The Best Worst Villain, EVER (Part Three: Go It Alone.)

All villains, all the time...

Read Part One Here.

Read Part Two here.



Everyone knows that one quote about the one thing about evil winning if nobody does anything, right?

I thought I knew that quote, which goes something like All that is required for evil to win is that it wins, or something, but then I was sitting here on Monday morning, having returned to "work" from my week of Adventures in Babysitting, and I couldn't remember how it went, so I did what I always do, which is Google the question.

(I'm not the only one who does that; "scientists" try -- in vain -- to prove things via Googling, too, which means that when I google things, I'm using the scientific method! And to think that Mr. Karsten, my 6th grade science teacher, thought I'd never learned anything in that class.)

In this case, I tried to search for the quote that I almost remembered, typing in "All that is required for evil," a search which will help me maintain my standing as number one on the Homeland Security watchlist.

And I was rewarded with the exact quote, exactly as I remembered it, and no doubt exactly as whoever said it actually said it. Here's the quote I got:

All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.

That was attributed, by "QuoteDB," to a guy named Edmund Burke. I didn't know anything about Edmund Burke, so I googled him, then, and got to a page of quotations by Edmund Burke. That page, I was gratified to see, had the exact same quote as the number one quote on the page. And, although it was exactly the same and there's therefore no reason for me to re-write it, I will do that, anyway. Here's the exact same Edmund Burke quote:

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Wait a second... that's not the same at all!

That made me wonder -- and get sidetracked, as I so often do -- what the exact quote actually was. And where better to get good, rock-solid answers than from a bunch of anonymous people on Yahoo. After all, these are the people who correctly identified the flavor of a white jellybean as "Mystery." So you know they're authoritative. Or at least that they'd have opinions on the subject.

They didn't disappoint, either: Noted Edmund Burke-ologist "RetroRay" discoursed on the subject, saying as follows:


The eighteenth century Irish statesman, philosopher and political theorist, Edmund Burke, is credited with the remark that "evil prevails when good men do nothing". Some have said that the quote was actually "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

In either case, it means that evil will win if good people do nothing.

Of course, the vexing, unsolved problem is to determine who or what is "evil" and who or what is "good." I, for one, often fear those in the world who are sure that they are "good" and are equally sure that those who oppose them are "evil."

But that might not be the last word on the subject, because the Internet abounds with people who have opinions, most of them wrong, all of them hilarious, and a click over from Yahoo! Answers yields "WikiAnswers," where, if you search for "Who said evil will prevail when good men do nothing?" you can find this:


"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke)

Numerous searches by numerous people have failed to find this exact quotation in any of Burke's writings,and it is now thought to be a 20th Cen. paraphrase.

Friedrich Nietzche made the quote.

I like that: The quote is first attributed to Edmund Burke, but the author then debunks his own answer, and then, without any sources whatsoever, attributes the quote to someone else entirely.

Of course, the main reason why "[n]umerous searches" by "numerous people" (remember: Everyone proves everything by Googling it!) failed to turn up the "exact quote" might be because they weren't searching for the right quote, but let's leave that aside in the interests of accuracy. Internet-style accuracy, that is, in which the fact that someone said something makes that thing they said true.

Which is why The Best of Everything is such an authoritative reference. I say things all the time, and once said, they're true! (Of course, I stole that quote from Nietzche, who himself stole his quote about evil not from Burke, but from The Flaming Lips.)

The reason I was looking for that quote is because I wanted to use it to lead in to Part Three Of The Best Worst Villain, EVER, although in the end, I'm lucky that I got so distracted by the search for the real Quotent Quotable (as Alex Trebek might say, if he was a little drunk)(Can you picture Alex Trebek just a little drunk? I think that'd be awesome.)

I'm lucky I got distracted by the search for the real quotation because I forgot that starting an article with a quotation is among the worst of cardinal sins for writers. Starting with a quotation is superceded, in terribleosity, only by (a) starting with a dictionary definition, or (b) making your post/article/essay an "open letter" to someone famous.

(Someday, I expect I'll read an editorial that begins with a famous person's quote about the meaning of an open letter, according to Webster's, and I'll know then that the long slow death of good writing, which began with Mitch Albom, is complete.)

