Today someone opened fire on a public event in Tucson (about an hour south of here) and killed a judge and a nine year old girl, and wounded a great many other people, including a member of the US House of Representatives. I don't know why this tragedy happened. I don't know who, or what, set this guy off. But I've been reading comments on various news websites, and everyone seems to be trying to make something out of the books that this obviously disturbed individual listed on some website or another.
"He read Mein Kampf, therefore he's a Nazi!"
"He read The Communist Manifesto, therefore he's a Communist!"
I read The Lord of the Rings - does that make me a hobbit?
Give it a rest, people. I've read most of the books on this guy's list, and I'm not a Nazi, a Communist, an anarchist, or a murderer. Sometimes a book is just a book. (Speaking parenthetically, it sometimes surprises me that books like Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto are not required reading in modern Western society - if only to serve as examples of how things can go terribly wrong when intellectual rigor does not keep pace with ideological fervor.)
There's a bizarre and to my mind most disturbing anti-intellectualism brewing in America, where just reading a book makes people suspect that you're a pinko commie fellow-traveler or a schnapps-fueled SA thug. And even listing them as favorite books doesn't make you a believer either. I really liked 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I don't think that I'm Heywood Floyd or imagine that black monoliths really tinker with us. And it's entirely possible for one to read Mein Kampf and find it an important book without putting on an armband and setting fire to synagogues (though I caution the reader that I view it as important in the sense of helping us to recognize that kind of institutional insanity and head it off at the pass before another 50 million people have to die).
This is one of the reasons I have some trouble defining myself by any one given political label - I don't like the idea of party elders sitting in judgment on my intellectual orthodoxy or telling me what or how to think. And this sort of thing is becoming very common in America. Not that I necessarily regard myself as an intellectual - but I hate being told what to think.
The right seems to demand ideological orthodoxy in the face of facts, such as the modern right's definition of Nazi ideology as "socialist" - ask Gregor Strasser just how socialist the Bavarian Nazis were. Go on, just ask him.* The far left demands obeisance to bizarre postmodern ideas like the relativism of science, that a "feminist physics" would be just as "valid" as the physics promulgated by all those Dead White Europeans like Max Planck and Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein (don't get me started on postmodernism - it makes me foam at the mouth).
Sorry, I just can't roll with any of that.
And in the end, a book is just a book. One of the mantras of the political right is "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." If that's true, then books don't have bad ideas; stupid minds have bad ideas. And leave the books out of it, please.
*He's dead. You can't.
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