Why we publish books: a policy statement

Because it’s not fair to ask TV show hosts to tell the truth for us

The cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel’s show is no laughing matter. But I also take it as a bracing reminder that it’s foolish to rely on famous people and/or established institutions to do for us the necessary work that we ought to be doing for ourselves. To make a long story short, that is why I am a book publisher.

I love Jimmy Kimmel, but he was never going to be the savior of the United States of America, any more than Jon Stewart was going to be during his first run on The Daily Show. I’m reminded of Eric Idle in drag as Brian’s mother in The Life of Brian: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”

If it’s true that Jimmy Kimmel was never going to save us, it’s equally true that the cancellation of his show doesn’t doom us. The lesson is that, more than ever, we must rely on our own resources. Those include our sentience, our moral compass, and our literacy, as well as our courage. Nothing offends me more than someone – anyone, on any side or representing any point of view – telling me what I’m allowed or forbidden to say or write. The English language and, more broadly, the ability to communicate belongs to each of us and to all of us collectively, not to any regime or self-appointed authority.

Many years ago in Detroit, in a strategy meeting of a small, besieged activist group I was involved with, my friend Tom Derry memorably said: “I don’t see why we can’t just say the truth. If it’s the truth, we should say it.” Yes we should, and almost regardless of the consequences. It is true that it can be hard to know where exactly the truth lies. “Truth? What is truth?” Pontius Pilate notoriously asked. But Pilate was a functionary of a brutal imperial regime, whereas Tom Derry is a career postal carrier and the best kind of ordinary citizen.

My father once pointed out to me that it’s precisely the fact that we can never know the full truth that makes books worth writing and reading. Writing and publishing books was all I ever wanted to do, from a young age. Over decades I’ve learned what it means to do that, and I consider myself fortunate to have the opportunity and responsibility to be doing it now, when its importance is more obvious and immediate than ever.

All of the above is to say that Blue Ear Books hereby announces its intention not only to stay the course, but to ramp up the work that we’ve been quietly doing for years. (See this page for how we define that.) Among the advantages we enjoy, I count the fact that we’re a lot less high-profile than Jimmy Kimmel. There is freedom in operating on a small scale, as well as in not being tethered to a commercial behemoth like The Walt Disney Company. And not everything that needs to be said needs to be said immediately or directly – hence the value of books per se. So: Watch this space.

For starters, over the next few weeks Blue Ear Books will be launching a new website and publishing two new books: Where the Mithuns Are: Essays on War, Art and Beasts by the longtime (I daresay legendary) Burma activist and author Edith Mirante, and Fatal Second Helen: A Modern Veteran’s Iliad by combat veteran and classics professor Josh Cannon.

I’ll leave you for now with a few breadcrumbs to mark our forest path, in the form of suggested readings:

• the posthumously published memoir Defying Hitler by the exiled German historian Sebastian Haffner;

• “The Power of the Powerless,” the classic long essay by Vaclav Havel, all the more relevant to us here and now because it was written specifically for a small group of Czech and Polish dissidents in 1978;

• the essays of George Orwell, especially “Politics and the English Language,” “Notes on Nationalism,” and “Why I Write”;

• Martina Navratilova’s consistently forthright comments, notably this from 2002 in the German newspaper Die Zeit: “The most absurd part of my escape from an unjust system [in Communist Czechoslovakia] is that I have exchanged one system that suppresses free opinion for another.” And this, to Connie Chung the same year: “This is why I speak out. When I see something that I don’t like, I’m going to speak out because you can do that here.”