I was looking for that quote because it's Monday and I couldn't figure out how else to start this post (that's why it's a cardinal sin; it's lazy), in which I intend to narrow down the list of potential Best Worst Villains, EVER by weeding out those who rely too much on henchman, sidekicks, computers, or other helpers to achieve their evil. My point was going to be this:

If it's true, as The Flaming Lips and Edmund Nietzsche said, that all evil needs to win is for good men to do nothing, then why would evil villains ever need henchmen?

And that is my point, whatever the quote actually is. My point is that Villains do not need henchmen. Not great villains, anyway.

There are three kinds of villains-with-henchmen.

First is the super-competent villain whose plans are so large that he feels he must enlist help, or an army, or both, to achieve them. That type of Villain is exemplified by Dr. Impossible, in Soon I Will Be Invincible, or by Walkin' Dude from The Stand or by Hitler, from World War II.

Let's examine those archetypes a little more closely, beginning with Dr. Impossible. He's a supergenius, a mad scientist, has an IQ of 300 or something, and he's invincible and has superstrength. Using that, he tried to conquer the world 12 times (and tries for a 13th time in the book Soon I Will Be Invincible.) In the book, Dr. Impossible reveals that he robs banks and the like to get money for his superplans, and he has an island lair (as many good villains do) where there is an army, or has been an army, maybe. (I read the book a while ago, so I don't exactly remember if there is or was an army.)

Then there's Walkin' Dude, who, following the decimation of 99% of the human race, begins walking around gathering up evil humans to do battle against the good humans for the right to rule what's left of the world, with "what's left of the world" being, apparently, "Boulder, Colorado," and some grocery stores with cans of food that people can break into and steal.

And, finally, there's Hitler, who I don't mean to make light of and I'm certainly not. We all know what Hitler did, and tried to do -- and if you don't know, watch The History Channel, which presents Hitler shows 23 1/2 hours per day. (Last week, Newsweek had a chart at the back showing which television broadcasts have hit which star systems. At some point, The History Channel will hit Alpha Centauri, whose denizens will then assume that nothing happened in the 20th century other than Hitler's rise to power, kind of the way I assume, based on my US History classes, that nothing happened between 1865-1930 other than "The Gilded Age" and Upton Sinclair's writing The Jungle.)

What happened to each of those Villains, in the end? [SPOILER ALERT!, EXCEPT THAT IT'S NOT REALLY A SPOILER ALERT! FOR THE STUFF THAT HAPPENED TO HITLER, BECAUSE THAT'S HISTORY, AND YOU CAN'T 'SPOIL' HISTORY, CAN YOU?]

[SPOILER ALERT! DISCUSSION: WOULD HISTORY CLASS BE MORE FUN IF STUDENTS DIDN'T KNOW HOW THINGS TURNED OUT? IMAGINE A TEACHER SAYING: NEXT WEEK, WE'LL FIND OUT WHETHER THE UNITED STATES WON THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR OR NOT!" ]

[COMMENT ON SPOILER ALERT! DISCUSSION: YOU THINK I'M BEING FACETIOUS, BUT I BET IF YOU ASKED THREE RANDOM HIGH SCHOOLERS RIGHT NOW WHETHER THE US WON THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR, THE ANSWERS YOU'D GET WOULD BE "Um...", "Which war was that?" and "I've got pepper spray, you creepy old man."]

Each of those villains failed, and they failed, in large part, because their troops let them down. As they always will, when working for a Villain. Who goes to work for a villain, after all? People who get forced to do it, or who are villainous themselves, that's who. That's not exactly a roadmap to success: I'm going to pin all my hopes for world domination on those two guys who are only doing this because they need the antidote for the poison I gave them, and that third guy who just tried to stab me in the back, literally.

Nazis, bad people who survived a plague, people who would be willing to go work on a deserted desert island to take over the world using weather satellites: These are not the type of recruits you want, and Evil, far from prevailing, will never win out if it relies on guys who wouldn't get let in the door at a job fair. The Nazis army, in particular, won all its stunning victories before anybody knew they were fighting. If I were to attack you entirely by surprise out of the blue, a la Andy Samberg:



If I were to do that, I'd almost certainly get in a good punch, like the time I fought a guy outside a teen bar when I was 19, and I hit him first and really scored a good one on him, too.

But if you then start fighting back, I'm almost certain to lose, just as I did that fight outside the teen bar, because that guy then punched me in the side of the head while I was celebrating my first-- and only -- good punch, then he tackled me, and then he kicked me while I was down.

Which is what happened to the Nazis, once the world began fighting. They began to lose, all over the place. And that's what happens to all villains who rely on an army to take over the world. Saddam Husseins' Republican Guard -- the "much vaunted" Republican Guard -- collapsed in the face of an invasion that consisted solely of George Clooney, Marky Mark, and Ice Cube. Walkin' Dude's army fared even worse: They were wiped out by a guy called "Trashcan Man," if I remember correctly.

Worse than Competent-Villains-With-Armies are Incompetent villains with armies. This includes guys like The Emperor from The Star Wars movies (I know, I said nobody else from those movies except Darth Vader, but I'm making an exception because I make the rules here), Sauron (and Saruman) from The Lord of The Rings, and Space Invaders.

I'm not even sure how these guys raised an army in the first place, but it's very apparent they are not qualified to lead one, and that their "army" barely meets the minimum criteria for a fighting force.

Space Invaders provide the best example of incompetence at the head of an army. Whatever particular Space Invader was in charge, that person was a complete nincompoop. Line the army up and have them march slowly forward? We figured out a way to stop that kind of attack back in 1776 (although that kind of attack was then tried by the South at Gettysburg, putting whoever led the Confederacy's forces there onto the short list of villains who should ride the short bus.) Even the Galaga invaders understood you've got to try to outflank people sometimes.

Then there's The Emperor, who people equate with "evil genius" but who had the "genius" notion of using an army made of clones.

Let me make the point of how bad an idea that is by looking at corn. As far back as the 1970s, scientists and farmers became concerned about preserving the genetic diversity of crops after "southern corn leaf blight" wiped out 15% or more of crops -- something that was possible because 90% of the corn hybrids shared cell cytoplasm. They weren't clones, not exactly, but they were very, very similar, genetically, and so they were easily wiped out by one common threat.

Now, can you see where that would apply to clones? One bad genetic marker, one discovery of a susceptibility to a virus, and your entire clone army is wiped out.

The only people dumber than the Emperor were the Old Republic/Rebellion, which spent billions on lasers and spaceships and X-wings and cool monitors and droids, but which could have simply funded a small lab somewhere to find a way to throw a retrovirus into the cooling system of the Death Star, kill all the clones -- and then have the Death Star for themselves.

Then there's Sauron, who might be the dumbest Villain of all. First Sauron takes all, or almost all,of his power and puts it into a ring.

Why? Why do that? Is it because the power was itchy and you just wanted to get some relief? How is a ring safer than your own body? Was there some chance that Gollum was going to kidnap you and wear you in a cave?

But then, Sauron decides to get his ring back, and take over the world, by relying on Orcs. Twisted versions of elves. That's his big plan. Beings that have all the troubles exhibited by the usual army-in-the-service of evil (that is, conscripts or villains themselves) but who also were made of "heat and slime," or, maybe created as parodies of elves and animated by evil will. (Tolkien tried it both ways.)

So they're basically Solomon Grundy, but without the muscles-and-falling-in-love-with-heroes thing going for them.

(Note: I just decided that, having remembered him, I'm going to add Solomon Grundy to the list.)

Some villains, though, don't rely on an Army of Clones or Easily Demotivated Conscripts. Some villains rely on a small group of henchmen, or just one henchman or assistant.

Villains like Dr. Evil work with a tiny group of almost-as-evil people, while villains like Plankton mostly work alone but get advice and help from one sidekick. In Plankton's case, that's his computer wife, Karen.

Either way, it's a bad idea and proves that you're not worthy of true Super Villainry. Again, not only does Evil not need help, but the help usually brings you down or points out just how inept you are.

Dr. Evil's helpers show both. There's the Will Ferrell character, who is tragically, but comically, inept at his job, and the rest of the helpers are about the same.



Except for Scott, of course. The helpers who are competent, though, are routinely ignored. Scott's suggestion that they just shoot Austin Powers is derided as no good. Number Two, in the absence of Dr. Evil, built Virtucon into a powerful, rich corporation -- and powerful, rich corporations have a far better chance of taking over, or wrecking, the world than any number of atomic bombs. Just ask Wal-Mart, which actually has its own nuclear program, but doesn't talk about it much because they don't need it.

