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Notes -
A follow up to the Roald Dahl censorship story from last week for those who haven't been following UK news. Apparently the publisher as (partially) backed down and agreed to keep the original books in print, along with the modernised versions. Apparently criticism from the Prime Minister, the queen, global authordom and the French was enough to swing it.
For now. But they've betrayed their intentions. They own the IP, this is what they want, and they'll bide their time until they get another chance, or they think nobody is watching. It's what other organizations have done.
How do you decide this is a case of what they always intended instead of drumming up controversy to get attention?
If they were acting out of moral concern, why back down in the face of opposition? I suppose there's a chance that they simply hadn't considered the consequences of announcing they would do this, and I don't want to deny that people can sometimes just collectively fail to use their brains on accident, but that seems even more unlikely.
Moreover, they're book publishers. Are we to think they haven't had debates about this kind of thing for ages? I doubt this is the case either.
So either they ignored a debate that would have a very high chance of playing out in their business, or they tried capitalizing on controversy to sell books. When was the last time Roald Dahl even got in the news?
They believe in what they are doing for moral reasons but back down when pressured enough. Happens all the time. My wife’s public university offered course credit to protest Kavanaugh but backtracked when it got media attention. That clearly wasn’t a publicity stunt.
This idea that nobody actually believes in this and it’s all a plan to drum up controversy annoys me. It’s reminiscent of “it’s just a few kids on college campuses.” Or suggestions that cancellations are just cover for severing ties with people for business reasons. Why is it so hard to accept that there are lots of true believers out there?
Al Franken was not a strategic move but true believers going crazy. A&E canceling all their most popular shows in 2020 was not a tactical business decision it was a moral panic. There are lots of believers out there in legit positions of authority.
Your example has, how to put it, an indelicacy to it that makes me see it as someone genuinely trying to do a moral thing. The Dahl books controversy seems almost perfectly tailored for maximum spread over something that they would very likely have thought through perfectly.
I don't have a problem with the idea that people out there want to modernize the language of older books by cutting out that which is unappealing to them. But that's not the same as saying that the people at Puffin necessarily want to do that in this case. That requires more proof.
I think the fact that they did it is pretty good evidence that they wanted to do it.
We know they wanted to do it, the question is why they want to. If they were being totally honest, was their conscious and major driving reason that they found the language objectionable? Or, as I suspect, were they doing this in a way to generate attention by surfing the line?
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