Enough Is Enough. “Sensitivity Editors” Have Raised the Hackles of My Sensitivities

HarperCollins, publishers of Agatha Christie’s marvelous collection mystery stories should be hanged by the neck until dead, alongside every groveling, subservient school board that acquiesces to a parent who judges Michelangelo’s David to be pornography.

Trot them all off to some communist re-education center

Re-education, of course, would suppose that there was some modest amount of education in these parents to begin with and that would be a stretch.

Authors published originally by Harper include Mark Twain, the Brontë sisters, and William Thackeray. Those originally published by Collins include H. G. Wells and the forementioned Agatha Christie. HarperCollins also acquired the publishing rights to J. R. R. Tolkien.

The present HarperCollins management, gutless and cringing behind their desks in deathly fear of losing another sale to Amazon, threw both literary history and freedom of the press under the stinky, smoking bus of cancel culture. The world’s largest publisher, operating since 1817 in god-knows-how-many-countries-of-the-world, lost its nerve, when it could boldly and proudly have set precedent. Shame on them and their sniveling response to criticism without merit.

HarperCollins states as its Core Values, Integrity, Accountability, Initiative, Respect and Service. I see by its actions that accountability only serves until cancel-culture diverts it and initiative tests which way the winds happen to blow at the moment. As for integrity, respect and service, Agatha Christie is no longer among us to demand it. Time was, a demand was not necessary.

As a writer, I have a very particular prejudice about the value of novels

Far more than a movie or a television series, a novel allows the reader to enter and essentially inhabit an alternative life for three or four hundred pages. It has been said that no two readers experience the same book and that’s true because the written word conjures up images and those images are as individual as our fingerprints. My brother used to say that he preferred radio to television, because the pictures were better. It is the same with reading, if the author is skilled.

The homeless are not the unhoused, cripples are not differently abled and stupid people do not suffer from a lack of intellectual acuity. It’s impossible to understand the lived experience of a crippled victim of war, whose commanding officer led his battalion into a stupidly ordered slaughter by bleeding away all the horrors of war by sensitivity editing. We live the borrowed life of the novel in common language, whether it be crude or elegant, rough or serene, intimate or distant and a great writer will take us there with language appropriate to the circumstance.

But the children, we must protect the children

If you protect a child from the realities of life, he or she will likely end up as either victims or prisoners. How does the idiot parent who disallows his child (and others as well) from looking at a naked David serve that child’s best interests? In literature, how does removing all the lovely wordplay from a Roald Dahl children’s book improve them? Puffin, Dahl's publisher has removed or changed hundreds of words in his books in new editions to “modernize” them, ironing out the irony along the way. Now, Augustus Gloop is described as “enormous” instead of “fat,” Mrs. Twits is no longer called “ugly,” “female” has been changed to “woman” and, quite incredibly, the Oompa Loompas Are now described as “small people.”

Surely The Wizard of Oz cannot be far behind, the Cowardly Lion succumbing to Bashful Lion and the Wicked Witch of the North becoming merely unpleasant.

There is a theme behind all this

These wild-eyed far-right creatures of a political bent, who have us at each other’s throats are now trying to sanitize their self-imposed- societal mess. Sanitize, yes…but only for white Americans and their white schoolkids who are so traumatized by their parents that they can’t possibly be shown David’s dick without falling apart.

Nor can they read a realistic account of Huckleberry Finn, Catch 22, anything by Kurt Vonnegut or (god help us) Elmore Leonard. Here’s an interesting side story from Elmore. A reader wrote to him and accused him of being a racist because the N-word appeared in one of his books. “I will never read another of your books,” she told him. He wrote her back, “I am not a racist,” he said. “One of my characters is a racist and he used the word because it identifies him as racist.” I guess she was just too uneducated and closed-minded to make the connection, but I’ll bet she’s on the school board, banning books in the school library.

Where on earth have we come to as a society?

We deny our early struggles in trying to establish the world’s first free democratic republic, thrashing out its imperfections through trial-and-error, argument and civil war. Yet our founders included in our Declaration of Independence from England the promise, the vision that all men are created equal. Not the actuality, because it was not possible in those times as a slaveholding nation, but the promise of times to come.

In these troubled times, what is our promise? Apparently a slim white majority of American citizens are determined to shield their children’s eyes from the sometimes bloody and sometimes racist methods by which we came to be an imperfect and only partly focused reflection in the mirror of our journey. In their version of a more perfect union, “sensitivity editors” will patch our wounds and make us well.

It just won’t fly

It’s a laudable achievement to be sensitive to a neighbor in need, a family in poverty or a confused young person trying to sort truth from fiction. But it’s a crime against humanity to let sensitivity editors re-write our books, lie to our children and craft a fabulist nation of white superiority.

We are not that nation, our strengths have always lain in our outreach to diverse cultures. We are better than that, perhaps not at this very moment. But in the long run, we are better than that and our history has proven this promise to be true. Both my grandfathers were English and both grandmothers German, but I am neither English or German. I am an American.

I happen to be sensitive about that.