Captain Hook is another example of a Villain with a few henchman, and look what happened to him: He lost to a kid, after repeatedly ignoring his own men's suggestions that they simply sail off somewhere where Peter Pan didn't live, and go back to pirating. Plus, he couldn't even kill Tinkerbell. Or keep her captive.

Villains with only one henchman don't fare any better. There's not many of these around, or at least not many I can think of (and Egocentric Existentialism then proves that those Villains I can't think of don't matter), so I'll go with Plankton, again. Plankton's computer wife works against him in two ways: First, she's always making suggestions that Plankton refuses to follow, to his own detriment -- his plans go awry when he doesn't listen to her. But second, she's always suggesting that he not do his evil plans.

How is a guy, even a one-celled guy, supposed to succeed when his wife is constantly telling him he shouldn't even be trying? How is a guy supposed to, for example, create the World's Best Sandwich if his wife is always telling him that he needs to put on pants and get into the office? (Not that I'm talking about anyone in particular.)(Sweetie, that last one would have been it, and we'd be rich, because, like they say, "Build a better sandwich and the world will beat a path to your door so that Evil can prevail more easily.")(Nietzsche.)

Master Control Program, too, had a henchman: Sark. But MCP was easily bested because Sark was easily bested and Jeff Bridges was able to figure out the intricacies of video games and how to drink electronic fluid and beat him in a movie that wasn't copied by The Matrix at all, really, except that it was.

No, what's necessary for success, if you have a henchman, is that your wife/henchman back you up -- like Richard Heene's wife backed him up, making his plan to rise to fame work brilliantly. At least until she confessed -- another reason not to have henchmen. If you don't rely on a 6-year-old and your wife, you can't be ratted out by a 6-year-old and your wife. If Richard Heene had done his plan himself, we'd even now be watching his reality show on which he and Kate Gosselin travel around the world battling Death Panels.

In the end, Villains work alone, as shown by the quote I almost introduced this post with, and as shown, too, by a far better quote than that. Rather than discussing what is or is not necessary for evil to triumph, one could listen to the words of the greatest philosopher known to the 20th century:

"I'm a loner, Dottie. A Rebel."

Now, I know he wasn't talking about evil, but neither was Burke Nietzsche or whatever his name was; the quote I kind-of-led into this post with was actually about Rock-and-roll. The full, actual quote is this:

All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to keep on claiming that Coldplay is rock and roll when clearly they are not. And what's so great about Radiohead, while I'm on the subject? Aside from Anyone Can Play Guitar, they've never really had a good song, have they? And that wasn't all that great, either. I mean, it was okay, but it wasn't, like a classic...

-- Friedrich Burkington III, in Walden: Or Life In The Woods.


So, what have we learned? That key number two to being a great Villain is: Be a loner.

Working with henchmen, groups, armies... that's for second-rate dictators and soon-to-be-imprisoned madmen.

Working alone: That's the way to go.

With that, I'll pare the list down again. The remaining candidates for Best Worst Villain, EVER are:

Solomon Grundy (New addition!)
Token Female: Reverse Wonder Woman.
The Lizard.
Marvin The Martian
"The Rake," from the Decemberists song of the same name.
The Red Baron (both the real one and the one from the Peanuts comic)
All the old guys who ran all the haunted amusement parks in all the episodes of Scooby-Doo.
Doctor Octopus
Rob Lowe in Wayne's World
The T-1000.
Mangog
Mr Norrell (who I think turned out to kind of be a villain?)
Darth Vader
The Mariner (from The Mariner's Revenge Song by The Decemberists)
Lex Luthor
The Joker
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Darth Vader (and absolutely nobody else from the Star Wars univere including especially not Boba Fett, so don't nominate him.)
Toth (from Raiders of the Lost Ark)
Saddam Hussein.
The Mariner (from The Mariner's Revenge Song by The Decemberists)
Voldemort
Ivan Drago (suggested by The Boy)
Galactus
The Anti-Monitor
The guy from Country Death Song by The Violent Femmes (Just to prove that I can think of bad guys from songs by groups other than the Decemberists)
Gorilla Grodd.
[SPOILER ALERT! IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE OR READ THE COMIC BOOK THIS'LL KIND OF WRECK IT FOR YOU] Ozymandias, from The Watchmen.

A word about why Voldemort is still on there: Voldemort had henchmen: The Death-Eaters. But Voldemort didn't appear to ever coordinate with them, so far as I could tell. He told them, at times, what to do, but he also seemed to mostly work alone when he wasn't attached to the back of a guy's head under a turban. So I'm leaving him on here, for now.

