You will have heard about the McMinn County (TN) school board that removed Art Spiegelman’s great graphic novel Maus, about the Holocaust, from the eighth grade history curriculum on grounds that it is inappropriate for kids. Here’s the transcript of that school board meeting. The main objections were that the graphic novel has some curse words in it, and a drawing of a nude figure. The transcript is worth reading, especially these bits:

Steven Brady: When we see something on television that is a direct quote from an actor or a president, something where it has that inappropriate language, they will blur it out or white out parts of it or they will bleep it.

Tony Allman: I understand all that, but being in the schools, educators and stuff 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.

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 passing away 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. Are the words objectionable? Yes, there is no one that thinks they aren’t but by taking away the first part, it’s not changing the meaning of what he is trying to portray and copyright.

Tony Allman: I understand that on tv and maybe at home these kids hear worse, but we are talking about things that if a student went down the hallway and said this, our disciplinary policy says they can be disciplined, and rightfully so. And we are teaching this and going against policy?

Melasawn Knight: 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 that 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.

Tony Allman: 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. You can look at his history, and we’re letting him do graphics in books for students in elementary school. If I had a child in the eighth grade, this ain’t happening. If I had to move him out and homeschool him or put him somewhere else, this is not happening.

Julie Goodin: Even for me Mr. Allman, you know I have an eighth grader and even if you did pull this book I would want him to read it because we have to teach our kids. Are these words ok? No, not at all that is not acceptable, but the problem is that we are 80 years removed from the Holocaust itself. I just think this is a grave starting point for our teachers. I am very passionate about history, and I would hate to rob our kids of this opportunity. Are we going to be teaching these words outside of this book as vocabulary words? No, you know me better than that Tony Allman.

Tony Allman: I know and I am not being argumentative, I am just trying to wrap my mind around because if a student sitting in the cafeteria decides to read this out loud and complete the sentences, what are you going to do? It’s in the book you’re teaching them so what are you going to do?

Melasawn Knight: We can say that the students know what that means, but they know what that means if they have been exposed to it prior to. The B word doesn’t have to mean that unless you have been exposed to it before. It’s not like we are teaching that or exposing them to that. We are trying our best to redact the best we can and follow the law and that is what we felt like we have done to address the concerns of that language, the best we could. We think it is a valuable book and most of the supervisors here have read it.

More:

Jonathan Pierce: I ask that you go back to your Hoard’s Dairy example. Not one time do I see a vulgar word in that paragraph there. My objection, and I apologize to everyone sitting here, is that my standard no matter, and I am probably the biggest sinner and crudest person in this room, can I lay that in front of a child and say read it, or this is part of your reading assignment. I’ve got enough faith from the Director of Schools down to the newest hire in this building, that you can take that module and rewrite it and make it do the same thing. Our children need to know about the Holocaust, they need to understand that there are several pieces of history, Mr. Bennett, that shows depression or suppression of certain ethnicities. It’s not acceptable today. We’ve got to accept people for who and what they are. I’m just an old country school board member and I think in our policy it says the decision stops with this board. Unfortunately, Mr. Parkison we did not go through the complaint process that’s also in our Board Policies.

But Rob, the wording in this book is in direct conflict of some of our policies. If I said on the school bus that I was going to kill you, we would be bringing disciplinary action against that child. Again, I am the biggest hypocrite, but I wouldn’t want to go to court that day. And somebody lay this book down and say look it was taught in the classrooms. Therefore, Madame Chairman I’m going to bring this to a head. I started it so I am going to bring it to a head. I move that we remove this book from the reading series and challenge our instructional staff to come with an alternative method of teaching The Holocaust.

Mike Lowry: Second.

The vote was 6 to 4 to remove Maus.

This is shameful. We are a stupid country. My 10th grade daughter read about this story yesterday, and said that she read Maus when she was a lot younger, and she understood that it was about the mass murder of European Jews — and she didn’t even notice the foul language or nudity (nudity of animals: the Jews are drawn as mice, the Nazis as cats). She’s right. The skull-cracking idiocy of this is that the schools of McMinn County are trying to teach eighth graders ABOUT THE MASS MURDER OF SIX MILLION, but six school board members believe that the occasional appearance of foul language in the narrative (the objectionable words were “bitch” and “goddamn”) is too much for their little ears, and nude mice representing the humiliation of human beings before their execution might eroticize their delicate sensibilities. What do these school board members think the Holocaust was? Spiegelman’s drawings are nowhere near the horror of actual photos of what the Nazis did:

Notice what that one school board member said about how they would not tolerate a kid on the school bus saying “I’m going to kill you,” so why should they tolerate it in literature presented to middle schoolers? Good Lord, where do you even start with that?! In the conservative classical Christian school where my kids attend, the kids read The Odyssey in seventh grade. Odysseus commits adultery with the goddess Calypso and the witch Circe as part of his ten-year journey home. Teachers handle these themes with care and attention. Besides, in our hypereroticized culture, kids can and do learn far more about sex and sexuality (to say nothing of foul language) every day. It’s crazy that grown-up school board members are so prissy that they want children to learn about the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis, but to do so without seeing four-letter words or the suggestion of naked mice.

