Of Bill O'Reilly, Hoising, and Petards

 

A modern day petard,
You didn’t really want to see a photo of Bill O'Reilly, did you?

We begin, Gentle Reader, with a short lesson in vocabulary and etymology in reference to the title of this entry.  Most people know the word “hoist” as either a verb meaning to raise up or as a noun meaning the mechanism by which that raising up is accomplished.  

Its most common usage today, however, may be in the expression “hoist by his own petard,” an expression employed by the title character in Act III of Hamlet.  (A petard is a medieval gunpowder-based bomb.)  In this expression, “hoist” is not a verb per se, but rather the past participle of the verb “hoise,” a verb meaning pretty much the same thing, but which has long since fallen into disuse. 

We do understand the expression correctly, however: to be hoist by one’s own petard is literally to be blown up by one’s own bomb, or figuratively to be undone by one’s own scheme.  Perhaps the best example in mythology (and subsequently in dramatic literature) is Oedipus, who would not have found himself in quite that relationship with his birth parents had he not attempted to avoid the fate foretold by the oracle.

Anyway, the most recent victim of such self-inflicted damage is the insufferable Bill O’Reilly.  Like so many other right-wing talking heads (Beck, Carlson, Ingraham, et al.), O’Reilly started out as a conservative-leaning commentator who not infrequently actually had something to say, but subsequently took a hard turn into Loonyville when it became apparent he could achieve more fame and fortune by doing so.  Even if O’Reilly weren’t a sexual predator, Curmie would have no sympathy for him. 

The source of the heady aroma of schadenfreude that currently fills the air is the news that two of O’Reilly’s books—Killing Jesus: A History and Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency—are among books that have been at least temporarily pulled by Florida’s Escambia County School District lest they run afoul of Ron DeSantis’s purge of books that anyone anywhere might allege “to contain pornography or obscene depictions of sexual conduct.” 

The chances that O’Reilly’s books actually meet any reasonable interpretation of the criteria for removal is remarkably close to zero, but the same could be said for the overwhelming majority of the literally thousands of other  books similarly pulled from the shelves (see below).  O’Reilly’s objection just got more play, both because people recognize his name and because he was an outspoken proponent of DeSantis’s censorial machinations.

Like most such authoritarian regulations, those currently embroiling Floridians appear to have started as a legitimate concern.  There is little doubt that some books inappropriate for young readers found their way into a few school libraries, and some small percentage of librarians and school administrators failed to provide appropriate safeguards.  But “protecting the children” does not include sheltering them from realities like the facts that slavery and segregation are very much a part of this nation’s history, that gay people exist, or that “loving America” is not the ideology-free perspective the right wing proclaims it to be.

More importantly, perhaps, is that O’Reilly is actually right about one thing (insert stopped clock analogy here): the law as written is disastrously, almost certainly unconstitutionally, vague.  As Curmie wrote about a similar exercise in censorship in Utah last spring, “excluding everything you want to exclude while not forbidding what you don’t want to forbid requires language skills surpassing those of the average state legislator,” and censorial reactionaries are even less likely than the average pol to craft such a bill.

That’s why one Utahn (that’s the correct term, apparently) sought to have the Bible removed from schools: “Incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide…. You’ll no doubt find that the Bible, under Utah Code Ann. § 76-10-1227, has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition.”  According to the law, the complainant has a point, as no “socially redeeming value” exception is allowed.

The drafters of such legislation have two things in common: 1). they aren’t really interested in protecting children, but rather on ensuring that their weltanschauung is the only one permitted (OK, they wouldn’t use that word; it’s not ‘Merkin, after all), and 2). they’re relying on selective enforcement leading to prior restraint to do their dirty work.

In Florida, Ron DeSantis’s minions over-stepped in a different way.  By holding individual librarians responsible criminally responsible for allowing one of those naughty books to go unsuppressed, and by attaching absurd penalties for those alleged crimes of omission, they’ve prompted precisely the reaction we see now. 

If a single complaint from a parent (sorry, the internal link in Curmie’s piece is now behind a paywall) can get a 25-year-old episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney” about Ruby Bridges pulled from classrooms lest students come to the obvious and irrefutable conclusion that at a particular moment in time “white people hated black people,” then the Trouble right here in River City isn’t pool, but something that rhymes with pool: Fool, in the person of the Governor of Florida.

Curmie can’t be sure if the recent removal by the same school district that pulled O’Reilly’s books of Webster’s Dictionary for Students, along with over 2800 (!) other books, for potentially violating the state law against “sexual content” was precipitated by an actual concern or as a means of showing just how remarkably stupid the law is.  Curmie fears the suppression was  spawned by the former, but there is no doubt that the latter has been amply demonstrated.

To be fair (sort of), although Curmie doesn’t have immediate access to that particular volume, he suspects that more than a few words involving sexuality may well be spelled and defined therein.  It’s a dictionary! 

Revenons à nos moutons: feeling too much sympathy for hypocrites like Bill O’Reilly, who were all for censorship of other people’s books, may be too big of an ask.  But perhaps, just perhaps, his notoriety might initiate a review, not of books which happen to include a gay character or suggest that slavery may not have been such a good idea, but of a ridiculous, anti-intellectual, ethically unenforceable, and (dare I say it?) un-American law imposed at the behest of one of the country’s foremost proponents of governmental thought control. 

Even Curmudgeons can dream.