibly, a murderer. He also happens to be one of my favourite artists. The late Eric Gill’s sculptures have become enormously controversial recently, in view of discoveries about his personal life. But what, then, about film directors like Roman Polanski? Or the possible proclivities of Lewis Caroll and JM Barrie? Or poets like Jean Genet, once a petty thief; or the perpetually inebriated Swansea poet, Dylan Thomas? What about drug-using novelists like William Burroughs? Or even - in the current moment, most controversially - JK Rowling? Can I divorce the art from the artist? Should I? To what extent does the artist inform the art? Should one appreciate the music, or the novel, in and for itself? Complex questions, to be sure: but the unyielding orthodoxies of ‘cancel culture’ seem to be a most illiberal response to me.

‘Ah, but Roald Dahl is a children’s author’ - comes back the rejoinder. ‘Corrupting the young - we can’t have that!’ Well, I’m certainly not dignifying that criticism with a response. The artificial division of literature into ‘children’s’ and ‘young adult’ and ‘adult’ categories is something I began to reject long before I took an interest in Lady C and the other ‘black books’ in our school library.

If you think a work lacks literary merit - don’t read it. If as a publisher you think it’s had its day - don’t reprint it. Altering the text to suit current-day identity politics, without the author’s express permission, is tantamount to pissing on their grave.

Good art should entertain us, challenge us, inspire us, and even, sometimes, disturb us. Think of one of Picasso’s most famous works - Guernica. It contains some shocking imagery - such as a gored horse, screaming women, a dead baby, a dismembered soldier, and flames. It was meant to shock. It was the artist’s response to the Spanish Civil War and the Fascist destruction of the Basque town of Guernica in 1937. Are we to judge Picasso’s work as too troubling for consideration today? Of course not.

But, then again, are we step by step remorselessly heading for the kind of world that EM Forster warned about in his extraordinary short story, The Machine Stops? In this remarkable work, first published in 1928 (!), the author predicts the rise of the internet (yes, really), human dependency upon machines, and the death of scientific inquiry and artistic imagination. In the story, we are introduced to a Lecturer, an ‘expert’ in French history, who to ‘tremendous applause’ declaims the following to his enraptured audience:

‘There will come a generation that has gone beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation “seraphically free from taint of personality”, which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened had it taken place in the days of the Machine.’

Sorry Huxley - sorry Orwell. Forster got there a few years before you.

I’m going to give the final word to Salman Rushdie: a man who appreciates the cost of creative integrity, and the dangers of censorship, far, far more than most of us ever will. He posted his reaction to the brouhaha about Dahl on Twitter a few days ago. He wrote:

‘Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.’

Spot on. Now I really need to get around to reading The Satanic Verses.

Just this morning I read where a woman claims that she and her “master degree’d” cronies are better qualified and more capable of raising our children than we are. So there you have it. We are worse parents than non-medical doctors with overpriced (and underachieved) Historical Arts degrees.

We send our kids off to college telling them, “you can’t make it in this world today without a degree,” so they listen, and they go out and get themselves an impressive sounding (if nearly useless) doctorate in psychology or sociology (along with the ensuing $300k in student loans). But then, what do we do with those kids once they graduate and expect that corner office in the fancy high-rise with a coffee shop in the lobby? Or better yet for them, a job they can work at from home, at least until they decide to quit due to the stress and begin trading collectible tennis shoes, or posting indecent pictures of themselves on the internet instead, only to find that they actually make more money doing that?

I’ll tell you what we do. We create jobs for them. That’s what we do. We create HR jobs, and DEI jobs, and sensitivity police jobs. Face it, our liberally-educated, socially-indoctrinated, barely motivated kids have to do something, don’t they? And these seem to be the only things they come out of college qualified to do.

We did not want our children to have to work as hard as we had to work, so they don’t.

We must reap what we sow.

Rewriting books as if they are heinous,

Yet the people calling for this are all about acceptance,

Unless it goes against what they want to see,

How is James And The Giant Peach,

Or a story about a poor kid achieving greatness,

Offensive?

How are these bad stories?

When they teach people about values and morality,

A reflection of the era they were written in,

We can't change history because we don't like it,

Books are the same,

Authors deserve to have their work read as intended

Not erased,

Just because there are people that don't like it,

Doesn't mean that a story should be changed

Common sense needs to come into play,

Don't burn books, don't rewrite them,

Just accept the fact that it isn't for you,

Instead of trying to virtue signal dead people,

Find a different book to read

And get some therapy too.

Shouldn't Mein Kampf be rewritten/edited? The book was edited first by Emil Maurice, then by Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess around 1926. It should next be edited by Texas state Rep. Matt Krause, who sent a letter to school districts detailing a list of 850 books that he believed “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” Krause’s letter has prompted several book removals in Texas schools, although we really don't know his feelings on Jews.

And we should take a really close look at "The Communist Manifesto." History has a lot of ugliness, but it is history.

