When I was a kid, the stories had normal plots. You know, an idiot wolf, a girl one fry short of a Happy Meal, a very heroic hero, and a really villainous villain. A couple of days ago I was taking a look at the books the school librarian is currently recommending to some 7- to 11-year-olds, and, if I’m being completely honest, I am pretty sure that the kids would would be better served intellectually if they spent the whole damn day on a Playstation instead of reading that huge mountain of crap.
In the first story, a sort of superhero clearly related to the girl from The Ring (AKA Greta Thunberg) goes about scolding children who don’t recycle their garbage properly. In the second story, a disgusting-looking, ill-mannered, sexually ambiguous, and supposedly funny monster explains that we are all different and equally valid whatever the color of our skin, our sexual preference, our appearance, or our habits. The truth is that, although he may not realize it, under that same premise, the author is equating me, for example, with an Islamic State jihadist; and that just won’t do, because I am much more vicious than any of them when it comes to torturing woke authors.
Another of these stories is about a little girl, a feminist heroine, who goes around teaching lessons to older men that seem to have the combined intelligence of a fossilized mussel. I also found a story about the life of a refugee child, which is like a never-ending yawn; I tried to read it and fell asleep before I reached the first boat drifting across the Mediterranean. How can an author be so inept as not to even deliver something moving about a child refugee? The answer is easy: because they don’t write with their heart; they write with their ideology.
I wonder what is worse: that children’s authors and publishers have gone mad or that teachers and librarians in seemingly decent schools are allowing such a collection of garbage into their classrooms. As a writer, I’m considering launching a legal campaign against all of them. It takes me many hours a week to get people to read each of my paragraphs with a certain degree of enjoyment and attachment, and even more to fish for new readers among the younger public. What I don’t need now is a whole generation of children discouraged from reading entirely because of an obsession with political correctness, and the fact that the right wing hardly ever wants to fight the cultural battle against the left. Perhaps the best defense is a good offense. I’m thinking of writing a children’s story about a superhero who eats idiots who pester children about recycling, equality, social justice, and global warming.
I don’t even want to think about the traumatic experience that these new generations of children will have when they think about books. It has never been easy to inculcate the habit of reading. But the fact is that these people, hell-bent on indoctrinating children in stories about environmentalism, immigration, homophobia, and other obsessive-compulsive leftist disorders, are not cultivating in them the habit of reading, but the habit of torture. Torture and, what is worse, submission.
I am not in favor of burning books. In fact, I wrote several outraged articles when Canada decided to burn Asterix, Tintin, and Lucky Luke books, among others, as part of a “ceremony of reconciliation with indigenous peoples,” and on other similar occasions. Anyway, in the case of this trendy, boring new children’s literature, I’m not advocating flames, but rather suggesting alternative uses. I have found that the book about the refugee works wonderfully as a wedge under the living room furniture. The one about the feminist girl is the perfect target for the neighborhood kids to try to hit with their Indian bows and arrows. And the one with the little monster, which has a fluorescent cover, I’m using that one as a coaster for when I’m hosting parties.
And, although I am against burning books, if the cold wave continues to set unconstitutional temperatures, I will seriously consider dropping them in the fireplace while raising a glass of cognac in memory and homage to all the old authors of real children’s literature — adventures, fairies, princesses, heroes — that the woke culture intends to cancel, along with one of the most important passions in life, the love of reading.
