Al Goodwyn Editorial Cartoons by Al Goodwyn for February 23, 2023

Did the estate and publishers of Roald Dahl realize that language used was outdated and needed updating, or did they think that by doing so, it would create such a clamor among certain groups that warehouses of old books that weren’t selling would suddenly fly off the shelves to people who would rather burn books than read them?

What a load of crap! This has gone too far….I’m so sick of these " righteous twits" who want to change everything THEY deem wrong! Get a life!

You’re too late. The Democrars have turned Eric Blair’s masterpiece into an operations manual.

I believe the modified editions are the British editions.

Ah, right-wing projection is in full swing!

Considering recent actions by DeSantis and the Republican Nazi Party, and their reliance on the profound ignorance of their followers regarding the definition of the word ‘Woke’, Goodwyn and friends have been tasked to once again assault reality.

The fact that so many complain about this reeks of “nothing’s gonna change my world” syndrome. Story telling, literature, etc. changes constantly over time/place. (Are you reading the Bible in its original form?)

I think the allusion to “1984” is a bit of a stretch. Oceania, the governmental entity, was the censor there. The Dahl “controversy” seems to be a decision made by a private company. No one says you have to spend your $$$ buying the new version, right?

This has little to do with politics and more to do with money. Corporations seek to increase their customer base by softening content some deem offensive. Personally I find it offensive to the authors such as Roald Dahl, but it’s not like it’s something new. The oldest book in the world, the Bible, has been rewritten and edited so many times it’s hard to know what the author originally meant.

The people who OWN the intellectual property decided they will change the text. You are a right-wing “free market” capitalist aren’t you Goodwyn? Are you saying that the private individuals that own that intellectual property shouldn’t be allowed to make that decision? Are you saying that freedom only applies to people doing things that you like?

Nobody is making them do this.

Is that DeSantis’s office?

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What? The Right hasn’t banned 1984 yet?

Blah-blah-blah. Don’t like it—don’t read it.

Why does the right always seem to forget that Orwell was an atheist humanist who opposed fascism and totalitarianism, and explicitly supported democratic socialism? They try to claim him as one of their own somehow, just because he was anti-Stalinist. He would hate the current American right.

Editors have always had a say in what the author writes and in what is printed. They often request rewrites, even with published works before new printings are made due to misspellings, grammar, plot inconsistencies, etc. .

What gives WOKESTERS the right to make these changes anyways? Why are they supposedly experts and think they know better how to ruin a classic work by altering it, or tamper with other’s freedom of expression in story telling? WOKE is broke. Boycott it, don’t buy the books.

Sure Al; direct a lot of attention and concern to the horrible “wokeness” of polishing up the terminology in Roald Dahl’s fiction to distract from the mutilation of American History books in Florida and elsewhere.

I just found out I was woke, all this time I just thought I was good at history. Jon Stewart

Once again, it is a British publisher editing a British book.

All the censoring in the USA is sponsored by book hating gun loving republicons.

For a society that keeps rewriting Jan 6, the insurrection, why should this surprise anyone?

When republicans claim to be unwoke they are saying they are anti human fascist racists.

woke = alert to and concerned about social injustice and discrimination.

“he’s an activist and very woke”

DeSantis is a book burning racist who is very popular with right wing extremists.

Roald Dahl was a British novelist, short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, and wartime fighter ace of Norwegian descent. His books have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide. Dahl has been called “one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century”. WikipediaBorn: September 13, 1916, Llandaff, Cardiff, United KingdomDied: November 23, 1990, Oxford, United Kingdom

Any author whose books are altered, because the whiners don’t like “how it’s written”, is probably spinning in their graves!

It’s simple…don’t like it.DONT READ IT!

What a wuss society! Can’t handle any bump in their road! Wimpy wimpy wimpy‼️☹️

Yeah, we would never allow important things like the pledge of allegiance be altered or have words added. Some things you just don’t mess with, OK?

Insanity!

This has, and had nothing to do with any Democratic Party anything. Or liberal anything. Quite a number of liberal college professors have spoken out strongly against it.

This is a big company with a gaggle of young people’s books who have decided these (rather goofy) changes will get publicity and sell more books. Probably, it will.

You want an opinion from two very openly left wing college professors? Here ya go:

https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Feb21-2.html

We are assuming, per the headline, that at least one Fox personality railed against this news last night. We don’t have the stomach to check, but we think we are on safe ground with that guess. It’s also probably 90% that, sometime this week, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) will be announcing new legislation banning updated versions of Dahl books from Florida schools. We do know that British PM Rishi Sunak has already blasted the changes.

We have to say, we are basically with Sunak on this. Yes, there are some artifacts of the past best left in the past (e.g., Confederate statues). But materially altering someone’s art? As many prominent authors (particularly Salman Rushdie) noted yesterday, that’s pretty icky. It’s like painting clothes on the people who occupy the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or making the merchant of Venice into the bishop of Venice, or erasing Jim from Huckleberry Finn, or waiting until Paul McCartney has passed away and then changing the lyric from “Well, she was just seventeen” to “Well, she had just turned nineteen.” Obviously, the folks who own the rights to Dahl’s works are within their legal rights to change the books, but that doesn’t mean they should change the books.

That brings us to a second point. Several of the works of the aforementioned Mark Twain are potentially problematic to modern readers, especially those readers who don’t grasp the satirical tone. The works of Rudyard Kipling are outright problematic. The works of Alexandre Dumas. The works of Loui

don’t want the poor to figure how the rich capitalist have been manipulating and using them for well over a hundred years, that is why they oppose critical race theory, imagen when the poor whites find out they were treated worse than the blacks and manipulated into attacking blacks by those who sold their jobs to the so called communist chinese.