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Elizabeth Austin, writing for The Washington Monthly, would like you to know she just threw her copy of Gone With The Wind (a gift from her father, no less) into the garbage. She expects you now to throw her a parade. Or send her a fruit basket. Just shut up and acknowledge her magnificence already.
Bethyboo, verklempt by her own awokeiness, rips a bodice or two here:
I don’t think I’d ever thrown away a book before—at least, not one that was still intact. But this book was different. I didn’t want to be responsible for one more young girl reading Gone with the Wind. It is a pernicious book. It is an evil book. It weaves a spell that has perverted our national vision of slavery and warped our understanding of the Civil War and its long, vicious aftermath. Its sugarcoated white supremacy has inflicted grievous, lasting harm on our country for generations. Gone with the Wind is poison. And it is more toxic because the poison is concealed within a powerful—even feminist— story told in deathlessly lyrical prose.
… “deathlessly lyrical prose” …
Boy howdy but GWTW, Margaret Mitchell’s fictional novel, is sure doing some heavy lifting there. Pity poor Bethyboo, born in 1958 she was just a little too young to have gone to Woodstock or riot on the Berkeley campus but look out world the fine people who destroyed Lana Negrete’s family business aren’t going to be the only ones having fun this time around! Austin is here to let you know that writing about love-among-the-hoop-skirts is literally HITLER!
I think the novel deserves the same treatment as Mein Kampf, and the movie should be considered the American cousin of Triumph of the Will. Anybody who champions either book or movie is standing up for the cause of white supremacy and should be judged accordingly.
Oh, Bethyboo. Did no one tell you that Fahrenheit 451 is not a How-To manual? I do know you’re confused by the concepts of “Fiction” and “Non-Fiction” and the difference between Romance Novel and Jew-hating Manifesto. Not that the last few years have been easy for genre writers, what with “Progressive” race-mongers demanding the purchase of indulgences and the right to police people’s home bookshelves.
… However …
Some unsolicited advice, dear? I really think this is the year you should stop huffing paint. Or wallowing in Progressive ideology. They both have the same effect on your brain and morals.
People who enjoy reading, or viewing, Gone With The Wind are not there for a lesson in How-To-Be-A-Slave-Master. They aren’t taking notes on how racism against black folk is totes awesome anymore than they are noting tips on how to do table-top leg amputations.
How utterly condescending, arrogant and, yes, supremacist Bethyboo is to fear that everyone else around her must be protected from GWTW and Big Scary Fiction! I guess if we are too frail to enjoy a big-blowsy romance of pretend characters saying made-up words in invented situations … oh, and wearing fabulous dresses! … without being corrupted, then should we be allowed to read Regency Romances? OMG, Bethyboo, have you ANY idea of the classism and misogyny of that era? How about whole series based in medieval times or the Roman era?
Personally, I read for entertainment. I want to sit down on a comfy couch, cat on my lap, beverage at hand, and be transported into another world for an hour or two or three. My fictional tastes run more to sci-fi than romance, but I appreciate great world-building, characters and engaging stories regardless of genre.
And to paraphrase the problematic Shakespeare, The story’s the thing.
Elizabeth Austin needs to take that stick out of her ass, her gifted-copy of GWTW out of the trash and stop campaigning for a position in the Ministry of Truth.
UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers!
featured image, cropped, public domain
G Wilson says: If only there was a way to get rid of unapproved books without clogging up the recycling system.
I have an idea. Perhaps the woke could all the offending volumes in a big pile and burn them.
What could possibly go wrong?
Steve says: Guess we can kiss videos of “Gladiator” goodbye.
Ampleforth says: I love how the left insists that they’re not fascists while they are doing fascist things. They only have acted like fascists once, and that has been continuously.
Sadie McQueen says: When all the books and television shows are banned; all the statues are removed; all the Army posts, streets, and restaurants are renamed, and people think that racism STILL exists, what then? These actions do not serve to eliminate racism; they are mostly ticking people off.
rbj1 says: So now the Carol Burnett Show skit about GWTW is to be banished?
(Yes, I am that old.)
Dietrich says: Curtain rod!
cheeflo says: Just thinking about that episode makes me laugh out loud!
Dietrich says: “…table-top leg amputations.”
Oooh, my Great-great-granddad had one of those, but he survived to a ripe old age. I treasure my pictures of him, one as a old man in which you can just see the top of his peg leg, and another in his civil war uniform before he was wounded. His CONFEDERATE uniform. Damn Yankees!
GWB says: Personally, I read for entertainment.
Oh, Darleen, you poor un-reconstructed child. No one is allowed to do ANYTHING for “entertainment”! It must enlighten you and bring you to a higher level of consciousness. It must inform you of your sins so you may repent and begin your daily penance. And no one, anywhere within the work, must ever commit a sin against the Church of the Aggrieved, lest the lost be led further astray in their thoughts and feelings.
the Ministry of Truth
Ultimately, they all want to signal their virtue, that the god of Grievance might look down upon them and smile. And, having been beatified, they may now exercise their virtue as a cudgel against those less enlightened than they.
Remove Jehovah from civilization, and you don’t get a rational society, based on empiricism. No, you get a religion of “reason” and a will to power that combines the worst aspects of hedonism and puritanism.
Jack_of_Spades says: I saw the movie once. I’ve never read the book, and you can’t make me. That said, has anyone read the book or seen the movie, and then decided that the wrong side won the Civil War?
Milwaukee says: We did need to end slavery. Questions about who should have won, well that’s problematic. Could slavery have ended without a war? I doubt it. But the war did give us the Klan and Jim Crowe.
My ex-wife bought a copy for me, a longtime ago. Funny, but like Scarlett, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, either.
Maureen Matthew says: I guess we have to toss almost all literature by these standards. Let’s recall the horrors of misogyny exhibited in any of Austin’s novels.
GWB says: Which is exactly what they did in China’s Cultural Revolution. ALL books that were not written to praise Mao and his ‘philosophy’ and to educate the masses about them were destroyed. All books that were “old” were sent down the memory hole.
Colorado Wellington says: No, she is right!
I’ve heard that a guy in Boulder, Colorado read the book and said he will catch himself some slaves at the CU campus and start a sugar beet plantation in Aristocrat Ranchettes, northeast of Fort Lupton.
That book is corrosive and evil.
Milwaukee says: I’ve read the book, seen the movie, and even owned both. Author was very austute and insightful in character development and portrayal.
Will Cate says: Hell, she can throw away her book if she wants to… her mistake is in assuming that the rest of us care why, or even that, she is doing so.
JT says: The woke mob has decided they are going to eradicate from the face of the earth everything and everyone that is outside their ideology. You will submit, willingly and happily, or find out why you should have.
RebeccaH says: I loved GWTW when I was a teenager, so much so that I reread it at least three times. As a descendant of the Confederacy, I already knew that the world depicted in that book barely approached what the real South was like in those days, and I knew as well as anyone that slavery was a wrong that the Civil War fixed, whatever our cultural loyalties to our ancestors. I’m all for real justice, not the “social” kind that today’s fussy-bot toddlers are throwing tantrums about. Bethyboo is doing the “look how woke I am” pose in hopes that she’ll be allowed to sit at the same table as the Kool Kids. It’s not exactly a pose to generate respect.
cheeflo says: What is “deathlessly lyrical prose?”
Sheesh.
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