Go on to Part Four, "Sure, you're crazy... ?" by clicking here.

The Five Best Books Schools Should Have Kids Read (And The Five Crummy, So-Called Classics They Should Replace.)

I am not a fan of "classic" literature. Most "classic" literature stinks, and I've read enough of it to consider myself an expert on the subject.

Of course, I consider myself an expert on every subject, but on the subject of "classic" (stinky) literature, I am an expert, because I've read so much of it, and because so much of it was... is... terrible.

Moby-Dick? Boring. The Canterbury Tales? Infathomable, and then boring, too. Anna Karenina? By the time I was halfway finished with it -- a task that seemed to take centuries -- I wanted to throw myself under a train. If that was what happened. I can't be sure, because that book was so stultifying that I scarcely remember any of it, beyond the fact that there were roughly 1,000,000 pages-long descriptions of the Russian countryside, descriptions that all boiled down to this:

Tundra.

Dostoevsky could have used a good editor.

Why do we make kids read these books? What's the point? To turn them off of reading forever and create a race of people who find Man vs. Food to be the highest form of human expression? That's the only reason I can think of for having people read a bunch of the awful, stilted, incomprehensible, unrelatable, books and poems that were routinely crammed down my throat. For every Great Expectations, a book that was not only genuinely great but which led me to read other, genuinely great Dickens books as well, there were three or four 1984s or Red Badge Of Courages.

Now, I never read that latter book; I just know that other people have read it. I might have been required to read it, at some point, but if I was, I blew that requirement off and still managed to graduate high school, college, and law school and get myself into a job where I can spend Friday mornings thinking about things like this, and about things like how I out-vested my boss, who today is wearing a sweater vest, whereas I am wearing a button-up, pinstripe, belts-in-back vest that is part of a three piece suit.

I never read The Red Badge Of Courage, but I assume it's boring and pointless because (a) the title sounds boring and pointless, and (b) the cover looks boring and pointless:


What's the deal with that cover? Is a poorly-drawn, weirdly-dimensioned image really the best way to convince someone to pick up that book? And (c) the book is by Stephen Crane, who I know best as the guy I think is Stephen Foster, but who obviously is not, because Stephen Foster is the guy who is best known for meeting the lead singer of Squirrel Nut Zippers at the Hotel Paradise:



And I'm pretty sure if "Stephen Foster" had written The Red Badge of Courage under the pen name "Stephen Crane," Squirrel Nut Zippers would have mentioned it in that song, which I assume is historically accurate, aside from the ghost part.

Is there any person, anywhere, who wanted to read The Red Badge of Courage in school? I never met anyone who wanted to read it, and I certainly didn't want to ever read it. Looking at that cover alone makes me yawn and want to punch myself in the eye so that I have an excuse not to start reading it.

So what we're doing, as a nation, is encouraging kids to associate reading with a punch in the eye, and a self-inflicted one, at that. Good job, educators.

Before I began writing this, I looked up, out of curiosity, what were the most-often-required books for college-bound students, and for high schoolers in general (there's a distinction there, about which I think that if there is a high school, nowadays, that doesn't want to consider its students college-bound, we should be closing that school and making the teachers get real jobs.)

I found there is a list of the 43 most-frequently-taught books, some strange ones stand out. A Christmas Carol? Really? We're teaching that to children? I understand that by now, A Christmas Carol is the only allowable holiday movie, but is it really a book to be taught in high schools? Does it prepare one for college adequately to read of Scrooge throwing open the sash to inquire what day it is and have the boy go get a fat goose for Christmas dinner?

There are not one, but two Greek tragedies, Antigone and Oedipus Rex, and I've read both of those and can tell you, if you haven't, don't waste your time. There's nothing about those plays that can't be summarized in a quick line or two, saving you the trouble of parsing through awkward ancient-Greek-to-modern-English translations. Guy accidentally sleeps with his mom and jabs out own eyes; lessons are learned about the weird fates we sometimes endure. There, I just saved you three weeks.

