The woke censors come after Willy Wonka and James Bond
Censorship is bad enough, but now the censors imagine themselves to be writers.
Next they’ll probably form an association and start giving themselves awards in an annual televised gala. Wait until you see the gowns on the red carpet, with every inch of skin covered up in flannel, from the turtleneck collar to the closed-toe shoes. The ratings will be terrible but no network would dare refuse to broadcast it.
They can call themselves the Grand Association of Word Demolishers, or GAWD for short. They can name their award the Figly, after the fig leaves that a 16th-century pope ordered painted over nudity in art.
The very first GAWD Figly must be awarded to Puffin Books, the children’s publishing label of Penguin Random House in London, which proudly announced that it had hired “sensitive readers” to rewrite the beloved classics of the late author, Roald Dahl.
Dahl’s books have sold more than 300 million copies, but nobody’s going to win a GAWD Figly for that. No, the award goes to Puffin for infesting Dahl’s books with the silken prose of an HR manual.
The London Telegraph compared the newly sensitive editions with the earlier published books and logged the changes.
In “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the sensitivists objected to this phrase: “Like all extremely old people, he was delicate and weak.” They changed “all” to “most.”
“Fully grown women” became “fully grown people.”
“His face was like a monstrous ball of dough” was changed to “his face was like a ball of dough.”
So, no generalizing, no women, no monsters. Got it.
Here’s another one: “Mike Teavee himself had no less than eighteen toy pistols of various sizes hanging from belts around his body, and every now and again he would leap up in the air and fire off half a dozen rounds from one or another of these weapons.” This passage was not rewritten. It was removed.
“Get all that mud off your pants!” is now “Get all that mud off your trousers!”
I have no idea.
The Oompa-Loompas, who once were “tiny men — no larger than medium-sized dolls,” became “the little people,” and most other descriptions of them were removed.
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In the new “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” nothing is “crazy” (“bizarre” is preferred). “Turning quite pale” replaced “turning white,” but “a lovely pale oval madonna face” is now just “a lovely oval face,” and “red in the face” is now “hot under the collar.” In the new version, no one has a “mother and father” (just unspecified “parents”), “great flabby folds of fat” are simply “great folds” and Willy Wonka’s “orders” are now “instructions.”
Puffin did this to a collection of 17 Roald Dahl books, but the publisher didn’t do it alone. The effort was joined by the Roald Dahl Story Company, which controls the rights. The sensitive readers came from an organization called Inclusive Minds, which, the Telegraph reported, calls itself “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in chidren’s literature.” That is, in literature that somebody else wrote. Roald Dahl’s biographer told the newspaper, “Dahl typically worked seven days a week for a year on one of his full-length novels and was drained by the experience, which involved extensive rewriting as he worked, followed by a lively back-and-forth with his editor.”
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This is what the “collective” and its sensitive readers are demolishing, and this is why they’re a lock for the GAWD Figly, although, as they’d be the first to point out, everyone should get a trophy.
Certainly the estate of author Ian Fleming will take home one of the prizes. The creator of James Bond died in 1964 without purging all his 1950s-era spy novels of inappropriate language, so his estate is doing it for him.
Best-selling author Frederick Forsyth, an award-winning writer of thrillers, bashed the Bond rewrites in a TV interview with Piers Morgan. He warned that a lot of iconic books might fail the woke test. “If you try the Bible, I don’t think the Bible will survive,” Forsyth said.
Imagine winning a golden Figly for rewriting the Bible. It’s like a scene out of the Bible.
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Maybe there will even be a GAWD Figly category for cookbooks. Someone could fill a trophy case with awards for removing fat from the works of Julia Child.
This isn’t the first time the censorious scolds in our society have acted as if we’re all as fragile as spun sugar. Comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested multiple times for obscenity, just for doing stand-up comedy for paying customers. Arrested, put on trial, convicted and sentenced. For the words he spoke.
Maybe you didn’t know this, but Lenny Bruce, who died in 1966 at the age of 40, was pardoned in 2003 by New York Gov. George Pataki. It was the first posthumous pardon in New York history. Pataki called it “a declaration of New York’s commitment to upholding the First Amendment.”
That’s better treatment than Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming are getting in London, where there is no First Amendment protection for freedom of speech and the press, something that Prince Harry discovered to his immense dismay after he moved to the United States. The Duke of Sussex told the “Armchair Expert” podcast in May 2021, “I’ve got so much I want to say about the First Amendment as I sort of understand it, but it is bonkers.”
Another comedian.
But here’s the punch line. It only took one week for Roald Dahl’s publisher to back down. Penguin Random House announced last week that the company will release the sensitive collection now, but later this year they will release the books in their original form so “readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl’s stories they prefer.”
They’re calling the original books, “The Roald Dahl Classic Collection.”
This means the Coca-Cola company will have to pass the trophy for worst product roll-out in world history. At last, New Coke is out of the highlight reel.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley