Commentary

The banning of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book in a Tennessee school district is yet another example of the growing deterioration of American society

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, a school district in the city of Athens, TN voted to ban a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust due to “inappropriate language” and an illustration of a nude woman, according to minutes from a board meeting. The book, of course, is Maus, by Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for the work that tells the story of his Jewish parents living in 1940s Poland and depicts him interviewing his father about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.

In the book, Jews are depicted as mice (“maus” is the German word for mouse) while Nazi’s are portrayed as cats, the mouse’s classic predator.

If you haven’t seen or read the book, it’s in two parts. Here’s an image from one page.

(Maus has never, unfortunately, been adapted into a movie. But at the end of this story I’ll insert YouTube  links to direct you to the entire opus, videoed with professional voice-overs of Spiegelman’s words.)

Minutes from the January 10th school board meeting (reporting of this meeting only surfaced this week as the world was preparing to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945) tell of objections over some of the language used in the book. At first, Director of Schools Lee Parkison suggested redacting it “to get rid of the eight curse words and a picture of a woman that was objected to.” The picture is of a nude Jewish woman, drawn as a mouse.

School Board Member Tony Allman said, “It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote (emphasis mine) this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy.”

Jonathan Pierce, the board member who initiated the vote to remove Maus from the eighth-grade curriculum, said during the meeting that the Holocaust should be taught in schools, but this was not the book to do it.

“Our children need to know about the Holocaust, they need to understand that there are several pieces of history … that shows depression or suppression of certain ethnicities (emphasis mine). It’s not acceptable today,” Pierce said, according to the meeting minutes. “…the wording in this book is in direct conflict of some of our policies.”

Apparently when more open minds prevailed in Athens*, Maus was deemed appropriate to include in the district’s eighth-grade English language arts curriculum.

Not anymore. Not during this current American, no, global, resurgence of anti-Semitism.

*(Do you, as I, see the irony of the banning of this book happening in a place called Athens, a city named after ancient Athens, the center for the arts, learning and philosophy; the home of Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum; the city-state widely referred to as the cradle of Western civilization and the birthplace of democracy.)

The board’s decision came amid a wave of conservative-sponsored legislation and other actions to pull books from schools, with other banned works including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

If there is any good news coming out of this travesty of a decision it’s this: since the banning, sales of Maus have increased dramatically! Just days after news of the banning, two editions of Maus reached the top 20 on Amazon.com and are in limited supply. Neither book was in the top 1,000 at the beginning of the week.

And, in another Tennessee city, Knoxville, the comic bookstore, Nirvana Comics said they would give away copies of the book because they “believe it is a must-read for everyone.” They said all students need to do is ask for a copy by calling them or reaching out on social media.

Is the Athens school board decision simply an isolated instance of ignorance? Not if you believe the numbers from this Claims Conference Poll taken in 2020.

• Among Americans under 40:
  • 48% couldn’t name a single Holocaust concentration camp;
  • 63% didn’t know that about 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust;
  • 11% think the Holocaust was caused by Jews.

Can you imagine what those numbers are in Tennesse?

I have a personal interest in this story for many reasons. One, in particular, is my connection to Tennessee where two great-nieces and a great-nephew have “benefited” from a Tennessee education system. Hopefully, after I encourage them to read this post we can discuss the issues and make it, for them and for me, a teaching moment. Oh, how they love their Uncle Ted!

But there’s also a related Tennessee story that bears a reminding. Athens, an hour drive from Knoxville is also a 30-minute drive from another East Tennessee city, Dayton. Why is this important? Because in 1925, Dayton was the site of the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in which high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.

Butler, a Tennessee state representative and farmer, was also the head of the World Christian Fundamentals Association. Lobbying state legislatures to pass anti-evolution laws, he succeeded when the Butler Act was passed in Tennessee. Butler’s reasoning for establishing the law came down to, in his own words, “I didn’t know anything about evolution … I’d read in the papers that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense.”

(If you’re interested in learning more, try to watch the film “Inherit the Wind” (it’s on Amazon Prime), a dramatization of the Scopes trial with the opposing lawyers, Henry Drummond (patterned after Clarence Darrow) and Matthew Harrison Brady (patterned after William Jennings Bryan), played by Spencer Tracey and Fredric March, respectively.)

And there you have it. 97 years after the passing of the Butler Act and the Scopes trial (Scopes was found guilty but the verdict was later overturned on a technicality) virtually nothing has changed in Tennessee. And unfortunately, in most Red States.

To wit:

On Monday, newly elected Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin announced that he’s created a “tip line” for parents to report instances of school officials behaving inappropriately, by which he means teaching “divisive” subjects like critical race theory. Wait, what was the word used by the Gestapo in Nazi Germany and Stasi in Communist East Germany? You know, as the German newspaper Der Spiegel put it, the word used to describe: “Neighbors reporting on neighbors, schoolchildren informing on classmates, university students passing along information on other students, managers spying on employees and Communist bosses denouncing party members.” As Yale historian Timothy Snyder put it, “Denunciation.”

How low have we gotten when the governor of a state can use Nazi tactics to get his way?