What about the Oxford Companion of American Literature? As compendia go, it's just a little too big and a little too controversial. As companions go, you'll be judged by the company you keep, right?

So, kill the messenger or the message? Or both? Just ask a stupid person. He or she (sorry, they) will answer, "More information is not better than less. I have enough to worry about."

Sanitizing books is sanitizing history, and--as the cliché says, "we'll be doomed to repeat it," dirt and all.

If we truly want to sanitize books, I suggest just some 70% isopropyl rubbing alcohol on the glossy pages or freezing the pages that aren't glossy (kills germs, like the SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19--and it's about time!).

You're more likely to "catch" a germ from a book and make it yours, than a really bad idea. After all, shouldn't we get really bad ideas on our own?

Some people say that history is written by the victors. That history is written from only one point of view, a radical right-wing point of view. I cannot help thinking that, as censorship and a shrinking freedom of speech continue to infiltrate Western Civilization, we are moving towards a future that is written by the other end of the spectrum, the radical left, a bastardized and extremist version of the values the left originally held.

Outspoken defectors from North Korea, such as Yeonmi Park, are pointing out the growing similarities between the culture they escaped from and the culture they've escaped to. A dictatorship doesn't emerge overnight; it grows slowly, playing on a society's obliviousness. It starts with the seemingly small things, taking things inch by inch, until suddenly people wake up and realize that miles have been stolen.

What happened to the idea of simply not partaking in the things that offend us, removing ourselves from situations we disagree with? What happened to honest and open debate? Every day, our culture progresses further and further toward a dystopian system in which, if you do not say the right thing, you are a danger to society and should be locked up or put down. Room for differences grows ever smaller. Western Civ boasts a policy of acceptance, freedom to be whatever and believe whatever - but in truth, lines are being drawn in cement rather than sand. Personal choices must adhere to the stance of the media and the represented majority (which is not the same as the statistical majority).

I'm conservative-leaning in my politics, and a Christian. There are people who think my beliefs are wrong. There are people who think my beliefs are horribly misguided. There are people who think my beliefs are harmful, to myself and to others.

Typically, the people who believe those things are also those who I believe to be wrong, misguided, and to hold harmful views.

So if we both believe this about each other, what do we do? Do we condemn one party and uplift the other? Do we censor and restrict one party until it either collapses in on itself or - perhaps inevitably - civil war breaks out?

People of different views have been living on this planet for thousands of years. Looking at history, we can see what happened when differences were treated with hostility rather than tolerance: murder, torture, genocide, etc. Tyranny abounds when one stance is determined "right" and the other "wrong".

"But is there no standard to which everyone must be held? Should we tolerate any and everything? How do we agree on what is morally correct if we tolerate so many different beliefs?"

It's debatable if anyone has a perfect answer to those questions. Statistically speaking, however, nearly every religion/philosophy agrees that particular acts are ethically wrong: murder, rape, theft, lying, breaking promises. There is some black and white.

But grey areas exist, and we must keep room for them, or we damn ourselves to a future in which history repeats itself over, and over, and over again.

What a scourge. Please move west of the San Andreas fault and wait for the big one so we don't have to deal with you anymore when you sink into the ocean forever.

I've also been buying up hundreds of copies of Dahl's original works, along with guns I think the ATF will ban in the future, so I'm capitalizing on this leftist stupidity. Anybody [who's legally allowed to own a gun and a book] need an uncensored book or gun, hmu, I'm ya boi!

living under a rock, i did not know about the new dahl editing, but it is no surprise. the presumption that this is in anyway acceptable is an outrage, but only for people who actually care about culture and artistic expression and not ONLY about their bottom line. these are hard times for the publishing industry. there are no conspiratory lizard people that force things in this direction. no these dire straights are self imposed. the economuc pressure for publishers to compete these days (there's about just four left that have a wide circulation) is such that anything that even carries a whiff of ethnocentrism or racism or sexism or any currently unpopular ism is banned or purged. why would an editor, or marketing officer, risk his stature on the very narrow field of publishing for something MEANINGFUL, when thatvis not their job discription. it is much more marketable to re-touch an old masterpiece, to make it fit in with mainstream expectations. better yet, if the writer is dead, then surly they don't mind, if new books are cloned from their genius, cleaned up and branded as part of their universe of creation. thus writers that lived in a very different age , are subject to this idiocy or malicious rewriting, and the trend is not slowing.

in the end, corporations dont care about people as emotional and intellectual entities. they see them as consumers. ideally a consumer is fanatically loyal, needs no variety, has no reaction to dissatisfaction or suffering of others, and considers itself as morally correct nonetheless. while publishers are just a really just a small particle in this, they do much to promote this cultural automaton. it is not a willful decision tjat they made, a long term plan to make everything the same, but they will definitely do very little to move it in another direction.

if this trend of censoring what needent be censored continues, verything will be so "corrected" that it will be bland beyond words. and the people that will be revolted to read such "whitebread and mayo" and avoid reading altogether will be more and more stupid accordingly- in other words- improved consumers. it would be a self imposed dark age.