Burn your Books (and Videos) Before it's too Late!

I've been following the nonsense in Colorado about the teacher being punished for showing a few minutes of Faust in her class. I didn't put it together until just now, but I had a strangely similar experience with a different version of the legend.

Last year, I got rush tickets for a BSO performance of Der Fliegende Höllander at Symphony Hall. Of course, that means having almost three hours to kill between getting the tickets at 5:00 and the 8:00 performance. First things first, I went to get an inexpensive dinner. I sat down at the restaurant with the copy of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus I brought along.

A man came by my table and asked me what I was reading. I told him. He asked to look at the cover.

"Faustus? That's the devils book, right?" he asked me.

He opened the front flap and read the description. "The devils book! I'm not going to touch this. Read this book, and the devil will take you down to hell. That Faustus, he's a bad man!" He walked back over to his table and continued preaching to the people he was with, about how only Jesus can defeat the devil.

I quietly continued eating my meal as quickly as possible, trying to ignore this guy. But I can only take so much of his condemnation and poor literary analysis.

So, I told him that the Faustus legend is a cautionary tale against shortcuts, and if anything, it should be promoted. The whole point is that Faustus tries to get all his knolwedge through the deal with the devil, isn't happy, and is damned to boot. Anybody who reads it will realize that it was a bad thing he did, and not do it themselves.

Of course, Mann's novel isn't really about Faustus; it's an allegory about Nazism in Germany, and doesn't really have anything to do with the religious issues this guy is talking about.

And, finally, as a Jew, I do not accept Jesus as Christ my savior, so in his mind, I'm damned anyway.

Evidently, he thinks I didn't understand what he was saying, because he repeated his speech and pacing around until he went into the (women's) bathroom. I hurried through the rest of my meal, cleared my table, and mentioned to one of the employees that they shouldn't let that guy harrass their customers or else they'll lose business.

I have the same reaction with this current controversy: the angry parents are so culturally illiterate that they don't realize that they're protesting what is, at its core, a very Christian story. I just hope they never run into Medieval mystery plays depicting Satan's banishment from heaven.