Of course Augustus Gloop is fat. That is the point of him. In “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” he embodies unrestrained appetite in the most literal sense. He is a foil and a lesson, all rolled into one massive blob of a boy.
But now a bunch of iconoclasts with mediocre minds and grubby souls are offended. Roald Dahl’s works are now owned by Netflix (yes, really), and the publisher, Puffin, has announced hundreds of changes. Augustus being described as fat is among the casualties, lest someone’s feelings be hurt. And so “sensitivity readers” have been deployed to ensure that Dahl’s books conform to the sensibilities of the whiniest of the woke.
It is tempting to compare this revisionism to Orwell’s classic dystopia “1984,” in which every book had been rewritten. But this is a softer (for now) form of thought control. Instead of a brutal government, it is corporations buying the rights to rewrite the past and its works. And those making these decisions are not motivated by profit, but by a small-souled censoriousness in service to a weird substitute religion.
This censorship is different from a cancellation. Dahl had personal sins that could easily get him canceled, such as his antisemitism (of course, he also fought bravely against Nazi Germany — history, like people, is complicated). But cancellation would be financially painful, and the corporations involved want to squeeze every dollar they can out of Dahl’s works. Thus, these new editions of his books are the woke version
