The latest victim of weeks of violence, which has led cities like Seattle to act as if they were the Navajo Nation, is not just decimated cities, but an open mind.

The Far Left — i.e., the mainstream Democratic Party — is now endorsing yet another assault on our freedom — book-burning.  In 1933, students in Berlin set on fire roughly 25,000 great works, including, among others, those of Franz Kafka, Heinrich Heine, and Thomas Mann.  Such works did not comport with the state-imposed ideology.  We are now witnessing another totalitarian effort, likely to be imposed, if not through legislation, then at least through political arm-twisting and concomitant socioeconomic pressure, to control what we read, think, and believe.

The first step is removing any artistic work, whatever the medium, be it film, literature, art, or otherwise, whose depiction of blacks is anything but respectful.  By such logic, we must ban Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (The Prioress's story tells of a Christian child murdered by Jews), Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (self-explanatory) Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (we all remember Shylock), and Dickens's Oliver Twist (for those who forgot, Fagin was a Jew).  This is merely the tip of the iceberg.  We will then cull our artistic heritage and identify and ban every work critical of or offensive to American Indians, illegals, gays, the elderly, secularists, and any other self-identifying subgroup spawned by our obsession with identity politics.  One of the first victims of this purge will be the Bible.  God just didn't have the politically correct view of homosexuality and free love.  He was certainly too critical of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Remember the origin of the word "sodomy"?  I would like to believe that when all of this were said and done, we would still have comic books to read, but I suspect that our superheroes were far too dismissive of the rights of the villains they slew.  After all, weren't the superheroes racially profiling the Black Manta?

What are the underlying assumptions behind this lunacy?  First, the cultural Gestapo believes we are all too gullible and far too stupid to form our own judgments of right and wrong.  We shouldn't, for example, be able to see the film The Help because, despite its sympathetic portrayal of blacks, moviegoers will believe that the entire race is fit only to cook and clean for whites.  We are also wholly incapable of appreciating irony, innuendo, or subtlety in an artistic work or delving beneath the surface to appreciate artistic intent.

Second, no matter how brilliant an artistic creation may be, it is fatally flawed if it fails to treat any self-identifying group with the respect it deserves, not as human beings, but as members of that subgroup.  One cannot produce a great artistic work unless he — wait, that pronoun is per se prejudicial; it should be "heshe" — treats even possible affected classification with due deference.  Judged by this standard, all great artistic creations will fall short.

Third, we no longer identify in this country as Americans.  We no longer see ourselves as one or define our greatness through our bonds with our fellow citizens.  Instead, we have allowed our obsession with over-indulging the sensitivities of those who prefer to identify as different to deny the rights and freedoms of the majority.  Indeed, in this warped way, there is no longer a majority — and that is the beauty of it. We are not linked by our commonality; we are divided by artificial differences.  Our overzealous desire to protect our separateness has indeed separated us completely.

Therefore, because we are all so special and needy in our separateness, no artistic creation can be permitted to offend our separate identities.  Our selfhood has become defined by our difference.  A black man is only black; he can have no beliefs or even thoughts that aren't informed by his black identity.  We are all merely a small part of a human being, and that part needs special care because offending that "specialness" kills us at our barren core.