During one of my particularly frustrating evenings ironing out an HTML document, I thought about Gutenberg. Then I imagined Martin Luther and his opponents exchanging saucy polemics, printed in bulk and eagerly devoured by the public. The printing press was the first champion of freedom of information. It is a shame that over the years it has been confiscated and locked away, guarded by those who are obsessed with controlling what people are allowed to read.
The first time it happened I rolled my eyes. The second time I felt mildly irritated. And the third? Well, I was just plain pissed off.
In a six-month period, while reading novels for my book club, I encountered three instances of an author making some cozy reference to Karl Marx – Marx at the graveyard, Marx on the bookshelf, and fond memories of reading Marx on a carefree summer day.
If one of the characters had been a rabid history professor on a rant, or perhaps a teenage ideologue on a mission to destroy capitalism, then references to Karl Marx would have fleshed out the character and enhanced the story. But no such characters appeared in the three vastly different novels. The Marx references were superfluous. Those brief allusions, dangling mid-paragraph like a turkey’s wattle, seemed more like words meant to appease someone, perhaps to reassure the publisher that the author embraced the correct thoughts.
The prevalence of (what I think is misleadingly called) a progressive ideology within the publishing industry is no secret, but I was not fully aware of the scope and the depth of it until I slipped past a checkpoint and entered the exclusive community.
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