Burn All the Dictionaries
the words are all new, so why bother
Before the Civil War, Southern states banned abolitionist literature. That ban meant that postmasters (illegally!) searched the mail, seized anti-slavery tracts, and burned them. And it meant that people caught with abolitionist pamphlets faced the likelihood of arrest. The District of Columbia considered a ban, then didn’t pass the thing, but Reuben Crandall was still arrested and tried for seditious libel in 1833 when he was caught with abolitionist literature. He was acquitted, then died of illness from a brutal pre-trial detention. Seizure, destruction, arrest: abolitionist literature was banned.
The Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote a 1924 novel, We, depicting a world in which an all-powerful government minutely controlled every aspect of life for an enervated population, finding as an endpoint for their ideological project a surgery that destroyed the centers of the brain that allowed ordinary people to have will and imagination. The Soviet government banned Zamyatin’s work: They seized and destroyed all known copies, told editors and publishers the author was no longer to allowed to publish, and sent Zamyatin into exile, where he died without ever seeing his own country again. Seizure, destruction, exile: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s work was banned.
During World War I, the federal government banned literature that discouraged military service, including tracts that criticized conscription. Subsequently, “socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer distributed leaflets declaring that the draft violated the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition against involuntary servitude.” They were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction. Anti-conscription literature was banned: It was seized and destroyed, and people caught distributing it were sent to prison.
In 2023, the tedious midwit poet Amanda Gorman posted on Twitter that she was “gutted” — the standard emotion for tedious midwits — to discover that one of her poems had been “banned” by a school in Florida. The news media raced to proclaim that Florida schools are banning books, the leading edge of the Ron DeSantis fascist wave.
As others have already said, Gorman’s boring poem was moved from an elementary school library shelf to a middle school library shelf, without leaving the library:
Staff members on the school’s materials review committee ultimately decided four of the five books would be “more appropriate” for middle school-aged children and thus moved the books to the middle-school section of the library. A fifth book that also underwent review, Countries in the News: Cuba, was found to be “balanced and age appropriate” and was kept in place.
Minutes from a meeting of the review committee show the panel found the vocabulary used in Gorman’s poem was “determined to be of value for middle school students.”
A spokesperson for Miami-Dade County Public Schools told CNN that “no literature (books or poem) has been banned or removed.”
“It was determined at the school that ‘The Hill We Climb’ is better suited for middle school students and, it was shelved in the middle school section of the media center. The book remains available in the media center.”
When the news media uses a trigger word, a loaded term that evokes Nazis on the march or innocents being slaughtered in the street — Daniel Penny is a vigilante! — look for the historical understanding of the term. We're living through Soviet-level redefinition of language. Ask what the word you’re seeing, like “banned,” was known to mean ten years ago, or fifty, and compare it to the way it’s being used now. One day soon we’ll talk about the curious evolution behind “trans rights,” but later. Words have had meaning. They can again.
As an aside, I haven’t given up the project of not writing for a few days so I can recalibrate for the future. I just…accidentally slipped a little. But I’m doing it here, so it doesn’t count:
Back right after the holiday.
When we reflect on Zamyatin's letter of resignation from the Russian writer's union as the result of their censure during the controversy surrounding the publication of "We," his words are a timeless affirmation that history rhymes.
The entire letter is too long to post here, but this excerpt demonstrates a historical underpinning for cancel culture and today's long march through the institutions:
"The general meeting in Moscow, without waiting for my explanations, without even expressing a desire to hear them, adopted a resolution condemning my "act." The members of the Moscow branch also took the occasion to express their protest against the contents of the novel, written nine years ago and unknown to the majority of them. In our times nine years are, in essence, nine centuries. I have no intention here to defend a novel that is nine centuries old. I merely think that it would have been far more timely if the Moscow members of the union had protested against the novel We six years ago, when it was read at one of the union's literary evenings.
The general meeting of the Leningrad branch of the union was held on September 22, and I know of its results only from a newspaper report ( in Vechern Krasnaya of September 23). From this report it may be seen that in Leningrad my explanations had already been read and that opinion at the meeting was divided.
A number of the writers, after reading my explanations, considered the incident closed. Nevertheless, the majority found it more prudent to condemn my "act."
Such is the act of the All-Russian Writers' Union. And from this act I draw my own conclusion: I find it impossible to belong to a literary organization which, even if only indirectly, takes part in the persecution of a fellow member, and I hereby announce my resignation from the All-Russian Writers' Union."
So sorry (not!) to hear about your unfortunate not-writing accident. It calls to mind Ron White's stand-up bit where he recounts an inebriated incident where he acknowledges that he DID have the right to remain silent, but not the ability...
Let's hear more, when you choose!