Seven years ago, when the totalitarians in Russia banned bookstore sales of “Maus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, author Art Spiegelman lamented: “It’s a real shame because this is a book about memory. We don’t want cultures to erase memory.”
Welcome to Tennessee, where the yahoos are giving us a touch of Russia.
As if this should be a surprise. In the Divided States of America, there is no vaccine for the pandemic of ignorance.
On Jan. 10, the McMinn County Board of Education met to discuss whether “Maus” – an anti-fascist cartoon memoir narrated by Spiegelman’s Polish Jewish father – should be summarily removed from the eighth-grade curriculum. The vote to ban was 10-0. It happened in a building called the Center for Educational Excellence.
Board member Mike Cochran’s definition of excellence is no cussing or nakedness. His beef is that “Maus” has a few cuss words and one depiction of nakedness (cartoon nakedness, but still!). He explained it this way (according to the minutes of the meeting, which surfaced in the local press this week):
“I went to school here thirteen years. I learned math, English, Reading and History. I never had a book with a naked picture in it, never had one with foul language. In third grade I had one of my classmates come up to me and say hey what’s this word? I sounded it out and it was “damn,” and I was real proud of myself because I sounded it out. She ran straight to the teacher and told her I was cussing…So this idea that we have to have this kind of material in the class in order to teach history, I don’t buy it…We don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.”
Board member Tony Allman weighed in as well, positing the argument that teaching eighth-graders about what can really happen under fascism is just a bad idea. Or something. Here’s how he put it:
“We don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff. It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff, it is not wise or healthy.”
A few guest speakers tried to reason with the board members. For instance, assistant principal Julie Goodin:
“I can talk of the history, I was a history teacher and there is nothing pretty about the Holocaust and for me this was a great way to depict a horrific time in history. Mr. Spiegelman did his very best to depict his mother (being killed) and we are almost 80 years away. It’s hard for this generation, these kids don’t even know 9/11, they were not even born. For me this was his way to convey the message.”
Another guest speaker, Melasawn Knight, concurred:
“I think any time you are teaching something from history, people did hang from trees,
people did commit suicide and people were killed, over six million were murdered. I think the author is
portraying that because it is a true story about his father (who) lived through that. He is trying to portray that the best he can with the language that he chooses that would relate to that time, maybe to help people who haven’t been in that aspect in time to actually relate to the horrors of it. Is the language objectionable? Sure. I think that is how he uses that language to portray that.”
Alas, board member Tony Allman was not persuaded:
“I am not denying it was horrible, brutal, and cruel. It’s like when you’re watching TV and a
cuss word or nude scene comes on, it would be the same movie without it. Well, this would be the same book without it. I may be wrong, but this guy that created the artwork used to do the graphics for
Playboy…If I had a child in the eighth grade, this ain’t happening.”
Oh well. If only Spiegelman had sketched some wholesome Holocaust scenes – cartoon Nazi guards saying “please”; death camp denizens saying “gosh”; maybe some cartoon Jews praying to Jesus – his art might’ve passed muster. (Today he called the board’s censorship vote “daffily myopic.”) But just as school material depicting the realities of our racist past are now often deemed to be too sensitive for right-wing snowflakes, it’s now clear that, in some quarters, the same standards of “excellence” are being applied to the greatest 20th-century crime against humanity.
As the philosopher George Santayana warned in 1905, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
On the other hand, Santayana was foreign-born and graduated from Harvard, so I shudder to think what those school board members would make of that.