Of Mice and Men

 I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books 
and some ideas as though they were diseases.
-Kurt Vonnegut

Just in case you think that me cheering for Neil Young in taking as stand against Spotify, Joe Rogan and COVID misinformation was somehow an endorsement of censorship let me assure you that I am very much against censorship.  In fact, a revulsion at censorship is one of the things I feel most violently, probably because I was permitted to read things like Fahrenheit 451, at a rather young age.  I despise the FCC and it's list of words you can't say on TV and radio. I would rather take the side of Howard Stern at his most vulgar rather than submit to a government bureaucracy that tells us what we should hear and see.  I don't like the MPAA, even though when my kids were growing up, I did consider a movie's rating in deciding whether it was alright for my kids to see.  However, I started to introduce my children to R-rated movies well before they turned the recommended age of 17.  It turns out a lot of very valuable cinema has bunches of profane speech in it.

But banning books is the thing that gets my blood boiling. The much publicized ban of the graphic novel Maus, by some school district in Tennessee is unsurprising and yet disconcerting.  Maus is recasting of the Shoah with the parts of the Nazis going to cats and the parts of the Jews going to mice. It is based on the experience of the author's father who was a Polish Jew who survived the Shoah.  As you might imagine, it contains some pretty grown up material and might be something that you want to think twice about letting someone young or immature try and process without some guidance.  But look folks, we just can't go down this road, especially in the name of safety, especially thinking that we're trying to "protect the children."

Here's a true story, in fourth grade I did so many reading comprehension exercises called "Concepts" that the teacher literally ran out of books to give me.  I believe that he had never had a kid who did as many of them as I did.  Now part of that drive was that you got rewards if you finished so many of these during down times.  In fourth grade, some kids finish the regular work faster than others, good teachers find ways to keep the fast workers (like me) busy while the others keep going. Mr. Senecal had various activities you could do if you were done the assignment, some were math based, some were science based, some were reading.  Concepts were short articles about various subjects, some were fiction, some were nonfiction; all of them had about a page or so of reflection questions to answer based on the article.  By the end of the year I had done nearly two hundred of these things. Around the same time, my Granny, dear old Gran, who was on one hand a brilliant woman who was also a voracious reader, as well as a woman who dealt with persistent mental illness, gave her bookish grandson a bag of books, thick books, grown up books, and I do mean grown up.  One of them was The Celestial Bed, by Irving Wallace, a novel that was based upon the work of Masters and Johnson, who are, ahem, sex researchers.

I remember that it had a classical painting of a nude woman on the cover, not pornographic, like Renoir or one of the renaissance deals, in fact, if I remember she was what some would call "Reubenesque." As a ten year old boy though, I started with that one, for about ten minutes, at which point my mother noticed what I was reading, but by that point the "damage" had been done.  I read some good words.  Words I honestly had no visuals to go with, but the ones I did have mostly came from naughty magazines that always seemed to be kept stashed in garages and the dark corners of closets.  Apparently, my Mom and her mother, my dear old Gran, had some words about the incident.  I don't know the content of those conversations, but The Celestial Bed did not make the journey home with us.

Was I scarred for life? Nope, I only remember the incident rather vaguely and mostly because my Mom made such a fuss about it.  Do I think she should have just let me read it? Also no, that would not have been a good parental decision, but I do remember being a little angry about having it snatched from my grasp.  If Mom hadn't noticed, if I had more time with that book, if I had snuck it around the way boys from my generation snuck pilfered skin mags around, would I have become a pervert, albeit a well read pervert?  Nah, it would have been just more sweaty, pre-pubescent nonsense. My Mom, sorry Granny, was right to take that away from my ten year old self.  You know who wouldn't have been right to take it away from me? A school board, or a governmental agency of any sort.  Should it have been in the library of my Elementary school?  Nope, but the issue with Maus was that it was being used as a way to teach eighth graders about the Shoah, it wasn't just left sitting around by derelict librarians or even well meaning old Grans. That means a teacher was walking the kids through the story, helping them deal with it and process difficult material.  It would be like a High School senior taking a class in Psychology and learning about Masters and Johnson with the guidance of a grown up.

It bears notice that Maus is now the best selling book on Amazon.  Congrats to Mr. Spiegelman, you should send a thank you card to the McMinn County Tennessee School Board.  Apparently our American tendency towards contrarianism actually does do some good.  But let me say that this way lies madness.  Banning books is a terrible idea.  It pushes our society down the path to intellectual blindness.  The fact that this sort of fascism is often hidden behind the guise of concerned parenting is rather insidious.  Your kids are going to see stuff that you don't want them to see, and read things you don't want them to read, you can't stop it.  You should think really carefully about how you limit their ability to learn to think critically about those things.  If you have a teacher who is willing to walk with your kids through the horrors of genocide then you should support that teacher as best you can, not take away their teaching tools.

Worse still is the inclination to try and put that task on some bureaucrats.  As soon as you let those clowns start making the rules about what is okay to learn and what is okay to read, you're on thin ice indeed. Oh, and I still haven't read The Celestial Bed, nor do I really want to, so I guess Mom won that battle, all by herself, without the help of any government agency.  Which is as it should be.