It’s heartbreaking.
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Especially if you’re a Holocaust denier or Nazi.
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Again this would have been, and still is the perfect time to then ask what book will they replace “Maus” with? Also ask the schoolboard members at what age and how were they taught about the Holocaust?
I can’t remember when and how I was taught about the Holocaust. But I still remember the scene in the movie “The Big Red One”-1980. That came out when either I was still in high school, or had just graduated. Maybe I was taught the horrors of the Holocaust with references back to Viet Nam which I watched on the nightly news when I was in grade school. There is just so many more good movies, where the Holocaust has been depicted with all of it’s horror that I can’t understand why “God Damn” in a graphic novel has gotten these school board member’s knickers in twist.
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So you agree with the Tennessee folks and the filthy stinking governor of the neo-Nazi loving Texas: All decisions for a child should be made at home, and not by the school board or teachers. That seems to be your point.
The Nobel committee needs to give Art Spiegelman the next award just to spite these idiots. Literature, Peace, Chemistry, I really don’t care which one.
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Not only is is not a very large step, it is the same thing.
The idea that “history” is something that happens to others not to decent White Americans. Which dovetails with the idea that decent White Americans shouldn’t have to feel bad about “history” that happens to other people.
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Proposed edit.
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I think they’re so myopic in their focus and they’re so afraid
That’s the republican base in a nutshell. Everything scares them all the time.
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Thank you. Because “history” shouldn’t scare them. Or offend them. Or, worse still, make them feel close to guilt (a human feeling).
Sometimes, with history, you get “Schindler’s List.” These people just want “The Sound of Music.”
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McMinn County didn’t remove Catcher in the Rye from the curriculum.
McMinn County didn’t remove Lord of the Flies from the curriculum.
McMinn County didn’t remove 1984 from the curriculum.
All of those use coarse language and/or depict violence or sex.
Besides the imagery from the graphic novel format (of anthropomorphic characters for God’s sake), what could possibly be so objectionable in Maus that isn’t present in those other classroom standards?
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"…Parkison said that the board decided that “the best way to fix or handle the language in this book was to redact it.”
"…Hitler said the board decided that “the best way to fix or handle the Jews was to redact them.”
FIFY
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It appears that Tony Allman just can’t wait for The Holocaust, Part 2.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana
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I was born right after WW II. I learned about the Holocaust from my Dad who fought in Europe from 1942 through VE day. So. first hand experience recounted added to going to movies where there was always a newsreel before the movie of moving pictures of the Death Camps, Jewish prisoners in their miserable troughs, and huge piles of naked dead bodies being bulldozed into burial pits. That went on into the 1950’s allowing plenty of time for my parents to deepen our education on what actually happened.
And now all that has been shoved into darkness by these goddamned dangerous fascists. It’s unfathomable, almost, unless one knows what ignorant humans still are capable of in murdering their own kind when revenge is promoted.
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This is actually a really hard distinction. I teach a strong cohort of ostensibly liberal college students and you might be surprised how confused they are by references to historical hate speech, symbols, and images – “should we be talking about this?” I wish we talked more about it, because there’s a sort of passive censorship about genocide and racial oppression except in a few cases where the narratives have become mainstream. And this creates the impression that those cases are exceptional and not linked to other outbreaks of virulent social diseases like racism and sexism, anti-Semitism, etc. So I completely agree with your comment, but I think it is often more than reading comprehension, it is also the wider impulse to avoid uncomfortable topics.
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In my younger daughter’s HS history class, the students watched “Schindler’s List.” There was some profanity and nudity in that too.
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The hate that is uttered over the dining room table would cancel out whatever “good” they are trying to promote.
I have known quite a few teachers. Much of what they work on is dealing with the effects of prejudices by bigoted parents.
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“Critical Master Race Theory”
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I bought all 3 volumes of Maus before it won the Pulitzer. It’s genius.
Tennessee is just wack. The nudity is not human, exactly.
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No naked mice, tho.
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