This afternoon, in passing, I heard college football broadcasters speaking to the situation of Dick Vitale and his “resting vocal cords.” One commentator mentioned how “humbling” it was to see Vitale communicate only through cue cards held up to the screen instead of using his iconic voice. “It’s also scary,” he said, “to lose your voice.”
So let’s talk about the voices being targeted by this current mania against critical race theory, which has translated on the one hand to book bannings, and on the other (when combined with other forms of bigotry, like religious intolerance) actual book burnings. What is happening to those voices?
The crusaders don’t even want the voices to be able to speak, let alone be heard and interpreted. Books are spaces where the wisdom contained within must be sought out externally. The reader comes to the book. The crusaders want to remove the book to control not just the reader; they mean to steal the breath from the voices merely resting on the page. They mean to pretend that those authors never had independent voices; they mean to stopper those authors’ throats with the raw rag of censorship, a vise-grip of prior restraint. They mean to disembody these authors, where their voices register not even a whisper and thus can be waved away like irritating vapor.
They mean to transform those they despise into invisibility and thus into ignorability.
I remember, too, the suffocation I felt during the final weeks of the Trump administration—pretty much all through the active campaign season—where I had the feeling that I needed to temper my online criticisms, lest my words come back to bite me were the administration to prevail electorally. I actually felt distinct pressure to watch my words. That’s another form of prior restraint: intimidation to express one’s own viewpoint or truth.
That pressure—that’s not democracy. But that’s the force that the Trump administration was pushing. I heard similar descriptions of pressure from others online—once Trump had gone down to definitive defeat and thus could no longer dangle such a Damoclean sword over the heads of the citizenry.
Who tells the story of America? This ultimately is the battlefield conservatives have chosen with these efforts, and in that sense, this push to censor—to ban and burn—represents a Lost Cause 2.0. It’s the same sentiment in 21st-century clothes. They’re trying to make bigotry fashionable.
Just today I, again, cried for the loss of the Library of Alexandria. The amount of accumulated knowledge—so much work, so much time, so much effort—reduced to ash, due to the abject ignorance of the conquering horde and its vandalizing destructive barbarity: this honestly pains me. These are real tears of mourning.
So when I hear of a pastor leading congregants in an organized book burning, I can’t help but draw a parallel. The destruction has its own name. The killing of a brother is called fratricide; to do the same to a monarch is regicide. The murder of books is libricide. The damage is not to the ideas contained in the books themselves, because that is not how one destroys an idea. The damage necroses society, as well as the culture we bequeath to our young. These zealots mean to deform us, and that by intimidation.