I’ve been thinking a lot about how weird the list of books banned from Wilson County schools' libraries is. I’m going to make the obvious point early: The law they’re following should obviously remove the Bible from Wilson County schools, and yet it’s still on the shelves there.
District removes books including ‘The Bluest Eye,’ ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and Dr. Seuss’ ‘Wacky Wednesday’ to comply with state law
Earlier this year, the state legislature amended the Age Appropriate Materials Act of 2022 so that “materials in a library collection must be suitable for the age and maturity levels of the students who may access the materials and must be suitable for, and consistent with, the educational mission of the school.” This means excluding any material that “in whole or in part contains nudity, or descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse.”
Whew, let me tell you about a thing that happens in the Book of Ezekiel. God is talking to Ezekiel, and He’s all: Zeke, I used to be in love with these two sisters, who were huge whores. It’s embarrassing, but the older sister slept with every man in Assyria. They killed her, which was kind of a bummer, but her little sister didn’t learn a damn thing from that. She slept with a bunch of Assyrians, and a bunch of Babylonians, and all she did was brag about how big a whore she’d been in Egypt. And she loved to have sex with guys who were hung like donkeys and who had semen like horses.
At this point you’re probably like, “Jesus, God, just break up with her already. It seems like she’s not that into you.” But no, then God subjects us all to His rape fantasies, where he gets all this girl’s lovers to gang bang her half to death and then cut off her nose and ears. This is really in the Bible, and it's super disturbing.
But it's fine for kids in Wilson County to read, whereas Slaughterhouse-Five is not.
This reminds me of a stupid rule my dad made when I was growing up. We kids were not allowed to cuss, but my dad said that no words in the Bible were bad. So I spent a good few weeks running around the neighborhood calling everyone asses and bastards and whores until my dad realized his plan to get his kids to either stop swearing or to carefully read the Bible had been an unfortunate success.
Long story short? Kids of Wilson County, let me introduce you to the music of Gordon Gano. I guess it’s totally fine to sing this at school.
But back to the weirdness of the banned books list. Slaughterhouse-Five was first published in 1969. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye came out in 1970. Stephen King’s It came out in the ’80s when I was 11. If books that came out before I was born or when I was a child were going to destroy America, wouldn’t they have done it by now?
Plus, books are widely available from a lot of different places. Banning a book from a school library isn’t going to keep a determined kid from getting it off the internet. And here’s the most painful truth for a book lover like me: Many kids today don’t read books. Even our smartest kids getting into our most elite universities are showing up unable to follow a book-length argument.
So if most kids don’t read books, and many kids (at least anecdotally) can’t read books, and if the ones who want to read books have ways around bans that didn’t exist a generation ago, what is the point of banning books?
Talking to librarians, advocates, activists and students about state and local book bans and book challenges
I mean, you can ban me from running the Boston Marathon if you want to, but I assure you, you don’t need to waste the effort. But if we all know my butt is on the couch in Tennessee and I am unlikely to be traveling to Boston anytime soon (and also that I recently severely injured my knee by sleeping in bed), I think it’s worth asking questions if I learn I’m banned from the Boston Marathon. Why go to all that effort to stop me from doing something I’m not going to do?
Flowers in the Attic (first published in 1979) is also on the list. Again, a series from my childhood. I remember when all the older sisters of my friends started reading that book and parents in town forbade their kids from reading it, which meant increasingly dogeared copies got passed around surreptitiously at school.
It’s weird to see so many books from my childhood on the list. But also, the books I recognize, that I’ve mentioned here, weren’t set in my childhood, even if they were published then. Flowers in the Attic is set in 1957. A huge chunk of Slaughterhouse-Five takes place during World War II and the decade after. The Bluest Eye starts in 1941. It alternates between a time contemporary with publication and 1957.
Since we’ve established that it’s fine if kids read about guys hung like donkeys and the sexual escapades of sisters in some contexts, I’m really starting to wonder if it’s not the subject matter of these books — or at least not wholly the subject matter of these books — but the eras in which they’re set.
If America got off track at some point — and let’s be clear, that point is usually argued to be the 1960s — and we need to get back on track by getting back to how things were before we derailed, back when things were great ... if we need to, say, make America great again ... then we need a good point in the past to get back to.
But we’re telling kids that we need to get America back on track while, at the same time, our libraries are full of evidence that there was always terrible shit going on in America, and it wasn’t secret. People in the 1970s and 1980s knew that the 1940s and 1950s were full of the same problems we have now.
These bans aren’t so much about protecting kids from stuff they’re not ready for as they are about protecting adults from realizing that the glorious past they want to return to never really existed.