The awkward, hard-to-follow language is a highlight of many high school and college reading lists, the idea seeming to be "If it's hard to understand, they'll overlook how dull and uninspiring and unrelatable the story is." That's the only explanation I can see for including so much Shakespeare on a typical reading list. Five plays from Shakespeare make the top lists. Five. One man makes up 1/8 of the total reading list for college-bound kids. And one man whose writing, while possibly very well-received in his day, no longer resonates with us, in part because it's almost completely unintelligible to us:


Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition; but without
The illness should attend it.

I have no idea what that means, or what it's supposed to mean. Who is Cawdor? If I were to replace some words in that paragraph, would the meaning change? Ballistique thou art, and Der Eisenwolf... (those, by the way, are supervillains, whereas Glamis and Cawdor are either Scottish provinces, or Scottish castles, or Scottish laundry detergents.)

Try this one on for size:

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell;
Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,
Yet grace must still look so.

I've been trying to parse that through for about 10 minutes now, and still can't tell what it's talking about.

You see the problem here. These stories and poems are boring, and hard to understand, and pointless, and long, and dry, and dull, and they're part of the problem with school, and teachers, and kids. They're teaching kids to hate reading and teaching teachers to hate kids because the kids hate reading, and that vicious circle goes on and on until eventually, we, as a society, must suffer through Joy Behar having a television show of her own.

I'm not content to live in a world where people who appear to be doing a bad impression of Mike Myers' bad impression of Barbra Streisand get to be on TV, and so, to remedy that ongoing cultural debasement, I've come up with a list of

The Five Best Books Schools Should Have Kids Read (And The Five Crummy, So-Called Classics They Should Replace.)

Teachers, take note of this. Students, go demand that your teachers teach these books instead of those books. Parents, quit worrying about how you're going to pay for your Lexus and instead talk to your kids for a change. And school administrators, go on doing whatever useless tasks you were doing. You're a waste of money, but harmless.

Note: I've deliberately left off of this list all the books I've mentioned on this blog before. Those books are great, but I can't keep talking about them.

1. Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, by Stephen E. Ambrose (who is not Stephen Foster or Stephen Crane.)

Why It Should Be Read: Schoolkids have to read some nonfiction, I guess, despite the fact that our entire lives are nonfiction and reading ought to be an escape from that. If you're going to read nonfiction, it should be nonfiction that not only makes a point about what life was like during the era the book's set in, but also makes a point in a non-weenyish, non-flowery-meditative-language, way. If possible, the point should be made by focusing, as Nothing Like It In The World does, on men carving their way through mountains using, more or less, their bare hands.

Nothing Like It In The World tells, as its title suggests, the story of the building of the transcontinental railroad, which sounds boring but isn't, because Ambrose pays attention not just to details, but to the impossibility of the task that America set out to do. Building this railroad would be hard now, and we've got spaceships and lasers and robots to help us. Building a railroad across America in the 1860s seems impossible, and probably was. Except they did it.

Bonus Lesson Schoolkids Will Get From It: They'll learn that something besides the Civil War and Lincoln getting shot was happening in the 1860s. When I first read this book, it took a while to sink in that this is happening at the same time as the Civil War. Schools present a distorted view of history, making it seem as though only one thing happened at a time. First we settled America. Then we killed the Indians with smallpox. Then Ben Franklin wrote some 'witty' sayings. Then... But, as we know, at any given time, lots of important things are happening, and schoolkids could do with a dose of that knowledge.

Stupid Book It Would Replace: Walden. Published in 1854, "Walden" has, so far as I can tell, no reason for existing. It doesn't purport to demonstrate anything about "typical" life at the time, presents no new or unique thoughts, and rambles on incessantly about things which I'd be more specific about except that I stopped reading it at page 7, when Thoreau was still blathering about the grain of the wood on his log cabin. For 155 years now, students have been subjected to the transcendentalist ramblings of a rich man who took a vacation, and asked to believe that they're important. If the Internet had existed in 1854, Walden would have been a blog, and not a very good one at that.


2. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman.

Why It Should Be Read: Great literature is about telling a great story, and Neil Gaiman does that, first and foremost. But great literature isn't just here's a story, read it. It's also about creating a sprawling, interlocking world that resembles our own except for some critical little difference, and in the tiny gap created by that distance live revelations about our own lives and thoughts and beliefs, and Neil Gaiman does that, too, in spades. In his story about newly-released ex-convict Shadow going to work for the old gods in a battle against the New Gods, Gaiman presents a society in which the things people believe have power actually exist -- but as belief in them fades, they start to lose power while new gods rise up, gods who don't go by names like Odin and Thor but instead have names like Internet. And, Gaiman creates scenes of intense emotion and vivid imagery, as when Shadow has to play chess against an old god, who, if he wins, gets to hit Shadow in the head with his hammer.

