F**king Mondays: Are We Really Censoring Roald Dahl?

Dahl is a bigot, but that doesn't mean we should rewrite his work.

The BFG: illustration by Quentin Blake

Welcome to another edition of “F**king Mondays! Many of you are off work for Presidents Day, so I hope you are taking advantage of the federal holiday instead of reading this column… Anyway, here’s your handy guide to the upcoming week!:

Censoring Roald Dahl

Puffin books and the Roald Dahl Story Company hired a “sensitivity organization” for children's books called Inclusive Minds to repurpose Dahl’s children’s books so that, according to Puffin, the books "can continue to be enjoyed by all today". Via CBS:

Descriptions of characters as "fat," "ugly" and "crazy" have been removed from the works in an attempt to bolster body-positivity and more sensitive depictions of mental health. Some gendered descriptions have also been removed from the texts, changing what had previously been references to "boys and girls" as "people" or "children," reported the Telegraph, who also said that a previous description of the character Miss Trunchbull in "Matilda" as a "most formidable female" has been changed to a "most formidable woman."

The paper also reported that new passages, which were not written by Dahl, have been added to the texts. 

"In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: 'There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that,'" said the Telegraph.

Other changes include references to color. In The BFG, for example, the Big Friendly Giant no longer wears a “black” cloak, and characters don’t turn “white with fear”.

You are going to be hearing a lot more about this given the story is almost perfectly scripted to further inflame the culture wars. I don’t really wish to add to the cacophony, but here’s my take.

I grew up reading Roald Dahl and his books had a huge impact on my life. From classics like Matilda and The BFG to more obscure titles like Danny The Champion Of The World and his fantastic autobiographies Boy and Going Solo, I read pretty much everything Dahl wrote. I couldn’t wait to read the stories to my kids, and I ignored rumblings about his work when they appeared 10 years ago alongside hardcore identity politics movement. But when my eldest was old enough, I found myself editing some of the language while reading it to him. Some of the passages really are pretty offensive, particularly in regards to women and overweight people.

There had been a more recent uproar over antisemitic comments Dahl had made that I had also decided not to look into — mostly because I was fed up watching my childhood heroes outed as malevolent predators (Bill Cosby and Michael Jackson for example), and wanted something to hold onto. But now I was reading him to my children I felt I had to rip off the bandaid, so to speak.

Unfortunately Dahl’s comments were shocking and left me feeling quite shaken. In an interview with The New Statesman in 1983, Dahl said he believed “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity.”

“Maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews,” he went on. “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere.”

“Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

In an interview with The Independent in 1990, just months before his death, Dahl wanted it to be publicly known that he was “certainly anti-Israeli, and I’ve become antisemitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism.”

“We all know about Jews and the rest of it,” he continued. “There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do – that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel.”

It took me some time to come to terms with these comments and decide on whether I wanted to continue reading his books. After some thought, I made the decision to dive back in — only because of the powerful impact his stories had had on me as a child. My five year old is fascinated by Dahl’s wicked sense of humor, his weird and wonderful characters, and the subversive themes in his books. He also loves the vivid descriptions of country life in England and is spellbound by Dahl’s powerful imagination.

I am editing the books as I read them because I don’t want him to think being fat is bad, or that it is OK to call women “hags” and “ugly”. When he’s old enough to read them himself, I’m going to give him the original copies and explain to him why I find some of the passages objectionable. I’m also going to tell him that while Dahl was a talented writer, he was also a racist and a misogynist. This is his legacy, and people need to know the truth about him and make decisions for themselves — and that includes children old enough to read him.

Puffin Books and the Roald Dahl Story Company’s decision to hire “inclusion, diversity, equality and accessibility” experts to whitewash his record reeks of corporate greed more than anything else. They want to rewrite his legacy because they stand to make a lot of money from his work — and in the current political climate his work is, as every good social justice warrior would say, “problematic”.

Some of the edits made by Inclusive Minds aren’t horrible, but others are patently ridiculous. Changing the color of the BFG’s cloak and the gender of make fictional creatures is symptomatic of a political ideology gone truly mad. I don’t spend a lot of time writing about identity politics extremism on the left because there are more important topics to cover (like the violent extremism on the right), but the movement really is getting out of control. You can’t make the world a safe space by controlling speech, and we aren’t doing children any favors by omitting inconvenient truths about history.

If parents and teachers have a problem with Dahl’s work, they should make the edits themselves, or explain why the specific passages are offensive. Maybe they can find another children’s author without the baggage and let Dahl’s work die a death many believe it should do. I’m not ready for that yet, but I don’t object to others moving on.

An AI Chez?

In response to our replacement of Bob Cesca with an AI bot last week, a reader commented that:

I'm here for the AI Chez Pazienza, as long as his gf and kid get the royalties.

Bob and I discussed this on The Banter Roundtable podcast over the weekend and decided firmly against this. My reasoning is simple: if there is an afterlife, Chez will be waiting there for me with various forms of torture. I did actually ask ChatGPT to write a column in his voice, and the results were…..interesting. We’ll just leave it there.

Banter on The Banter

I love reading through member comments, so please keep them coming. A gem from over the weekend:

I really hope that the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit severely damages Fox News' ratings and its bottom line. The network should be fined the billion of dollars that the plaintiff is asking for, and just maybe, it might prevent them from duping the public as it did during the 2020 election coverage. And it still continues to do so even at the present moment. I wish in a perfect society that people like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and others like them are stripped of their lofty positions in "disinformation" journalism. Actually, it's not even journalism, as you have indicated. These "news" hosts are performance artists, nothing more. It's so sad that they have such a large audience of gullible dupes who believe the bullshit that they peddle. This is how divided our country has become since the coming of Dumpf. We are definitely in what has been called a "post-truth" era of our country.

I agree with Ben over the abominable attack by the right on the trans community. It is very offensive to direct this excessive anger toward such a marginalized community that has been physically attacked and even killed over decades now. When will this madness end? Those who continue these assaults on such a vulnerable community must be called out at every instance.

I am also outraged by what is being done in the Sunshine State by its fascistic governor who looks like Fred Flintstone all the more, in my opinion. I don't even enjoy visiting the state anymore because of the tense atmosphere there. It's actually the bad drivers that contribute to my unwillingness to travel down there.

As for your podcast's conclusion, it would really be fantastic if Donald Trump would finally be indicted - for something already, damn it!

Hope that Justin recovers from COVID-19 real soon.

This coming week

Justin will be writing about his experience with Covid, and I’m working on a big piece about the Dominion/Fox lawsuit for this week (see the reader comment above). We touched on it on the podcast, but this is a genuinely huge story that could have powerful ramifications for the media and the country. We’ll be going deeper into this issue on the podcast too. Bob’s column is an unknown at this point, so you’ll have to stay tuned to find out!

Catch up

Up to date with everything we’ve done this past week? If not, here you go:

The Banter Roundtable Podcast (Free): Explosive Fox News Texts, Ohio Conspiracies, And Tucker Severely Owned

The Emergency Meeting: Is Matt Gaetz Innocent? (Members)

Anti-Woke Comics Aren’t Just Wrong, They’re Bad At Comedy, Too (Members)

The Twitter Files Elon Musk And Matt Taibbi Don't Want You To Know About (Now unlocked)

Not a Banter Member yet? Get yourself a Membership for less than a cup of coffee each month!:

Wishing everyone a happy week!

Ben