Do you want more information on how thick this board is? Look at this, from the transcript:

Mike Cochran: It doesn’t matter, it’s in the curriculum, all this stuff keeps popping up. So, I want to read it, you guys can fire me later, I guess.

I’m just wild about Harry,

and Harry’s wild about me

The heavenly blisses of his kisses,

fill me with ecstasy

He’s sweet just like chocolate candy

Just like honey from the bee

Oh I am just wild about Harry,

and he’s just wild about me

One of the discussion questions is define what this word “ecstasy” means. My problem is, all the way through this literature we expose these kids to nakedness, we expose them to vulgarity. You go all the way back to first grade, second grade and they are reading books that have a picture of a naked man riding a bull. It’s not vulgar, it’s something you would see in an art gallery, but it’s unnecessary. So, teachers have gone back and put tape over the guys butts so the kids aren’t exposed to it. So, my problem is, it looks like the entire curriculum is developed to normalize sexuality, normalize nudity and normalize vulgar language. If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it. You put this stuff just enough on the edges, so the parents don’t catch it but the kids, they soak it in. I think we need to relook at the entire curriculum.

School board member Mike Cochran thinks “I’m Just Wild About Harry” — a foxtrot written in 1921, one century ago, for a Broadway show! — is a subversive plot to eroticize the innocent schoolchildren of McMinn County.

The whole thing is utterly humiliating. Shame on the McMinn County school board.

But look, this kind of thing happens all the time, in liberal places. They’re not objecting to four-letter words in Maus, or rodent ta-tas, but to equally ridiculous ideas, concepts, art and literature that offend progressive sensibilities. I’ll happily trade you the McMinn County school system for Yale, Harvard, and the pantheon of woke US universities. Just last week in Seattle, a progressive school board removed Harper Lee’s antiracist classic To Kill A Mockingbird from the required reading list because it upset some progressive parents. Idiocy. Total philistine idiocy.

Back in the year 2000, I wrote a piece (no longer online) about how in my home state of Louisiana, the Catholic diocese of Lafayette had banned the work of Flannery O’Connor because black students and parents objected to her using racial epithets in her stories, which were set in the Jim Crow South. I wrote:

The Catholic Church teaches that our moral and intellectual failures may sometimes be excused by something it calls “invincible ignorance” — an absolute incapacity to understand that what we’re doing is wrong. The plea of invincible ignorance seems just about the only hope for Catholic parents in a southern Louisiana town who succeeded this summer in banning from a local Catholic high school the work of the woman widely held to be the greatest Catholic fiction writer of twentieth-century America.

But for their bishop, the head of the Diocese of Lafayette, who set aside common sense, basic fairness, and intellectual integrity to crumble to the parents’ bullying — well, in his case it looks more like willful ignorance, and that leaves him with a whole lot of explaining to do. Thanks to Bishop Edward J. O’Donnell’s abject surrender to the forces of political correctness, a southern Catholic school — Opelousas Catholic High — has the dubious distinction of being the first recorded school in America to ban the southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor.

In fact, the bishop’s edict goes further. The parents of black students at Opelousas Catholic had demanded that O’Connor’s collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, be removed from reading lists because it contains characters who use the words “nigger” and “pickaninny.” And Bishop O’Donnell, in ordering the elimination of O’Connor’s volume, directed that “no similar books” replace it: All books containing those racial epithets are forbidden, regardless of context.

Mark Twain? Gone. William Faulkner? A dead letter. Black authors Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, even local writer Ernest J. Gaines? Banished without reprieve.

“Basically, anything that has to do with race is off-limits,” said Arsenio Orteza, the teacher whose assigning of O’Connor to his eleventh-graders sparked the furor. “Think of how much American literature that leaves out. Maybe The Scarlet Letter is the way to go, and I’ll have to hope there aren’t any adulterers who object in the community.”

I hardly need to list here examples of contemporary progressives being just as pigheaded and blind as the McMinn County school board.

What is wrong with us? Seriously, the childish urge to censor without any understanding of context is baffling. This comes from the zero tolerance movement, which says that anything that raises the slightest objection, or is even the tiniest bit deviant from the straight and narrow, must be banned. This arose when the public lost confidence in authorities to use their own discretion in punishing infractions. This quickly led to the death of common sense.

It’s a hard problem to solve today. We plainly cannot trust teachers in every instance. We have far too many recent examples of activist teachers trying to mainstream Critical Race Theory and gender ideology without parents knowing, thus abusing their authority. On the other hand, is the alternative really to have school board members showing themselves to be prisspot ignoramuses, denouncing hundred-year-old show tunes and a highly acclaimed illustrated story about the Holocaust on grounds that seem more like the Saudi morals police than men and women of the West?

I really don’t know how to fix this. Nobody trusts anybody else. If my kids were in McMinn County public schools, I would be mad as hell (sorry, “mad as heck”) over the Maus imbroglio. But does that mean I believe the judgment of teachers is always to be trusted? Not remotely. A combination of the zero tolerance mentality, hysterical sensitivity to offense, and the loss of a common culture with common standards, all brought us to this point. What’s going to get us out of it? No clue.

One good thing that could come out of it: if you haven’t read Maus, or shared it with your older children, please do.