We all love a good book-burning, there’s no doubt about that. Standing at Oxford Circus round a great big bonfire in which great works (phah) of literature turn slowly to ashes as we all warm up and sing ‘gin-gan-gooly’ type songs. Bonding. As the Brontë bindings burn. Even though its August and hotter than the fires of hell virtually all the time at the moment. And there’s a good argument to be made that we need more fires. Yet it has been revealed that kids at universities are reading… books!! Particularly subversive in this respect are students of English. And in those books one can find… horrible things! Sexism. Sex. Racism. Xenophobia, transphobia, anti-Semitism, anti-working-classism, Islamophobia, nationalism, war-mongering and things guaranteed to offend or upset virtually everybody. So the universities want to get rid of various books which, they view, are particularly offensive.

A movie came on the tv the other night. Can’t remember what, I wasn’t actually watching, but I glanced up from a rather challenging Sudoku just to see the ‘advance warnings’. You know, ‘may contain scenes of sex, violence or crimes against football’ type of thing which are essential. To protect… errrr… from… errrr… whatever. And the message said ‘contains attitudes from the period’. As a warning. Which is odd, because every single film ever made contains ‘attitudes from the period’, unless its set in the future, like Blade Runner, and no-one knows what the attitudes then might be. Or Terminator. Because do robots and cyborgs have ‘attitude’? Interesting…

So the question is: how much fucking protection do we need from fiction? Does fiction even have the right, either written or on film, to portray reality, if that very reality might possibly offend someone, somewhere in the world, just a little bit? They’ve banned A midsummernight’s dream at one university. For ‘classism’. What about Downton Abbey then? Or The Queen??? Can’t get more class discriminatory than them. And Shakespeare, FFS. The most brilliant playwright ever and yet wrote about a time when a woman had to dress as a man if she wanted to work or be taken seriously. Well, you know what? IT HAPPENED. It was 500 years ago. Its allowed to have happened. That in no way reduces Merchant of Venice to a racist, sexist, deeply misogynistic treatise about the virtues of anti-semitism.

History happened. In the way it happened then, not as we’d like it to have happened now. You’d hope someone at a university might get that. Or the bloke on tv with the warnings. Otherwise, whilst we’re being revisionist, can we do anything about a few football match scores which caused me great upset and stress? And still do!

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx