The Fearless Blogger

image credit: Magh

Since I’m Jewish, curious, and a procrastinator I had no choice but to follow the link included in this tweet (Confession: I’m checking Twitter and now blogging instead of cleaning my kitchen.)

In his essay on protecting the printed word, The Electronic Book Burning, Alan Kaufman compares the current shift towards electronic media (and the resulting impact on small bookstores) to a Nazi pogram (and the resulting murders of  99 Jews, imprisonment in concentration camps of 25,000-30,000 Jews and the destruction of 267 synogogues [source]):

the awful scene [that] is reoccuring everywhere: venerable, much beloved bookstores closing and that portion of the populace who cherish books—an ever-shrinking minority—left baffled and bereft; a silent corporate Krystallnacht decimating the world of literacy.

And I thought I’m dramatic!!

Granted, I’ve never written, much less published, a book, so it’s perfectly reasonable that I don’t share such strong views on the value of the medium over the content.

That said, although understanding Kaufman’s background helps add a bit of context to the essay’s metaphor, somewhere in between the comparison of the destiny of inanimate objects to human beings and the correlating comparison of market-trend and consumer-driven business decisions to the calculating, hate-filled “Master Plan” of the Nazi’s, his message gets a bit lost.

image credit: Patrick Correia

Before you think I may be over-reacting, I’ll share some additional passages from the essay:

Like any product, the book must run harder and faster in the marketplace or else fall and die. And the books are falling. Only the fittest now survive. While mid-list authors drop in the snow, blockbuster thrillers and middlebrow memoirs and diet books huff their way forward. Soon, though, they too will drop. The idea is for no one to be left standing. All physical books must go up the chimney stack. Such was the methodology of the SS who forced their prisoners to run naked races round and round the barracks yard in the Polish winter, a race that no one was meant to win.

The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.

Rather than add my commentary as to whether I agree if books are “despised” or with the author’s view of proponents of electronic media as “hi-tech propagandists”, I’ll share a bit more from the essay:

Not since the advent of Christianity has the world witnessed so sweeping a change in the very fabric of human existence. Behind the hi-tech revolution is an idea of Progress that in many regards resembles the premises of Christianity itself. The superseding of the new way over the old, of the New Testament over the Old Testament, the discrediting of the traditional as inferior or even evil, a sense of powerful excitement about the revolutionary, and of course, most importantly, the promise of heavenly immortality over the temporal limitations of the wasting physical body—the accursed haptic book versus the blessed Holy Ghostly Internet—all these earmark the hi-tech pogrom against the book.

Hmmn.  Let’s continue, shall we?

Heinrich Heine, the early 19th century German Jewish poet, wrote: “”Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people.”

OK. Well, the above quote from the  closing paragraph actually resonates with me.

And then it is quickly overshadowed by one last final metaphor:

The advent of electronic media to first position in the modern chain of Being—a place once occupied by God—and later, after the Enlightenment, by humans—is no mere 9/11 upon our cultural assumptions. It is a catastrophe of holocaustal proportions. And its endgame is the disappearance of not just books but of all things human.

Just a thought here.  As a general practice – regardless of the comparison one is attempting to illustrate – the adjective “mere” is not probably not an appropriate adjective to be paired with “9/11″.  The expression “too soon” comes to mind (among other expressions, I won’t get into!).

I appreciate the value of the printed book as an art form and small bookstores as a culture.

All the same, I think the comparison is a stretch.  And frankly a bit offensive  - insensitive at the very least.

That’s just me though.
What do you think?

Read it here:
THE ELECTRONIC BOOK BURNING by Alan Kaufman (Evergreen Review No. 120, October 2009).

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