The Comstocks Try for a Comeback on Long Island

by Gregory Bresiger

"Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it…Burn all, burn everything. Fire is light and fire is clean." (Captain Beatty in the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451.)

Some Irish people don’t like Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. Well then, let’s burn it.

And that is what is planned by some groups of "proud Irishmen and Limerick men," who are scheduled to burn 700 copies of Angela’s Ashes at Lily Flanagan’s Bar in Rockville Centre, in Long Island, New York, on March 11.

A perennial best seller since its publication in 1996, the book details McCourt’s impoverished childhood in Limerick in the Irish Republic. Angela’s Ashes is a bittersweet memoir. It recounts the story of a boy growing up with a drunken father, who insisted that the boys pledge themselves to "die for Ireland," and of an Irish Catholic Church that McCourt believes was uninterested in his family’s trials. The author seems to delight in ending the book by telling of his affair with an American woman, much to a chagrin of a Catholic priest. McCourt has mixed feeling about his mother. He is obviously a man who has never forgotten the bitter experiences of his childhood.

McCourt, whose work was recently made into a movie, also wrote harsh words about his mother and depicts Limerick in the 1930s as a dreadful place. He questions his father’s decision to take his family from an America in the midst of the Great Depression, back to an Ireland that was also suffering economic hard times. His mother’s later remarriage also troubled McCourt, who later immigrated to the United States and became an English teacher in the New York City public schools.

McCourt’s book has become an incredible success, making millions of dollars. After staying on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for a few years, it is now at the top of the paperback bestseller list. But David Crowe, the owner of the bar and the organizer of the book burning, says McCourt’s book "absolutely desecrated his mother (in the book and the movie).…That was absolutely despicable. This is the strongest way I could think of to make a statement," he told the Irish Voice newspaper.

Indeed, Crowe, if he is telling the truth, may not realize that he is on a holy mission – a mission to prove H.L. Mencken right. The sage of Baltimore said America was the land of the boob and that "no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

Crowe confirms Mencken’s judgment when he reports that he has contacts with people around the country about his event and the response has been "99% positive." He says he has lined up hundreds of people who will join in the book burning party. He conceded that book burning was wrong, "but this is how I felt would be the strongest way to get people’s attention."

Rest easy, Henry Mencken. However, Mencken also wrote about the enlightened minority, that small group of people who he said would be the ones who didn’t fit in, those few who revolted against the political correctness of all ages.

McCourt’s brother, Malachy McCourt, also an author and a former bar owner, says, "They were burning books in Hitler’s Germany around the time period that the book was written. To think that mentality is still around today is pretty scary."

The Irish Freedom Committee agrees. It is planning to give away copies of Angela’s Ashes. (There he goes again. Between the burnings and the giveaways, Frank McCourt probably just went into another income tax bracket).

The committee wants to "highlight the disdain most Irish-Americans feel for the book burning." This book burning, which will likely be covered by most of the idiot box clowns of the New York City media, is yet another illustration of the law of unintended consequences.

Party A sets out to accomplish X. But his plan is ill conceived and counterproductive. He ends up accomplishing Y, which is the opposite of X. (In this case, he encourages more, not fewer, people to read the book in question. The Comstocks ultimately made Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie into a best seller with their objection to the book’s supposed obscenity. In the 1920s, irate clergymen burned Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry, later made into a successful movie with Burt Lancaster. The book became a bestseller and 75 years later is still a part of our language and culture. But who, today, remembers the hyenas who burned the book?).

An illustration of above principle is a comment by a playwright friend of mine. She generally has little interest in Ireland, its culture or history. She traveled there a few years ago and had a thoroughly unpleasant trip. When I told her about Angela’s Ashes a few years ago she told me she had no intention of reading it. What did she say when I informed her of this Angela’s Ashes cause celebre?

"Oh, wow. I’m going to have to read it now," she said. Crowe and his friends just put a little more money in McCourt’s deep and still deeper pockets. (Hey, maybe he can go out there to the Long Island pub and buy the gang a round!)

Not only are the book burners blundering clowns of the first order, but they are feeding an environment of intolerance that, in effect, promotes the crushing of ideas, instead of meeting them in the marketplace of ideas with better ones. They are – in their small and I hope insignificant way – attempting to weaken a tradition of tolerance that – at times – has been represented by Erasmus, Spinoza, John Stuart Mill and John Milton, among others. But as Erasmus stated in his wonderful little book, The Praise of Folly, "the number of fools is infinite." Book burning is as American as war, lawless government and political correctness.

Before we burn the books (and then maybe some bothersome people?) we find unpleasant, discomforting or even annoying, before we try to stamp out those experiences and ideas that don’t jive with our ethnic, religious or family experiences, before we follow in the footsteps of our yahoo forefathers who tried to prohibit the teaching of Goethe or the playing of Beethoven during World War I, before we send John Rocker to the gas chamber, we should pause for a moment and remember this: Those who play with fire should think about the warnings of the great German poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). More than a century before Hitler came to power and burned books, he warned that, "Where they would burn books, they would burn people."

Gregory Bresiger, a business writer and editor in Kew Gardens, New York, has written for The Free Market and The Journal of Libertarian Studies. He is at work on a series on Social Security for Lew Rockwell. com.