More book-fixing foolishness

Recently, Puffin Books published updated editions of some Roald Dahl classics that were edited with the sensitivity airbrush. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Augustus Gloop, for example, is no longer enormously fat, simply enormous. (Perhaps, in future editions, he’ll be body-shape nonconforming). In the latest edition of The Witches, Dahl’s (newly defined) crime of bald-shaming has been corrected. In a similar move, Ian Fleming Publications has made alterations to fix the late James Bond creator’s not-so-acceptable takes on race, gender, and sex.

All of this raises a rather important question: Who on earth asked for this? Any parent who is lightly familiar with his work knows that Dahl is far closer to Dante than Dr. Seuss on the sensitivity spectrum, thus it’s hard to imagine a single parent on the planet who is aching to buy his offspring a book about child-eating giants but who refuses to do so as long as the giants are called “ugly.”

It appears, then, that the taming of Bond and the BFG is a phenomenon caused not by a natural supply-and-demand exchange between customers and publishers but by a kind of woke-mafia shakedown. Inclusive Minds is the organization behind the changes to Dahl’s books. Peruse the about section on their website and you’ll discover something that sounds eerily similar to the scenes in gangster movies where local hoods extort their neighborhood grocer. Inclusive Minds is there to help you keep your work running smoothly. Inclusive Minds encourages you to partner with them early in the creative process “so that Inclusion Ambassadors can share nuances related to their lived experience as characters are created and plots are developed.” Nice little novel you got there. Would be a shame if someone canceled it.

Granted, a less cynical but more terrifying possibility is that we’re dealing with true believers, people who are firmly convinced that diversity consultants are necessary for art to be beautiful and true. For the true believer, the creative process can’t be complete until the creator has submitted himself to the consultant and the artist has prostrated himself before the HR rep. Sure, Fleming and Dahl had vision, but what was their genius compared to that of a lived experience curator? Sure, they invented timeless characters. But can those characters really be timeless if they don’t have someone to help them change with the times?

Whether people like those at Inclusive Minds are true ideologues or mere opportunists, their behavior certainly meets the biblical qualifications for foolishness, a mindset that rejects the wisdom of God to chase the fleeting praise of men, and that hungers for temporary satisfaction instead of the peace of God found in the wounds of Christ. And while the books of Dahl and Fleming are hardly Christian books, a wise man recognizes that their value is found in whatever holy and beautiful truths they endorse, not in how useful they are to underemployed grievance studies majors.

A wise man recognizes that to create his own stories is to imitate the God who created this world so we could know the story of salvation. A fool believes that a dead man’s story exists to create a job market for him or to create an opportunity to boast of his righteousness before his peers.

A wise man depicts the hideousness of evil to show people how we triumph over it. A fool believes it’s a greater accomplishment to show people how to hide from it so they don’t have to deal with it. A wise man is content to let storytellers be products of their time, knowing the good they’ve created will transcend whatever bigotries and other iniquities may have appeared in their work. A fool thinks that gathering an audience to watch him fix another man’s sins is how he makes himself righteous. A wise man writes. A fool says, “This is what you should have written.”

Because wokeness always needs to manufacture more outrage and create more marginalized groups to keep functioning, we should expect no end to this foolishness. Don’t be surprised if, in a year or so, the comb and the brush bits from Goodnight Moon are expunged to show solidarity with the victims of alopecia or if the mouse from If You Give a Mouse a Cookie finds himself requesting oat milk out of respect for the lactose intolerant.

Whether the Inclusion Ambassadors are running a woke-mafia shakedown or are genuinely convinced they’re making the world a better place, the art-destroying results are the same. For this reason, anyone entrusted with preserving historical writings or creating new ones would be wise to deny the copyediting fools the distinguished privilege of drawing near their manuscripts with pen in hand.

As King Solomon said, “like snow in summer or rain in harvest, so honor is not fitting for a fool.”