Reading American Gods will help schoolkids appreciate the intricacies of a modern novel, as the story begins small and expands out to include even a murder mystery, and will help them appreciate a longer story, as the book is allowed to flower with language and themes and plot. None of this 100,000-word-or-less modern publishing stuff for Gaiman.

Bonus Lesson Schoolkids Will Get From It: Here and there, classes glance at mythology and discuss it, but they never get into what mythology really represents, and never discuss how understanding the way people used to believe in God might help analyze the way people nowadays believe in God. Remember, at some point in the past, a group of people looked at Mount Olympus and swore that their Gods really existed and were right -- and then went and killed some people to prove it. A book that compares and contrasts religious beliefs with cultural signifiers might just help sort things out a little.

Stupid Book It Would Replace: Moby-Dick. Melville's so-called "classic" tale of man and nature, obsession and madness, is as exciting as reading a statistical abstract. Nobody learns anything from a book which has, as its main reaction, "Oh, God, how long is he going to be talking about rope, now?"



3. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury.

Why It Should Be Read: Hey, remember all those great short stories you read in high school and college? No? Me, neither, and here's why: they all sucked. Short stories in high school and college classes uniformly fell into two categories: there were the "excerpts from longer works" that were hard-to-follow and meant nothing because you hadn't read the larger work, and then there were short stories by Ambrose Bierce, who's the only author ever to write a short story, at least so far as I can tell, based on my educational background. If you go by my English classes, nobody wrote a short story after An Occurence At Owl Creek Bridge, unless you count Jack London, who wrote all those stories about those cute husky dogs freezing to death or something.

Short stories, as a result, have fallen into disfavor. Everyone everywhere takes it for granted that people don't read short stories anymore, which would make James Thurber extremely sad if I knew who he was.

People don't read short stories because, like most other forms of literature, schools have ingrained in us a belief that short stories are awful and boring. But short stories would be very useful to society right now, when we don't have the time or patience to read novels all the time and when we do have the Internet, which allows for quick, cheap publication of short stories, stories which could be downloaded easily or read on your lunch break. If you can spend 15 minutes watching LOLCatz, you could also read a short story.

The Illustrated Man will cure all that. I read it when I was about 12 or 13 and I have never forgotten it. Never. Ray Bradbury expertly places out succinct narratives that are quick to read but which embed themselves in your mind. Each very quickly creates an entire world with rules unique to that realm, where the characters come alive for a short time and play out their brief episodes, and then retire offstage, while lingering in our minds. These are scary, surprising, fascinating short stories that can be read one at a time, but you'll likely read the entire book in one sitting.

Bonus Lesson Schoolkids Will Get From It: Ray Bradbury's a sci-fi writer, so they might just get interested in science, as men walk under Venus' eternal rainfall or drift helplessly in space after a rocket explodes, or as children use a television-room to recreate an African veldt, with possibly murderous results.

Stupid Book It Would Replace: Sorry, Ray: Fahrenheit-451 has to go. Schools pick this book out because it sends an Important Message: Censorship is wrong, reading is right. But the book is dull and dry and hard to read, so kids likely side with the firemen. It just goes to show you that the message has to be secondary to the story, a lesson schools have never learned.

4. The Harry Potter Series, by J.K. Rowling.

Why It Should Be Read: Okay, first off, I know this isn't a book, but a series of books. Still, it tells one story, really, one epic story, so I'm counting it. If it makes you feel better, duct-tape all seven of the books together.

People have long said that J.K. Rowling made it fun to read again and saved reading for kids, the way Dan Brown saved reading for adults, while other people have said No, she didn't. Well, other people, you're wrong. J.K. Rowling did save reading -- for adults and kids. She made reading not only fun for these books, but made reading newsworthy. Think back to before 1997: When was the last time before 1997, when the first Harry Potter book hit the shelves (in the U.S., at least) that you recall a book making the news, let alone news stories about people lining up to buy it. (Answer: The Satanic Verses, which made the news but which nobody bought. I read it; you can skip it. Instead, read Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.)

