So the most recent news in banning books is that a school board in Tennessee voted unanimously to ban MAUS from their school. I'm sure it's not the first time MAUS has gone through this, and it certainly won't be the last, but I can't think of anyone who isn't a Nazi who would want to ban this book. But if you want to know the finer details, here is the transcript of that meeting.
Fair warning, it's a difficult read, not because everyone involved is an asshole (they are), but because no one cleaned up the transcript. I suspect they ran the recording through a program and didn't have an educated (ha!) human being go over it. There are typos and missing words, etc. But it's worth reading if you have the time (and I know some of you are insomniacs, so you probably do).
Anyway, they're trying to do their best to make it about a nude image and eight naughty words and not about the Holocaust. So they're not entirely batshit crazy. But still. If they're willing to chuck such an important book because of those things, then they're probably being disingenuous. There is talk of redacting those things, but they don't sound all that serious about it. They seem to be looking for copyright excused not to do that. And those things shouldn't be redacted, anyway.
It makes me somewhat grateful for the way I was raised. I mean, I was forbidden to experience a lot of art. If an album had the Parental Advisory sticker on it, I couldn't listen to it. I remember when I was a kid in Coconuts begging my grandmother to buy me Undertow by Tool, and she examined the cover art and tried to get me to confess that it was something dirty. She eventually bought it for me (reluctantly), but she asked a lot of questions about how it might be vulgar. And if I was twelve years and 364 days old, I was still forbidden from seeing a PG-13 movie. Renting an R rated movie from Video Magic? Don't even think about it.
Which made me glad to hang out with Dad when he had me for a weekend. He'd let me watch R movies, and if boobs showed up? He wouldn't make me close my eyes. And I hung out with friends who didn't have such domineering authority figures in their lives, so I was able to watch awesome and grotesque horror movies while sleeping over at their places.
BUT! When it came to reading? Nothing was forbidden. If Wrath James White had a book out when I was, say, eight years old I'd be allowed to read it. I could read anything I wanted, and that went a long way toward making me who I am today, and for that I'm very, very grateful. Not even my grandmother would have stopped me from reading MAUS as a kid. I didn't know about it at the time. I read it in college while working at the library. It should be noted that it was shelved in the 940's. For those unfamiliar with the Dewey Decimal System, that's a nonfiction section for history books, particularly WWII. So it's impossible to underestimate the importance of this book.
More to the point, the Bible has a lot more offensive scenes in it than MAUS does, and you never hear about an American school board so much as thinking to ban it. So if you're reading that transcript, keep that in mind. You'll note that one guy talks about being a sinner and a hypocrite, so religion is an important factor to at least his decision making.
I forgot who said it first, but when authority figures ban books, you should go out of your way to read them and find out why. It's almost never really about offensive language and sexless nudity. You'll see a very obvious pattern, and it's always about trying to prevent people to think about things in a particular way.
I didn't take a critical thinking course (fuck the word "module") until college. There are two reasons for that. The first is that I'm paying for that course, and I didn't pay for public school. The other reason is that no one wants you to think critically when you're not eighteen yet. If you did you'd realize how fucked things are. Why eighteen? Traditionally speaking, that's when they can send you off to get killed in some war, but we don't have the draft anymore. But what the hell? Tradition is all that matters to most people. We do things because our ancestors did them. I'm glad to see that attitude finally changing, but it needs to be outright killed.
Do new things. Think things through. Read banned books.
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