Ugh.

Why I Threw Away My Copy of Gone with the Wind

I threw away my copy of Gone with the Wind.

It wasn’t easy. The book spent a couple of weeks sitting recycling-adjacent before I came up with the will to toss it into the bin. I held it in my hands one last time, and I kissed the title page where my father had inscribed: “To Beth. Christmas 1975.” And then I dropped it into the garbage.

Your father must be so, so proud. “Look at me! Look at how woke I am! Look at how performatively offended I am on your behalf! Bestow upon me your adulation and diversity points!”

Bah.

Look, I *hated* “Gone With The Wind” the one time I watched it, probably around 20 years ago. I despise all those Confederate ᛗᚩᛏᚻᛖᚱᚠᚪᛣᚳᛖᚱᛋ who got themselves statues. But these vapid yahoos who are so proudly tearing down statues of Confederates – and Columbus, and Ulysses S. Grant, and Thomas Jefferson, and Francis Scott Key, and George Washington and soon enough Lincoln and the Wright Brothers and Neil Armstrong and Edison and Einstein – are all human garbage. I would be happy to see Confederate statues removed by the cities that own them… removed from their plinths and hauled off to a museum somewhere, or melted down, whatever… so long as it was the cities and counties and states that are actually responsible for them doing so in a legally approved manner. But what we’re dealing with here *isn’t* local governments deciding that idealizing traitors is not such a good idea; no, what we have here are Marxists and SJWs and idiots (but then, I repeat myself) deciding to flush as much of history as they can down the can in the hopes that in the vacuum that follows they’ll be able to build a shiny new utopia upon fluff and lies.

So if you want to toss out your copy of “Gone With The Wind,” by all means do so; it’s yours. But you are aligned with people who would gladly throw out *every* copy if they could. And in aligning yourself with the worst humans the United States has to offer, you’re proudly tossing out mementos from your father. Nice.

Bah.

I personally do not own a copy of “Gone With The Wind.” No interest in it. But I *do* own quite a number of books that actually offend me. I’ve got a first edition of “Chariots of the Gods.” I’ve got a first edition of “Plain Facts” by Kellogg. “Worlds in Collision” by Velikovsky, “Magick in Theory and Practice” by Crowley, the Maleus Malificarum, “Fingerprints of the Gods” by Hancock, a first edition of “Flying Saucers have Landed” by Adamski, the Koran and a WWII-era “Mein Kampf.” I thought I had cheap paperbacks of “Communist Manifesto” and “Das Kapital,” but I do not recall seeing them since the move from Utah. But on the other hand I’ve got a whole shelf of “Skeptic” magazine back issues, books by Randi and Penn & Teller and Sagan and Shermer and Gardner; sci-fi by L. Neill Smith and Heinlein and Brin and Clarke and Lovecraft and Anvil and van Vogt and Anderson and Niven and Pournelle and Steele and Leinster and Piper. I  suspect Ms. “Drink In My Glory For I Threw Away One Book” may not have the same sort of diversity of thought on her bookshelf. Certainly less so now that she’s learned to love trashing literature.

If such things were real, if I could I’d probably have me a copy of the “Necronomicon.” I’d never *open* the damned thing, and I’d keep it wrapped in plastic, wrapped in aluminum foil, wrapped in asbestos, locked in an iron box and stuck in a safe deposit box somewhere. I’ve often found it quite useful to read that which I fundamentally disagree with:Creationist claptrap, flat Earth nonsense, leftist yammerings. One of these days I’ll probably get around to reading whatever literature has been cranked out by the Black Hebrew Israelites. It’s good to not only expand ones horizons, but also to know what those who would harm you have to say.