What a relief to read that bookstores have at last assumed their proper role as censors and arbiters of public morals. Banishing Diaz, Alexie, and Wallace is, I assume, only the beginning. I mean, we all know about the Beats—Kerouac (misogynist), Ginsberg (Man-Boy-Love Association member), Burroughs (murderer). But what about Mailer, Bellow, Salinger, Updike, Hemingway, and that notoriously bad father, William Faulkner? Don’t forget antisemites like Pound and Eliot. And you know that Robert Lowell could be savage to people? If you stock Plath and Sexton, aren’t you glamorizing suicide? People say Mary McCarthy had quite a tongue on her. And what about cranks like John Milton—anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, pro-regicide….And please don’t get me started on Byron (incest), Shelley (cheating), Baudelaire (whoring), Rimbaud (gun-running). But these literary cats are the low-hanging fruit. Imagine the moral probity of those bookstores deciding not to stock the shelves with work by and about bona-fide mass murderers—not only the obvious ones, like Hitler and Stalin, but also our own men and women: Nixon, Kissinger, Johnson, the Bushes, the Clintons, Madeleine Albright, Janet Reno (Waco—never forget!)? Then there are lesser criminals like Martha Stewart, who will also need to be purged. But we’re just getting started, aren’t we? From here on, as in any self-respecting theocracy, shelf-space should be reserved exclusively for the works of bona fide saints. Here is where it gets tricky, though, because surely the Bible will have to go—what other book has led to as much bloodshed, from the Crusades to the present? Keep in mind how Jesus provoked a crowd to stone the adulteress: “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.”(Source)
Food for thought. Another Biblical precept: "Ye shall know them by their fruits."
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