I’ve been thinking a lot about the McMinn County School Board removing Maus from the curriculum. I’ve been wrestling with what to say about it, considering that so many other people have said such smart things about this broad push throughout the state to remove from schools books that make white parents uncomfortable.
But the part that’s been sticking with me the most about the McMinn County situation is the moment in the minutes of the school board meeting when they decided to remove Maus from the curriculum, and school board member Mike Cochran wants to talk about a poem he finds vulgar. "I want to read it, you guys can fire me later, I guess," he said, and then began reading aloud:
I’m just wild about Harry, and Harry’s wild about me
The heavenly blisses of his kisses fill me with ecstasy
He’s sweet just like chocolate candy
Just like honey from the bee
Oh I am just wild about Harry, and he’s just wild about me.
This isn’t a poem, of course. It’s song lyrics. From a song that is 100 years old. It’s a song so famous that Harry Truman used it as his campaign song. It’s easily Googleable.
The part that I’m hung up on is that I just do not — cannot — believe that Mike Cochran doesn’t know that. He’s upset enough about these words being in the curriculum that he brings it up at a school board meeting, but he’s not upset enough to search them on the internet? It’s just impossible.
There’s another moment earlier in the meeting when another school board member, Jonathan Pierce, literally says, “I’m just an old country school board member,” which, granted, is hilarious. But it’s also a well-known trope, where the lawyer who everyone has underestimated says, “Well, now, I’m just an old country lawyer …” and then proceeds to school everyone in the courtroom on his own terms.
What was going on here finally clicked for me when I was listening to the most recent episode of the podcast I Don’t Speak German, which is about the McMinn controversy. (Full disclosure, I was a guest on an early episode of the podcast, and I respect the fuck out of what hosts Daniel Harper and Jack Graham are doing.) About 25 minutes in, Harper says: “Maus was not banned because the people in charge of this banning were actively encouraging a diminution of the Holocaust ‘narrative’ in public schools. It was banned because they thought it was a piece of degenerate art made by a Jewish person whose ideas of what reality is conflicted with certain kinds of old-school nationalistic jingoistic agendas and the Christian faith.” A few minutes later, Harper says: “And so the truth is that Maus was banned, or Maus was taken out of the curriculum, the stated purpose of this was because it was this degenerate — they don’t use the word ‘degenerate,’ but it’s oversexualized, it’s got some swear words in it, it’s got some things that are just uncomfortable for children to be examining in their classrooms.”
That bit about Maus being degenerate art stopped me in my tracks. That is exactly the problem they have with it — it’s vulgar, there’s nudity, people die. As if there’s some other Holocaust that wasn’t built on a vulgar pile of naked dead people that we could teach kids about.
And the reason they’re talking about vulgarity and appropriateness and doing their whole “I’m just a country board member” act is that they are staking out the sides in their culture war — wholesomeness vs. knowledge, with them on the side of wholesomeness.
It’s why John Rich, who I would bet you $1 billion has never read a book for fun, feels qualified to advocate for the removal of books from schools. It’s why the Moms for Lying to Your Kids think they should review all the books in our kids’ school libraries. (Good luck with that in Davidson County, you corny fascists. You want to know what books are in our junior high and high school libraries? All of them. If the public library has it, kids in school have it.) They don’t think they know better than you. Knowing shit’s for liberals and degenerates, if there is any breathing room between the two. Knowing is corrupting, and learning leads to knowing, so we’d better stop kids from learning and just start indoctrinating them with wholesome ideas.
It’s really a brilliant rhetorical setup. If knowledge is corrupting, then the introduction of facts that disprove your point don’t matter. They are, in fact, dangerous and must be suppressed. And if your opponents try to find some kind of common ground between wholesomeness and knowledge, well then we’re in grave danger of screwing over all the people in our society who are usually seen as degenerate — religious minorities, women, people of color, LGBTQ people, immigrants, artists and musicians, writers, etc. The middle ground between wholesomeness and knowledge is a betrayal of knowledge. The middle ground concedes that this purity-culture bullshit has some merit, and that maybe some groups are just corrupt, and maybe it’s fine that we don’t get to know about them.
This is why the solution isn’t just buying copies of Maus and sending them to McMinn County, or arguing that the books Moms for Liberty want to challenge aren’t actually bad for kids to read. We have to recognize that they are actually fundamentally opposed to kids learning things and opposed to all of us valuing knowledge.
We all — kids included — have a right to the whole library. And we need to start fighting for it, because some people are already fighting against it, and they’re having some big victories.
