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Cover down, cover up Turning the Book -- and the Clock? -- BackwardBy Rick Horowitz
Solid citizen (busybody) that I am, when I see something amiss, I try to fix it. If the car parked right in front of my neighborhood breakfast place still has its headlights on, I make sure I tell someone -- or even a couple of someones -- inside, so they can track down the driver before the battery goes dead. If something long and metallic falls out of the back of a passing truck -- this actually happened yesterday -- I run out into the middle of the street and carry the thing back to the curb so it doesn't blow out someone's tire or force someone to swerve out of its way and maybe lose control and hop the curb and wipe out a pedestrian or two. Just trying to help. But it's not only the big things that get me involved; even the little disarrays trip my trigger. I can be browsing the bins at my local music store and notice there's a CD in the wrong place, alphabetically speaking; more often than not, I'll put it back where it belongs. Like I said, a solid -- if slightly obsessive -- citizen. Which is how I came to be flipping James Carville at Barnes & Noble the other day: just fixing someone's mistake. Or so I thought. You know how bookstores display their books, don't you? Most of the books are shelved sideways, so only their spines are showing. But the big sellers, the hot books -- they get shelved the wide way, a whole stack of each of them, so they're each facing front. Bigger display means better display, which means more browsers, which can mean more sales. Except that -- I was strolling through the "Current Affairs" section at the time -- there was James Carville's book shelved the wide way, but with its backside showing. Somebody had obviously glanced at the book -- "Had Enough? A Handbook for Fighting Back" -- perhaps had thumbed through a few pages, and had put it back on the shelf facing the wrong direction. I quickly set matters straight, and there was Carville's bruised and bloodied mug staring out at the world again, exactly as his publisher had intended. My good deed for the day, so now I could -- But wait. There, on the top shelf, right above Carville, was another book that had somehow been put back backward: "The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America," by Eric Alterman and Mark Green. And on the third shelf, right below Carville, there was yet another book turned backward: Richard Clarke's explosive "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror." This was odd. Actually, this was more than odd. So I kept looking -- and finding. On the fourth shelf, "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush," by John W. Dean, President Nixon's former counsel and a man who knows something about secretive White Houses. John Dean -- turned around. And in the next bookcase, Arianna Huffington ("Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America") -- turned around. Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose ("Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America") -- turned around. Paul Krugman ("The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century") -- turned around. Michael Moore ("Dude, Where's My Country?") -- turned around. Even John Kerry ("A Call to Service: My Vision for a Better America") -- turned around. By this time, I'd gone well beyond the land of innocent mistakes, of coincidence. Someone had obviously decided to flip these particular books, decided to hide their covers and try to muzzle their messages. There were plenty of conservative books, pro-Bush books, on the shelves, too, but none of them was turned around. Sean Hannity was free to "Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism." He was free to "Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism." Only the administration's critics had received the special treatment. It wasn't a total rout. The third "Current Affairs" bookcase, I noticed, hadn't been tampered with; even the critics were still visible. The phantom book flipper must have run out of time -- or maybe someone walked by. Purifying a bookstore is the kind of thing a person prefers to do in private, don't you think? Did this particular person have so little faith in the strength of his own arguments, or in the judgment of his fellow Americans, that he couldn't risk a fair fight between competing ideas? Or had he decided for the rest of us that the ideas and opinions he happened to disagree with shouldn't even be allowed to compete? That's pretty scary. There's more than a letter's difference between book turning and book burning -- but how different is the impulse? Posted 4/27/04. Get
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Rick Horowitz
