Our story so far: East Bumfuck County¹ in Tennessee—about 20 miles away from the site of the Scopes monkey trial—has banned Maus, a Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust. Outrage is universal.
But rural, conservative school districts have been doing this kind of stuff forever. They don't like sexual themes. They don't like nudity. They don't like swearing. Maus is an adult novel that features all of these things. But there are lots of other novels and nonfiction books about the Holocaust. If Maus is too raw for them, how about recommending something else instead of getting dragged into the usual pointless culture war squabble. Wouldn't that be a better use of time?
¹It's really McMinn County, population 50,000, about which Wikipedia says this:
In August 1946, an uprising known as the Battle of Athens erupted when the McMinn County sheriff and several other county officials (most of whom had ties to Memphis political boss E.H. Crump) attempted to fix local elections. A group of World War II veterans launched an armed assault on the jail in Athens, where the county officials had retreated with the ballot boxes. After an exchange of gunfire, the county officials turned over the ballot boxes, and the votes were counted in a public setting.
Maybe--if people banning the items are acting in good faith. It could even be argued that nudity in books about the Holocaust will distract from the message, especially where teens are involved. But it does seem the people seeking the bans are looking for pretexts to remove books, not to improve discussions on sensitive topics. Why on earth discussing the Holocaust or saying "Nazi's are bad" is now considered "sensitive" by the right wing is beyond me.
Because these people will tell you the only thing Hitler did wrong was invading Russia.
And national healthcare. I have it on good authority that's why Obama was just like Hitler.
That must be why wingnuts avoid the interstate highway system, modeled on the autobahn, and stick to forlorn country roads where the feds can't surveil them.
These people think the only thing Hitler did wrong is “not finish the job”.
A group of World War II veterans launched an armed assault on the jail in Athens, where the county officials had retreated with the ballot boxes. After an exchange of gunfire, the county officials turned over the ballot boxes, and the votes were counted in a public setting.
Those WWII didn't need an investigation from Congress or the DOJ. They knew how to take care of stolen elections without a big fuss.
If Maus is too raw for them, how about recommending something else instead of getting dragged into the usual pointless culture war squabble. Wouldn't that be a better use of time?
I'd recommend Triumph of the Will but that's black-and-white and we know nobody likes to watch black-and-white anymore. Can we settle on "Hogan's Heroes"? It even shows the Nazis in an unfavorable light, like that time Klink broke up the party after Hogan smuggled the busty, blonde fräulein into the barracks.
This didn't end up where I was aiming. Oh, well.
I never understood the appeal of Hogan’s Heroes.
“Oh, those crazy, bumbling Nazis. Why, they’re harmless buffoons! Why, they couldn’t hurt a flea. Yuk, yuk, yuk!”
In the book, the Jews are drawn as mice and the Nazis are cats. Banning the book based on “nudity” is absurd. And there’s no gratuitous nudity in the book.
Even though the story is told using the “funny animal” device it is a very powerful story.
Shaved pushy is shaved pussy, species immaterial.
Apparently, the nudity they are complaining about isn’t the mice. Within the book, Spiegelman talks about and reprints a story he had written many years before. When Spiegelman was 20 years old his mother, a. Auschwitz survivor, committed suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathtub. The panel in question shows his father finding her. The story is very raw and shocking in a lot of ways but worrying about the depiction of a bare breast that you have to look really closely to see and in that context is just weird:
https://jperrryy.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/prisoner-on-the-hell-planet/
Kids today know all about things like that, & worse, because of XXXtentacion.
If anything, while sadder, the mother's suicide is less gruesome & socially maladaptive.
The nudity complained about here is naked MICE.
Kevin please don't use words like "bumfuck" when referring to rural counties. Stff like that just makes it harder on us progressives in blue cities (like my Knoxville) in red states.
I really gotta wonder. They claim they don’t like a couple of boobies and a handful of curse words sprinkled in among this powerful and personal story. But then, the coincidence that they happened to ban it just about on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day? Hmmmmmmm. Makes you ponder. 🤔
"They don't like sexual themes. They don't like nudity. They don't like swearing."
No, those things are OK. They don't like Jews.
They going to ban the KJV next? It has all of those things.
They don't dislike Jews, they just like like Nazis more.
They only like the few Jews who will be around to fulfill some ridiculous prophesy that a few Jews have to be left in Israel for the second coming. Meantime, if those Jews there could go to war with Muslims it’s a win-win for them. After that, us Jews are a bunch of George Soroses to them.