I wanted to close with this – a very new, very chilling, short, fictional, documentary-style spot created for the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum. It was created and directed by Eric Hirshberg, a former advertising creative director and company CEO who, since leaving the business world, has devoted time to supporting important causes out of “Will Work for Change,” a creative network he founded to bring seasoned creative expertise and marketing to non-profits and mission-based organizations. 

As you watch the film bear in mind the opening two frames.

Could it? You be the judge.

Finally, as promised, Maus in video, by Art Spiegelman.

Maus Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Maus Part 2

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Commentary

Insurrection, sedition, insurgency…studies show, we’re not in danger of losing our democracy, we already have!

The headline, and much of the story, for today’s Around the Block is taken directly from The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, in his December 17 Op-Ed.

The headlined quote is from Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego. Professor Walter also “serves on a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task Force that monitors countries around the world and predicts which of them are most at risk of deteriorating into violence. By law, the task force can’t assess what’s happening within the United States, but Walter…applied the predictive techniques herself to this country.”

Walter’s conclusion:

“We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe. No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war but, if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”

As Milbank reports, “the United States no longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set — the one the CIA task force has found to be most helpful in predicting instability and violence — Walter writes that the United States is now an ‘anocracy,’ somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.”

But wait, it gets worse!

Milbank goes on, “U.S. democracy had received the Polity index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for much of its history. But in the five years of the Trump era, it tumbled precipitously into the anocracy zone; by the end of his presidency, the U.S. score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first time since 1800.

“We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Walter writes. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity index.”

She goes on,

“A partial democracy is three times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy. A country standing on this threshold — as America is now, at +5 — can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.”

Increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions? Haven’t I been hearing of things like that? Like voter suppression laws, gerrymandering and power grabbing by partisan politicians allowing them to overturn future election results… And a Supreme Court that sits back and lets it all happen?

If this is not enough, recent events are putting the run-up to the January 6th insurrection in the spotlight. And, it ain’t pretty.

Beyond former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ incredibly dumb book revealing information that the Trump crowd didn’t want revealed, we now have this, from Peter Navarro, former U.S. trade adviser and Trump sycophant, courtesy of the Huff Post:

“In an appearance on former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast Thursday, Navarro praised Bannon as a ‘hero’ for coming up with the ‘strategy to go up to Capitol Hill’ on Jan. 6.

“Navarro, using a football analogy about one team sacking another, gloated Thursday that there were ‘100 people working on the … team … who were going to make sure we remanded the [electoral] results back to the battleground states,’ which would have subverted Americans’ choice for president. Navarro also referred to former Vice President Mike Pence as the ‘quarterback’ of the offense, suggesting they had wanted Pence to go along with the plot.”

It’s kind of ironic. When Navarro was subpoenaed by the House select committee to testify, Trump urged Navarro to ignore the summons, keep mum and “protect executive privilege” in the investigation by the “Communist Democrats.”

Before I go, I just want this to sink in: the former President of United States called duly elected members of Congress who are investigating the greatest assault on the Capitol since the War of 1812, “Communist Democrats!”

This, by the way, is the same former president whose slogan was, and still is, “Make America Great Again,” but in the process, presided over a “Polity” score drop of five points, putting the U.S. in league with Mozambique, Niger,  Suriname, Papua New Guinea and Somalia, among others. Does anyone have a definition of “Great?”

I’ll close with my oft-used reference point to what’s happening in this country now, Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 dystopian novel, “It Can’t Happen Here.”

Yes it can…and indeed it did!

Commentary

School says, “Christmas Tree yes, Menorah, no.” And judge agrees!

The San Francisco Chronicle reported today, “When a woman in Carmel sought to add an inflatable balloon decorated like a menorah to the tree-lighting ceremony at the school her third-grader attended, the school turned her down — and had a basis for its refusal, a federal judge says.”

The Chronicle went on, “’Although Christmas trees once carried religious connotations, today they typify the secular celebration of Christmas,’ U.S. District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman said, quoting the [Supreme] Court’s 1989 ruling in a Pennsylvania case.”

Although Freeman said aspects of the case were “troubling” she did suggest that the student’s mother, Michele Lyons, could still try to prove the school violated her rights.

In her lawsuit, Lyon’s said that teachers at the school schedule parties around Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter and describe Christmas as an “American holiday” and Hanukkah as an “Israeli holiday.”

Okay, just to be clear, this school is in Carmel CALIFORNIA, not Carmel Texas.

The irony, of course, is that Hanukkah is a holiday with virtually no religious significance but important historical interest. I’ll leave for another time the question of whether the heroes of the story, the Maccabees, were heroic liberators and defenders of religious freedom or intolerant religious zealots, intent on stamping out any attempt to “modernize” Jewish tradition.

But I digress.

So which is it, do we put Christ back in Christmas when it suits us and exclude him when it doesn’t?

I thought I’d turn to Tammy Wynette for the answer.

One last thing. Do you think you can get a good hot pastrami on rye in this Carmel neighborhood? Do you think you can get them to hold the mayo?

Happy Holidays to all…and to all a Good Night.