12823

Some interesting bits from the article involving the ACLU I posted above:

Rothert said public school boards are not allowed to pull books from libraries, citing information on a 1982 case determined by the U.S. Supreme Court:

According to Island Trees School District v. Pico, “the Supreme Court held over 40 years ago that ‘local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.’”

And according to Campbell v. St. Tammany Parish School Board: “[T]he special characteristics of the school library make that environment especially appropriate for the recognition of the First Amendment rights of students.” Id. at 868. “[J]ust as access to ideas makes it possible for citizens generally to exercise their rights of free speech and press in a meaningful manner, such access prepares students for active and effective participation in the pluralistic, often contentious society in which they will soon be adult members.” Id. “[I]n light of the special role of the school library as a place where students may freely and voluntarily explore diverse topics, [a] School Board’s non-curricular decision to remove a book well after it had been placed in the public school libraries evokes the question whether that action might not be an unconstitutional attempt to “‘strangle the free mind at its source.’”

12824

More GOP attempts to remove books from libraries in the news today.

12825

I kind of agree with you. On the other hand, I don’t think any canon of literature deserves codification in a curriculum. I’d rather we didn’t try to sneak cultural values in through the literature we assign. I’d rather we explicitly taught cultural values and then maybe used literature as part of a multiprong strategy for exploring them. And much of our English literature curriculum is not even meant to provide this function: it’s meant to provide a shared cultural language, e.g. everyone understands what you’re talking about when you refer to star-crossed lovers. (I think Shakespeare, for what it’s worth, is wildly overwrought. Central to his reification is the notion that in the 4 centuries since he published, no writer has been his equal, which is just a ludicrous idea.) To Kill a Mockingbird is a fine-but-not-especially-great novel that is anything but timeless. It’s interesting as a historical artifact, the way Uncle Tom’s Cabin is, but as a useful exploration of contemporary racial dynamics maybe not. Maybe swap that out with The Underground Railroad or Beloved or Between the World and Me or The Vanishing Half or The Hate U Give or something else more contemporary.

12826

I stole this from elsewhere, it’s a pretty good summation of what I observe from the GOP in 2022:

Republican strategists decided to transition from conservative policy issues over to purely identity issues.

Identity issues are the recreational drug of politics. They make it easy to win election after election without the drudge work of making policy. But it makes electoral victories so easy that politicians and media became addicted to it.

More importantly, it replaced actual policy with vilification of the other party. So voters became trained to hate everything democrats wanted, whether it helped themselves or not.

One example is shown by their opposition to Obamacare - they’ve been against for MANY years but they couldn’t come up with a replacement.

12827

I’m fairly certain Trump has the plan in a filing cabinet. He promised! And for sure during the 2024 campaign he will swear that he has the plan to fix healthcare and we just need to elect him to find out what it is.

12828

The ultimate plan of the GOP is to close the FDA, the EPA, revoke most environmental policies, the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, end National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service, sell of most National Forests and Wildlife areas, reduce the National Income tax to as little as possible, reduce most capital gains taxes to near zero, end Medicaid and Medicare and food stamps / WIC programs.

And they’re going to do that on the back of books in elementary schools.

12829

He was going to release it in two weeks but negotiations hit a wall a big beautiful wall the highest wall you could imagine but the democrats don’t want a wall they want open borders but I would have had a wall and we were only three weeks away from finishing the wall

12830

I’ll agree with this. Maus is terrific.

12831

It sure is.

12832

Of course school boards have been in a tizzy over Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for decades, so it’s nothing new for pearl-clutching parents and teachers to be offended by words and images no matter the message of the work.

It’s always been funny/sad to me how Huck Finn catches it from racists for the depiction of a white boy being friends with a black man, and from others for the use of the N-word.

12833

Certainly if they only read one book in the entire course this might be the case, but I’d think that they could read other books along side this Pulitzer prize winning classic.

I can respect this. Mockingbird isn’t some ultimate work of literature that requires presentation to every human being. (although I would argue that it is a work of such quality that it should at least be considered)

Rather, it is the RATIONALE for its removal that was so offensive to me. The fact that it used foul language, when presenting such foul concepts such as racism, is not a legitimate criticism. Such an argument misses the forest for the trees. Accurately depicting racism will inherently involve depicting offensive things, just as depicting the holocaust will always involve depicting horrific attrocities.

Yes, we might look upon our acts as humans in cases of southern racism, or the holocaust, and such things may make us want to look away. They may make us uncomfortable… they SHOULD make us uncomfortable. I’ve said before, that I sometimes feel like folks don’t feel enough shame. Maybe this is the catholicism I absorbed as a kid, but shame is what lets you know you did a shitty thing. The answer isn’t to be shielded from your shame… the answer is to do less bad things that make you feel ashamed.

The answer to things like the holocaust isn’t to pretend it didn’t happen, or sterilize our recollection of it into text and numbers. The answer is to look upon those horrific acts, recognize them for the atrocities they were, acknowledge the shame and terrible feelings that recognition inspires, and seek to avoid allowing such things to ever happen again.

12834

Well, there are a lot of books, and only so much time in English class. The reason any canon is formed is in large part because there is limited time available to read everything.

12835

No more ludicrous than saying Bach is the best composer, Michelangelo the best visual artist, etc. Time elapsed doesn’t have that much to do with it. (Except that a century or two seems to be usually required for a canonical work’s place to ‘set,’ and its esteem may be magnified by the extent to which it influences later works, because that process tends to make it appear to be almost a primal/ideal form of whatever qualities were imitated.) Some still consider Homer the greatest poet of all time; he also happens to be practically the first one that has survived.

If you think the very idea of making aesthetic rankings and/or placing someone at the top of them is ludicrous, that’s sort of a different matter. Obviously it is innately subjective. For my part, I know of no writer in English who comes up to Shakespeare, for whatever my opinion is worth.*

*It’s not worth a whole helluva lot.

12836

I imagine people upset by the contents of Maus would be upset by almost all adult fiction, even literary classics, except for the Bible.

12837

They’d be upset by the Bible too if they didn’t know it was the Bible.

It’s like when NPR would read the Declaration of Independence and right-wingers would freak out every time.

12838

People pick and choose from the Bible all the time, so yeah.

12839

Things that are ignored.

12840

I don’t know if it’s on that list, but this is my favorite nonsense bible quote:

Isaiah 34:7

And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness.

12841

They left out the restriction against eating blood.

“If any one of the house of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn among them eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from among his people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life. Therefore I have said to the people of Israel, No person among you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger who sojourns among you eat blood.”

Also, I’ve always thought this bit had to come from the author’s personal history:

“If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.”

12842

Good ones, guys. :)