We read "Night" by Elie Wiesel in my school. That or "If This Is a Man/Survival In Auschwitz" by Primo Levi seem like good options to test this crowd's intentions.
Oh man, there's a lot. I've read a few that I could recommend to these people if I thought they were acting in good faith (I don't). But, assuming I did, I'd recommend:
Number the Stars - Lois Lowry
The Devil's Arithmetic - Jane Yolen
Stones in Water - Donna Jo Napoli
And, of course, the Wiesel trilogy and Primo Levi books already noted are superb.
"Age-appropriate" is a reasonable discussion to have, but really, didn't "Schindler's List" let this cat out of the bag long ago? For these parent groups (setting aside culture war politics) there is no end to banning books. Most of the kids would never check a book out of the school library, but "Maus" has (mouse) nudity?!! Spread the word, PTA!! Elsewhere they are banning "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Huckleberry Finn" because the n-word. Someone might want to let them know that Genesis features sex, murder, rape, loose women, loose men, incest, miscegenation, violence, and genocide. Exodus features witchcraft. Time to Ban the Bible!
Ezekiel 23:
19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. 21 So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled
I think that The Book Thief is the answer to Kevin's question.
Does Maus have actual swearing, or is it just "God Damn"?
That example actually IS swearing.
"Pig fucker," on the other hand, is an impolite name to call somebody, but it doesn't violate the Commandment not to take God's name in vain.
Paging through the book, I don’t see much. Far less than you near every day.
* Far less than you hear every day.
Anyone who wants to see how disingenuous these people are can go the the Amazon page and read the preview. It will be immediately obvious that complaints about nudity are laughable
Some recommendations:
The Search by van den Heuvel, a graphic novel about the Holocaust from the Anne Frank House museum.
The Boy on the Wooden Box by Leyson, a memoir about one of the youngest kids on Schindler's List.
Milkweed by Spinelli (perfect for struggling middle school readers) about a group of homeless boys in Nazi occupied Poland who get trapped in the ghetto - main character is likely Roma, and becomes close to a Jewish family.
Others include Number the Stars by Lowry and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by Boyd.
The ending of the film version of Boy in the Striped Pajamas is Lottery-level horror.
While I know very little of the details of McMinn County, I come from another rural place, and I can attest that people there can, in good faith, object to nudity and swearing and also still want their children to learn about the Holocaust, and not have some big thing about Jews. Mind you, they probably don't have a lot of first-hand experience with Jews, but they have read things like The Diary of Anne Frank, for instance.
If the target for the book were high schoolers, I would roll my eyes a bit. Those kids know all those words and see all those things every day, and you're better off as a parent guiding them through that experience than trying to deny it to them. But that's kind of an aside.
So, until we have more concrete detail, I personally would grant them the benefit of the doubt. Mind you though, I'm not personally Jewish, though many have thought I am.
Some people ban Anne Frank too.
https://library.bentleyschool.net/c.php?g=386286&p=6989422
This makes a ton of sense, because no thirteen year-old I've ever known has ever used a naughty word or seen a picture of a naked person.
I can confirm that I was in my 14th year before I ever did those things.
... or wait a minute ... thinking back, maybe it was my eighth year.
East Bumfuck County? Better watch out there, Kevin. Rural people might think you’re making fun of them, disrespecting them or condescending to them. A few years ago, you warned all us liberals that we shouldn’t do that to rural folk, and instead should empathize with them.
East Tennessee is mostly bumfuck counties, although it was generally pro-Union in the Civil War… mostly because the Smoky Mountains and hill country weren’t exactly a plantation economy.
Bradley County is next to McMinn, and they have the big city of Cleveland, population 47K.
East Tennessee is also where Oak Ridge* is located. In the 1950s and 1960s, it had one of the highest concentrations of scientists and engineers in the country and a lot of them retired there.
*I grew up in Oak Ridge in the '60s
And Bradley County is a bedroom community of Chattanooga. McMinn County is bisected by I75. It's red but far from what I'd call "bumfuck." We do have a few of those here but I've also seen some in my spouse's native Oregon.
Shoutout Greater Idaho!
do as i say etc, etc
I read "the rise and fall of the third Reich" (shirer) probably the year after highschool and found it really compelling. Not specifically about the Holocaust, but it is woven all through everything.
The Painted Bird.
[authorship controversy doesn't make it a worse book]
All those recommend above, but this is another one I read & kept despite that issue. Haven't seen others recommend it in the years since, but it was very affecting. Also: Hitler's Willing Executioners (Goldhagen).Wish I could recall a later, very comprehensive & detailed history of Hitler's regime, but overloaded shelves mean that later books aren't stored by author.
