While painfully ruminating on certain current negative phenomena (viz. book banning, censorship, and xenophobia) our thoughts, somehow, wandered back to the time of our senior year in High School and a memorable character, “Geenzie” or, properly, “Jeremy Klotz.” Geenzie was physically unable to join our coterie of friends who regularly played basketball after school in the schoolyard and rarely accompanied us to dances and parties for the same reason as his non-participation in sports. Geenzie was fat, big-bellied, with short arms and legs, and haplessly, clumsy and poorly coordinated.
Thus, there was scant reason to befriend and socialize with him, with the sole and compelling exception that his family owned one of the rare, newly developed, color televisions with a wider-than-usual screen, acquired by the good fortune of his father, Albert’s, employment as Assistant Manager at the corner appliance store. On most Saturday afternoons, in the appropriate season, we would assemble, at Geenzie’s living room, to enjoy colorfully watching College football games. However, such opportunity to watch College football games in color and on a bigger screen had its countervailing considerations; his apartment was eternally, uncomfortably hot, which latter feature enhanced the less-than-aesthetic impact of the malodorous, deeply-couch-ensconced presence of Geenzie. But, properly, to our theme.
While, we regularly indulged in neighborhood sports and greatly appreciated and much-lauded the demonstrated high skill of the uniquely talented televised players, Geenzie, by contrast, who was as athletic and supple as a burlap sack of stale Vidalia Onions, would loudly and emphatically, deprecate every instance of an incomplete pass or failed tackle. The ironic recollection that he needed to struggle, simply to free himself from the soft surface of his couch yet unashamedly, had arrogated to himself the franchise to jeer and comment at every failed play (albeit by such especially talented football players), informs our present, analogous understanding of the nature of the ironically, low caliber of the book banners, censors and xenophobes, the protagonists of our, disturbing ruminations, as stated above.
Those many of us who have valuably and enjoyably included the reading of good literature in the woven fabric of our lives, empirically, could and would not, possess any desire to limit or restrict others’ literary choices The reader’s naturally developed enlightenment and acquired respect for nuanced interests, would, systemically, disincline him from such un-American, arrogant, and despotic activity. In our view, it has, eternally, been the semi-literate, reductionist, based upon some purported, moral or religious grounds, who would choose to trespass on such basic freedom. Such dedicated censors would appear to be more than adequately possessed of the qualities of ignorance and incapacity, and like Geenzie, hopelessly deficient in relevant skill or rectitude.
Identical principles apply to all ubiquitous species of hapless and un-American censorship of the written word, inclusive of the recent advent of the attempted arbitrary constraints relative to the tactical expurgation of academic education. Moreover, these tailors of expression and would-be diluters of empirical history have empirically, demonstrated the personal absence of a modicum of intellectual and moral basis, for their purported “self-righteous” and reductionist behavior. History, like creative writing, is not store-bought hanger merchandise, in need of alteration; and most emphatically, not by such consummately, reductive, and unskilled, tailors.
In addition to their colossal ignorant bias, we assign a “Geenzie” measure of ineptitude and lack of perspective to America’s selfish and provincial xenophobes, who remain in dedicated (MAGA) opposition to the immigration of foreign families, desperately seeking an acceptable way of life. Their myopic ignorance extends to their appalling lack of recognition that our Nation is (virtually, 100%) populated by immigrants and their progeny, (inclusive of the most radically biased and selfish xenophobe). We, as first-generation American citizens, have eternally sided with Lady Liberty, who forever raises her beacon as an invitation to needy immigrants; and as well, with her personal poet laureate, Emma Lazarus, that our fortunate nation, for moral and humanistic reasons, continues to admit foreign nationals, escaping from dangerous or impoverished countries; and seeking a better life, as did we and our forebears.
Notably, American citizens who have had the benefit of the broadening experiences of traveling abroad, and the enlightening satisfaction of social interaction with citizens of other countries and ethnicities, would predictably, refrain from espousing the xenophobic, ignorant prejudice, inherent in stagnant, provincial entities, as personified by our recollected, archetypal- schlemiel, Geenzie.
-p.
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