The author of the award-winning graphic novel “Maus,” which depicts the atrocities experienced by Jews imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, expressed his disgust with a Tennessee school board’s unanimous vote earlier this month to remove his book from its curriculum during interviews with CNBC and CNN.
“There’s something going on very, very haywire there.”
Welcome to America.
”According to minutes of the board meeting, members claimed to be concerned about profanity and an image depicting nudity in the book.”
”I, for one, am OUTRAGED that innocent children were exposed to images of mice without clothing!”
(Just wait’ll these folks get a glimpse of Snoopy running around in the buff!)
Tony Allman, a school board member, argued that schools and educators “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,” Allman said, according to the minutes.
Presentation of realities is not promotion of it.
What an utter failure in reading comprehension.
Wait till they realize Donald Duck isn’t wearing anything from the waist down.
I guess sex education had been overlooked because it doesn’t involve Nazis?"
Tennessee, like the rest of the White South, where evolution runs in reverse.
Well, Blacks and Jews; who’s next?
Mr. Spiegelman just taught me a new word: “daffily”.
Don’t forget where the Scopes trial was staged…this is an outrage, but not a big surprise.
The irony… book banning and book burning was a signature Nazi behavior.
In the School Board’s defense: They never read Orwell, either.
"Tennessee is obviously demented. There’s something going on very, very haywire there.”
One word – Republicans.
There's only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days. https://t.co/fs1Jl62Qd8
— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) January 26, 2022
I don’t think they’re being ironic.
Gee, I guess genocide isn’t such a big deal when you compare it to the horrors of “profanity and an image depicting nudity.”
Tony Allman, a school board member, argued that schools and educators “don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff.”
First, “this stuff” is history, a subject that a well-educated person should encounter. Second, I suspect Mr. Allman is not a well-educated person if he thinks that “enable” and “promote” are synonyms for teach.
staged? interesting choice of word.
Not wrong, just interesting.
I used to drive to an art colony in North Carolina - a great place to learn, beautiful surroundings (blue ridge). Even a decade ago, I took pains to avoid TN. I made up for it by hitting a few bourbon distilleries in KY, instead.
It’s not a very large step at all from “don’t teach anything that offends white folks or makes them feel uncomfortable” to “don’t teach anything that offends Holocaust deniers and Nazis”.
No, not everywhere. It’s not like that where I live in western Washington state. It’s like that in parts of Tennessee. Which is one reason why my wife and I decided not to retire there, although we had a beautiful vacation place up in the northeast TN mountains for several years.
Our neighbors were nice as long as we didn’t stray far from innocuous topics, but the undercurrent of fear and distrust of anyone not exactly like them was always there.
One guy who owned the farm adjoining our land asked if my wife was an Eskimo. She’s Russian/Polish descent, slightly olive skinned but nowhere near looking like that. But she was different enough to ask the question. The cities in TN are less weird, I’m sure, but up in the mountains it’s still a different world.
In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
–Mark Twain