The is nothing that I would recommend to these ignorant folks. No wonder they seldom rise from the ground.
I love all the earnest suggestions of people in this thread. The reality is that any book that makes any white person feel discomfort is too much. A large portion of our country’s population is of German ancestry. Nothing wrong with that, I’m a little bit of that also. But the whole point is to whitewash any white-supremacist history and to emphasize the evil of any present day minorities. Full stop. Under this theory, there will ALWAYS be something objectionable about any book under any objective standard. It’s just the ones that come to their attention and bother them politically that get the ax.
"Wouldn't that be a better use of time?"
I don't think so. It's really not about the book - it's the principle.
Being enculturated into rural southern society does not (or should not?) serve as an excuse for being wrong or ironically hypocritical.
They don’t like anything more challenging than learning a trade, IME.
And a lot of times not even then. Especially if it's a trade that involves numbers or isn't 'manly' enough. Come to think of it, there's a considerable overlap of the two.
I count professions like nursing in the trade category. It took me years to realize that my high-school advanced biology class was fairly difficult anatomy & physiology because the teacher expected roughly a third of the students to go to nursing school and she figured it’d be useful. They didn’t “believe” in evolution, but they learned the stuff that they’d need at work.
I'm trying to decide if I'm embarrassed to be part of an audience that responds so well to such cheap shots. "East Bumfuck County" ROFL
Well, you're not alone.
Wait. I remember Maus.
Wouldn't the "nudity" be a cartoonish drawing of a naked mouse? She'd be about as "naked" as Pluto in a Disney cartoon, no?
Watched the CNN interview with the author of Maus, and he pointed out that that only 30% of kids in that county read at their school levels, so something to keep in mind.
Also, he had an interesting recommendation for our modern times, On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, which I not only can recommend but just released a graphic version.
https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Graphic-Lessons-Twentieth-Century/dp/1984860399
Thanks for that. Just bought it.
You're very welcome. Enjoy isn't quite the right word, so I hope you find it informative.
The version I have is under $6 and has a small form of less than 6 1/2" x 4 1/2" so easy to carry and give as a handy present as well.
He wasn't at all cheering on Bill Maher the other day.
I would stick with Maus. In my experience, even lots of college kids these days don't like looking at pages full of words. Pictures help.
Maus is an amazing work of art. Instead of looking at alternatives, KD should inform us why the County think like it does starting with the transcript of the hearing and perhaps call a spade a spade.
To explore alternatives with them is to concede that their book-banning position has some legitimacy. If you decide to meet a monster half-way, you've already lost.
Right.
+10
I knew about it in 7th grade because the kid in my homeroom who was super into ( ( ( Stan Lee ) ) ) convinced our librarian Ms. Tryggestad to order Maus for the library.
That would dilute the purity of the principle. You’re either for it, or against it…
You should realize it's not about the nudity or the swear words (I think one was "God damned" but I could be wrong), it's about the subject matter. You can pick any book you want about the Nazi genocide (not only against Jews but also against the Romany and others) and this group of people in Tennessee would find some way to object to it because it defines what they want to do so desperately as a crime against humanity.
Isn’t the point of this controversy not that some rural county somewhere banned a book, but that the free speech warriors on the right who routinely decry every perceived incidence of “cancel culture” by students at some obscure liberal arts college — which typically amounts to little more than said students expressing their, er, free speech rights by protesting speech they find objectionable — are glaringly silent about actual, honest-to-god, government sponsored censorship?
To be fair, the writer of this very blog is one of those Joshhawleyite, Conorfriedersdorkian nutpickers who says jackshit about middle & high school level censorship by the right but goes on & on & on & on about Oberlin banh mi type shit.
Way back when NBC broadcasted "Schindler's List", Rep. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma protested that there was nudity. The scene involved a group of women being stripped and sent in to the showers they thought would kill them. They were wailing in horror at the prospect.
No wonder he protested. The scene probably gave him a boner that lasted for hours. And then he went to the senate.
"Rep. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was quoted in a release put out by his office as saying the airing of the highly acclaimed film took network television ``to an all-time low, with full frontal nudity, violence and profanity being shown in our homes.''
https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/schindler-on-tv.html
Too easy: The Camp of the Saints.
I visited an American friend who lives in a distant suburb of Tokyo that she refers to as Higashi (East) Bumfuck. Totally cracked me up.