Harry Potter changed all that, and brought reading front-and-center again, making it socially acceptable to read books again and talk about it. Before that, books were going the way of ... well, whatever other entertainment had been nearly driven out of society. Opera, maybe.

The Harry Potter books do more than just that, of course: they present a time-honored literary tradition, or a couple of them, in a new and fun light, taking concepts that seem familiar and re-presenting them in such a way as to make them fun and interesting again. If, as has been said, there are only so many story lines to go around, then it's important that those storylines be told in a fresh way, and Harry Potter does that be imagining a Britain that doesn't exist inside the Britain that does, presenting the alienated stepkid who's actually the hero-in-waiting, the multiverse idea, the Second coming of unknowable evil, all those old tropes, as something new and bright. Harry Potter's adventures are similar to that of many kids who stumble into magical realms; he'd probably get along well with the Pevensies, and as a kind-of adopted kid who turns out to be a world-saving hero, I bet he and Clark Kent could trade some anecdotes. But his story is told in a new, fresh, modern way.

Bonus Lesson Schoolkids Will Get From It: Not everything everywhere is like it is in America. The original book's title changed from a Philosopher's Stone to the Sorceror's Stone, and language was edited around before later books became more British. Little differences in culture can be starting points for understanding the vastness of the world, so if Harry wants to eat a cookie and call it a biscuit, let him.

Stupid Book It Would Replace: The Catcher in The Rye, by J.D. Salinger. From it's too-obscure title to its rambling writing to the fact that this book has been owned by every psychotic ever to make the news, The Catcher In The Rye has no place in schools. I don't even know what the title is supposed to mean, and if The Catcher In The Rye has anything to say to me, or about life in general, or literature, or anything, it was lost in the deranged but somehow still boring ramblings of the author. The whole time I was reading The Catcher In The Rye, I kept thinking "Really? This book? Really?"



5. The Bonfire Of The Vanities, By Tom Wolfe.

Why It Should Be Read: I finally picked this as book 5 out of a list of about 20 remaining, opting to put it ahead of A Prayer For Owen Meany, Never Let Me Go, The Professor and The Madman, The Corrections, and more. Here's why: Never has there been a book which so accurately captured a moment in time, a feeling, an era, as The Bonfire Of The Vanities. What The Great Gatsby is to the 1920s, what The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is to the late 19th century, The Bonfire Of The Vanities is to the latter 20 years of the 20th century, and then some. In prose that never stops being entertaining and never seems to drag or dawdle, Wolfe spins the tale of unforgettable characters who are archetypes and yet still real: The Wall Street Trader. The Floozy Mistress. The Social Climbing Wife. The Drunken Reporter. The Grasping Public Servant, and more, all make an appearance here, all interacting in a story that starts from a minor car accident and spins more and more out of control, and then refuses to end even when it ends. Here, in one book, is both enough social commentary and enough entertainment to fill a whole year. It almost seems unfair to other books that The Bonfire Of The Vanities should exist.

Bonus Lesson Schoolkids Will Get From It: Again, there's an embarrassment of riches here. The book helps explain how bond trading and the stock market worked, had a look inside the economics of newspapers, the real machinations of a state court system (as opposed to Law & Order: Never A Plea Bargain). And that's just to name a few.

Stupid Book It Would Replace: Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Why, in God's name, are we using 700-year-old, "Olde Englysche" verses to examine the roles played by various people and sectors of a society? Especially of a society that not only no longer exists, but which existed so long ago that it no longer has any impact on our society, outside of Making kids hate English class because they have to read this junk. Here's an actual quote from The Canterbury Tales:

"The serpent Satan, our first enemy,
Who has his wasps' nests in the heart of Jews,
Swelled up: 'O Hebrew people!' was his cry,
'Is it an honorable thing, think you,
That such a boy should walk where he may choose,
In scorn of you, and make of you his scoff,
Singing songs that are an insult to your faith?'"

Um. What? I dozed off, and then gagged, too. Here's an actual excerpt from The Bonfire of the Vanities:

Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later, that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called 'Being a Father' so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.

What's not better about that second one? It's better written, it's intelligible, it relates to kids who themselves are on the verge of adulthood, and it comes in the context of a really great book.

If schools are going to serve as anything other than warehouses for children -- and warehouses for children whose purpose is to scare and bore kids out of learning -- they'd better take my suggestions about these books.

Otherwise, we as a society are about 15 minutes away from Joy Behar vs. Food.



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