"Pope Francis' [BLEEP!] May Be Bigger Than Anyone Dreamed"

The title of this blog post is an homage to Jimmy Kimmel's brilliant "This Week In Unnecessary Censorship," a recurring bit on Kimmel's show in which video clips of mostly politicians, but also other famous people are shown, altered by Kimmel's staff with unnecessary bleeps and blurs to make it look as if, for example, George Bush Sr were swearing like a sailor, or as if Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain and Northern Ireland were mooning the public before hot cameras. Kimmel is too modest, of course: what he's doing is quite useful in pointing out how ridiculous censorship is. Here comes the headline from this blog, but uncensored. Clutch your pearls:

"Pope Francis' Reforms May Be Bigger Than Anyone Dreamed"

I bet a lot of you were thinking that the bleeped word was a lot naughtier than "reforms"!

What has prompted me to such disgusting behavior? The Ban Bossy movement, is what. Sheryl Sandberg, CEO of Facebook, wants us to stop saying "bossy" because it discourages girls from leading, or so some people say. I don't want to discourage girls from leading. But I also don't want people to tell me stop using this or that word. Telling me to do that is... Oh, what's the right word for something like that? ... It's on the tip of my tongue.

As I pointed out in two recent Wrong Monkey posts, here and here, and in other blog posts and elsewhere, I don't think that banning individual words is a great idea. Or even so much as a mediocre one. I agree with the goals of the PC speech movement: empowerment. Overcoming discrimination. Increasing people's respect for one another. Yes, yes, yes! Sign me up for all of that. But I think that the method of the PC speech movement, identifying individual words and then discouraging people from using those words, is just fucking awful.

You want to talk about language? Okay, let's talk about language. Let's get down and dirty and nitty and gritty and talk about it. Kim Keating has jumped aboard the Ban Bossy bandwagon. What's that? you never heard of Kim Keating? Me neither. Let's see how she describes herself in her HP Blogger's Bio:

"Kim Keating is founder and managing director of Keating Advisors. With over 18 years of experience, Kim serves as a trusted advisor to individuals and leading organizations. Under her guidance and expertise, Kim helps organizations develop a clear talent management vision and strategy. She specializes in working with leaders to align their strategy and build compensation systems that are objective, transparent, and support fair and equal pay. She help individuals negotiate more effectively and women, in particular, to level the playing field by providing customized compensation data."

Never heard of Keating Asvisors? Let's see how they describe themselves:

"Keating Advisors is a strategic human resource consulting firm that helps clients develop innovative talent management strategies and reward systems."

For all I know, Ms Keating and Keating Associates may be brilliant at helping companies, and, in particular, at getting fair and competitive pay for women. And if they are, that's great. That's very important work. But if after 18 years as a human resources consultant, she can't hire somebody who can write better than that, then she's one of the last people I want telling me how to use language.

We've got POETS for that sort of thing. I can't say it enough, I want the same things that advocates of PC speech want, and I couldn't disagree more strongly with their methods in trying to achieve those goals. I'm not going to support PC speech, and I'm not going to try to advance someone to the chairmanship of General Electric based on her or his skill at writing sonnets. And that's that.

The Index

The Catholic Index, that is. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum of 1948. It's a beautiful thing. There are a lot of wonderful books on that list. Spinoza is there. And Descartes. Defoe made the cut, but only his The History of the Devil is on the list, and none of his novels. Zola , Emile, that is, is on the Index: "Opera omnia." Another Zola, Guiseppe, an 18th-century painter, has six works on the list, in Latin and Italian. Martin Heidegger is not on the Index, but Ioannes Henricus Heideggerus, Opera omnia, was indexed in 1669, and Johann Conrad Heidegger, Reflexionen eines Schweizers über die Frage: Ob es der catholischen Eidgenossenschaft nicht zuträglich wäre, die regularen Orden gänzlich aufzuheben oder wenigstens einzuzchränken?, in 1769.

No, I'd never heard of the older Zola nor of the two older Heideggers.

There was this wonderful Bavarian novelist and humorist, Oskar Maria Graf, who responded to the Nazis' book-burning early in 1933 with an open letter entitled "Verbrennt mich!" ("Burn Me!"), in which he pointed out that the Nazis had burned titles written by a fairly comprehensive list of great, good and competent German writers, and demanded to know why he was not one of them. "I have done nothing to deserve such an insult!" he wrote. (Shortly after the letter was published the Nazis obliged Graf: they burned his books and took away his citizenship. He escaped to the US and lived the last several decades of his life in Washington Heights in Manhattan, in a neighborhood which was sometimes referred to as "the Fourth Reich" because a lot of German refugees settled there.) Anyway, going over the Index sort of reminds me of Graf and the Nazi book-burnings: every now and then you notice that someone's missing from the list who really didn't deserve the insult of not being mentioned alongside those other greats. Francis Bacon and John Milton and Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson are on the Index -- why not Henry Fielding?! Why, I oughtta... Why are Voltaireand Renanon the Index, but neither Schopenhauernor Nietzsche? Why Heinebut not Marx? Why so many Lutheran theologians, but not Lutherhimself, nor Melanchthon? Why Giordano Brunobut neither Copernicusnor Galileo?

But of course, that's how it is with any great reading list: if it interests you at all, chances are that you would've liked to see a lot of items on it which were omitted.

It may have occurred to you, gentle reader, that I don't seem to be taking the list seriously either as a warning against sinful books, nor as an outrage of censorship. Right. I don't take it seriously either of those ways, I can't. Maybe it was an effective tool of censorship as recently as 1948, I don't know. I sort of doubt it. The Index was begun in 1559, not all that long after printing had become widespread in Europe, and back then, of course, censorship was a very serious matter indeed, and books got people killed in large numbers. By 1948, however, it's hard for me to see how the Index still could've been for anyone more than it is for me: a wonderful list of suggestions for reading, and a source of great amusement.

Not that I would imagine that every item on the Index is a great read. Many of the books seem to be harsh criticisms of Catholicism from a Protestant point of view, and such things are dreary to me, about as dreary as Catholic condemnations of Protestantism, or Armenian condemnation of Greek Orthodoxy, or Orthodox attacks on Copts, and they area all intensely boring to me for very similar reasons. They are all deadly serious defenses of this or that version of a fairy tale.