An Argument Against Books

  Books are the biggest capitalist scheme ever. Why do we have to buy expensive encyclopedias? Well, authority figures say that we need to know all the information in the encyclopedias. But who benefits most from their purchase? These same so-called "experts" in their fields that write articles for encyclopedias. You buy the book, and they laugh all the way to the bank with un-told sums of money. The same goes for dictionaries, thesauruses and so on. When you buy a book of classic poetry (not cheaply mind you, those are all hard cover books) who is to say that it's really classic? After all, it sounds like junk to normal folks like you and me, and was quite probably translated from Latin or Greek or French or some other dead language. Who are we to know what it really says? These self-styled "PHD's" claim that they know better than we do. Who makes all the money when you buy another leather-bound volume of Baudelaire? That's right, it's those same stuffy professors who told you it wasn't a bunch of pessimistic frog hoohaw in the first place.
  Many books get you over and over again with all the marketing tie-ins. Read Macbeth? You'd shell out at least twenty bucks for theater tickets to see the play. And they're selling authentic Yorick skulls in the lobby at half-time, and the kids just have to have one. Then you're going to have to rent the video. It'd be better off if they'd just release it straight to video, but the military-academic-industrial establishment wants you to think that it's great literature, so that they can make another quick buck off the working class.
  Not only that, it takes trees to make books. When Robert Frost said "Whose woods these are, I do not know," he didn't continue to say "and we should chop them all down and make them into thousands of Harvard Press editions of poetry." Why do you think Gilgamesh chopped down the cedars of Lebanon? I bet it was so that he could print copies of his poorly edited epic.
  If people would just stick to the television and computer, the world would be better off. Electronic devices run on electricity, which burns much more cleanly than books ever could. If god had wanted us to write on paper, he would have given us laser printers. After they published 'Le Morte Darthur,' there were a lot less trees in England for all those knights to go stomping around in. Books are bad for the environment.
  It's all part of a vast conspiracy on the part of the military-academic-industrial complex. They want to keep the top five percent of the US population that can actually read and pronounce big words like "sarcasm" and "postmodern" in power. All the money spent on books goes into the hands of a very small but powerful group of English professors. We all can do our part to stop the tyranny. If you can't read now, don't start. Take what books you have and send them to Africa. The starving children there can cook them and eat them. Buy a computer and a TV and plug them in. Notice the nice comforting electronic whir? You don't get that kind of satisfaction out of a book. With everybody's cooperation, we can stop the oppression of 4000 years of literacy.

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