Academic

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Why should The Strand survive? As it happened, on my last trip The Strand had n?

By Ed Driscoll

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Why should The Strand survive?

As it happened, on my last trip The Strand had none of the books I was looking for. I wasn?t searching for any viciously right-wing tracts. The store had simply decided to go big and long on the ?improving? literature that it seeks to push on New Yorkers (Kendi, Coates, DiAngelo and all the rest) and it had done so at the expense of the variety and pluralism it once displayed. For instance near the front entrance on my last visit there stood a considerable quantity of the book (notorious to the readers of this publication) titled In Defense of Looting. Were I not on a guest in the country I should have picked up that whole steaming pile, walked out of the door and dumped them on the kerbside. For aside from believing that the author of that book should be taken at their word, it is quite something for a shop in a town that recently suffered an outbreak of looting to be prominently promoting a book which explains not only why ?all cops are bastards? but why the looting of other people?s businesses ? businesses sometimes just as old and venerable as The Strand, incidentally ? is not just fine but justified. Of course a store should stock a book. But what they push tells you where they stand.

So I understand why people might flock to The Strand when the call goes out to save it. They lingered there for many an hour in their student years. Which literary visitor to the city has not, in the past, left the place with an overweight luggage-case full of books? But The Strand is not the store that it once was. It has become another improbable victim of the culture wars, offering an ever-smaller selection of ?good-for-you? fare to a clearly dwindling number of customers. Sad, but not inevitable.

It’s telling that uber-woke books such as the aforementioned ??improving? literature? and the now infamous In Defense of Looting don?t sound like they?re flying off the shelves even in far left Manhattan, the city with the reincarnation of Batman?s Marxist supervillain Bane as their mayor, and a shrinking population of true leftist believers as his constituency.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on November 01, 2020 (boomark / email).