Unanimously. I put this in Cafe Society, but perhaps it would be better placed in Great Debates or Factual Questions (title: Are they all gone mad?), or Politics and Elections (title: First Amendment revisited: praise for sedition good, mourning the Shoah bad), or MPSIMS (what is more mundane than bigotry?) or in the Pit, so as to openly say what I think of censure and hypocrisy.
Spiegelman thinks the board’s decision was “absurd” and that the words in question are several mentions of “God d—” and the word “b----.” He said the nude drawing depicts his mother’s suicide, which includes a “dot for a nipple” and a bathtub filled with blood.
If you show genocide, mass murder and the resulting desperation it should be shown in a pleasant, god-fearing way, it seems. I am speechless, so I better stop. I don’t understand.
It was banned from a Middle School for profanity and nudity, which sounds like everything I ever read in Middle School since the books I checked out from the School Library were all noticably edited for language (offending words were either completely blanked out or had the G-D D-amn treatment).
It’s a massive overreaction but I got no stake in this.
Yeah, because parents really care about whether a cartoon animal is nude. That’s why kids aren’t allowed to watch Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, or Winnie the Pooh, right? And they don’t let their kids watch PG-13 movies, right?
Beau already has a video on it. I can’t say he’s wrong about why they feel the need to censor this book.
As I said in the SRIOTD thread, Maus is the only comic that made me cry. Spiegleman overcame his near-estranged relationship with his father to get his story on how he survived the concentration camps. It helped me understand my father, a WWII vet, a little better, and the reasons for his coldness and distrust. How anybody can only see nudity and cussing in such a monumental work is baffling and pathetic.
IDK whether I am getting you right or I have an obtuse mind, but do you mean you got no stake in this because it is just Middle School, or because you don’t read comics anyway, or because this is just Tennessee or is it something different? Because I am not even American, don’t go to school, could hardly put Tennessee on a map, but I feel this is important nonetheless. I like comics a lot, admittedly.
This can’t be right. I’ve been told that only the left participates in cancel culture. They must be a bunch of liberals in that Tennessee school board.
I think they should ban whatever book this quote comes from:
There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
I agree with Beau’s overall sentiment, but I believe he’s overthinking the motivations here. I grew up in the conservative south. Children are never to be shown nipples, and the word “goddamn” is never to be used because it might offend somebody who believes in God. If you think that’s too childish or provincial to have much force, I’m here to tell you that still it’s serious business.
Parental authority over such topics is paramount, and is not to be questioned. You can see the phrase “parental authority” cropping up in Florida and Texas and other places. Serving what end? Doesn’t matter. Parental control is its own end. It’s a pillar of southern culture.
Do I believe some parents are motivated to use their parental authority to prevent their children from being exposed to any theory of authoritarianism? Sure, and I bet there are a handful of actual Nazis or Nazi-adjacents involved in this.
But by and large, for the past 300 years, any southerner would tell you that schoolkids shouldn’t be exposed to nude bodies or blasphemous words. I’m opposed to it, yet it’s so ingrained that it’s an instinct that I have to fight when parenting my own kids. This wasn’t contrived out of thin air to hide the Holocaust. There are multiple strands of motivation here.
I also suspect that some of this is a reaction to conservatives feeling that the Holocaust is abused purely to browbeat and bully them. Most conservatives don’t know or care much about the Holocaust, in my experience. To them, it was long ago and far away and hence irrelevant.
But conservatives do have a boner for killing liberal sacred cows, and they see the Holocaust as one such animal, so they delight in killing it. Banning Maus is their way of saying “look what we can do to their sacred cow.” It’s not so much a message to liberals as it’s in-group signaling to conservatives that yes, we’re still in charge. It’s a balm to soothe their anxiety over losing narrative control and parental authority in a changing culture.
Rural southerners are deeply stupid and chauvinistic. I think it’s a category error to credit them with any strategy of indoctrination more sophisticated than “fuck you, you can’t tell me how to raise my kids.”
No, it is not.
And if the Holocaust was treated in a childish way, say with funny Mickey Mouses and Donalds, it would not do the Holocaust justice, it would be obscene.
Maus is great art because it could show the horror without being gory, but not sugar coating the horror nonetheless (among other things).
If you have never read Maus, I highly recommend it. It is excelent art and poignant history.
ETA: The board’s statement is just hyprocrisy IMO, scusatio non petita acusatio manifiesta.
But, as Beau said, none of those people object to other nude animals, and most likely let their kids watch media with those words in them. Hence we know this is not their motivation.
I do agree that there is a “you can’t make me” streak. But it doesn’t sufficiently explain why they would think that the holocaust is being used to “browbeat” them. Beau’s explanation makes that make sense.
There definitely were no problems teaching the Holocaust in my school. And, while I’m in Northwest Arkansas, my specific town is much more “Southern” in how it thinks.
While I applaud, and tend to agree with, everything you wrote, I also think that both things can be true.
There’s often (usually ? always ?) a dynamic – stupid vs. evil – at play. The market for demagogues tends to be the former. The demagogues themselves tend to be the latter.
There are think tanks and political operatives who spend their working lives understanding their customer base, and formulating strategies to entrain, compel, and entice them.
So I wouldn’t doubt that this sort of approach comes from a white guy in high-priced clothing, and directly targets socially conservative rubes.
I had Maus a long time ago, and something amazingly trivial always made me wonder. Spiegelman portrays his psychiatrics’ office, and has a little word panel with an arrow pointing to a picture on the desk of the guy’s cat. It said something like: “really!”, as if keeping a picture of one’s pet were an aberration of some sort.
This is actually the weakest point he makes, as it always is when someone argues “the same people who hate X have no problem with Y.” If you aren’t taking care to delineate “the same people” and concretely show what they do and don’t have a problem with, then it’s somewhat of an overgeneralizing strawman. Additionally there is often some sleight-of-hand about the similarity of X and Y, which I’ll revisit below.
First, do we know that everybody who hates Maus lets people watch other dubious media? No, we don’t. I strongly doubt rural Tennessee parents are letting their kids watch Braveheart as he suggested. I don’t know this is the case, but I’m confident that Beau contacted exactly zero parents or administrators to make this determination.
Second, it doesn’t really make sense to compare “other nude animals” when most mainstream cartoon depictions of animals don’t show their genitals or nipples. The fur or feathers serves the purpose of clothing, the concept of “nudity” doesn’t really apply. That’s just a lazy comparison.
Seriously? Parental control is a pillar of every culture. In what culture are minors ever expected to have the ability to make life-altering decisions, including the sources from which they will receive their education?
