CSotD: Banned Aids and Nits Picked
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I was glad to see Steve Brodner’s latest commentary, which is about banned books, and about the way the right wing has embraced Cancel Culture and about how young people are not accepting it.
The Granbury School District is banning books. Banning them.
Not simply removing them from a curriculum as we discussed yesterday, or putting them behind the counter as many school libraries do with troublesome titles, but taking them entirely out of classrooms and libraries. That’s what “banning” means.
And god knows, they’re not alone.
Yesterday’s entry got a lot of pushback on social media, some more valid than others. I don’t intend to refight the battle here, but it was a case of a school board not “banning” Maus — it is presumably still available in school libraries there — but removing it as the anchor text in an 8th grade Holocaust curriculum, with an expressed desire to have teachers find a different book with which to continue to teach the topic.
Derf Backderf has said that the issue of book banning has been going on for quite a while and it’s good that this story finally gave the matter some traction, and I’d agree, except that, as noted, it was largely misreported.
Great, important cause, but a lousy example.
The Granbury situation is an excellent example: Cancel Culture fanatics are targeting 130 titles and demanding they be banned from school libraries, with their targets being largely, as Isabella Guzman explains and Brodner quotes, books by or about people of color or of differing sexual orientations and gender identities.
She’s right. It’s disgusting.
To which I would add that it’s even more disgusting that you don’t have to reach or exaggerate or misreport to make this crucially important point: There are far too many perfectly applicable, valid examples such that good coverage would provide the traction Derf seeks, if good journalists made the effort.
Though I’d point out that, when you cut down newsroom staff to make bigger profits for shareholders, it means editors don’t have enough reporters to assign them to go to those board meetings and take notes.
You might as well censor the news as make it impossible for anyone to cover it.
Here’s a link to a particularly well-written letter to the editor from a young man of color who protests book banning from either side of the aisle, calling out both the fascisti and also well-meaning liberals who want to protect him from the N-word.
I love Gen-Z. They seem to realize that they must stand up for themselves and, as Brodner notes, they’re asking questions in real life that this fictional kid does in Kevin Necessary’s cartoon.
That fourth panel says a lot, and I say that for two reasons. One is that I’ve (already) had two granddaughters who raised their voices well before they were of voting age, and the other is that, when school boards are filled with partisans and the clueless, it’s the fault of people who don’t vote.
One of the major triumphs of the rightwing has been capturing local offices while the left focuses on Presidential politics and Congress. They’re winning with singles while their opponents strike out trying to hit home runs.
I’m old enough to remember when Bernie was mayor of Burlington. Hell, I’m old enough to remember when Peter Soglin was mayor of Madison.
Where are the rest?
Paul Fell offers a comforting view of young people, and of the response to rightwing bans, especially if they are loud and attract attention.
There is hope in the Forbidden Fruit aspect of all this. Back when I was in high school, Leslie Thomas’s “The Virgin Soldiers” somehow made it onto the shelves of our school library despite the rampant sex and hilarious off-color jokes throughout. Somebody in our crowd read it and, from then on, it was off the shelves and in our hands constantly.
I promise you, nobody assigned it and, certainly, nobody used it as the anchor text in a module about anything.
However, if they had caught on and disappeared it, we’d have found other copies. Immediately.
If you ban it, they will come.
Meanwhile, Harry Bliss (AMS) imagines a world of good parenting that sets kids up to become good readers.
I used to read to my boys every night at bedtime and I count that among my better moves. Granted, I only read Joyce to them as infants, far too young to follow the adventures of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, but well able to snooze to the vibrations of that wonderful, rhythmic prose.
But we included classics amongst the Roald Dahl.
Hint to readers: The best read-aloud book ever is “Through the Looking Glass,” because most of the characters only appear in one chapter, so you don’t have to remember their voices the next night. I stole most of mine from the 1933 film, in which, among many others, Cary Grant was the Mock Turtle and WC Fields played Humpty Dumpty.
Speaking of cultural references, and shifting to far less weighty matters, today’s Zits (KFS) reminds me that there was a four-year-old in our circle who wandered into the kitchen and asked her mother what she was cooking. Told “beefhearts,” she wrinkled her nose and said, “Mommy! Bees don’t fart!”
That little girl is approaching 50 today, and I’d suggest that, if Jeremy knows “Smashing Pumpkins,” he’s at least in his 30s.
Captain Beefheart fans, meanwhile, are mostly in their 70s and 80s.
Boy, are we old. Which beats the alternative.
As long as I’m nit-picking, I also laughed at today’s Sherman’s Lagoon (KFS), in part because I’ve long been on record as preferring funerals to weddings.
- People only get one.
- Nobody says, “But I have to ask her to be a pall-bearer! I was a pall-bearer at her funeral!”
- No John Denver music.
- And, even if they’re thinking it, nobody comes up to you and says, “You know, you’re gonna be next!
However, the wake comes first. Then the funeral.
All of which brings us back to politics, and the days when we believed that “all politics is local” and no man should die without a decent representation at his wake.
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