Because when they’re really most focused on me yelling at my father when he destroyed my mother’s diary and finally confessed to it. But you’re play with dynamite when you’re playing with caricature. But by showing the caricatures as masks with humans underneath it, and pointing to that more and more as the book goes on, dissolves whatever their caricature is by creating a kind of self-destructing metaphor. But the caricature thing is: caricatures can be used be used to subvert themselves, you know, like the caricature of reducing Nazis and Jews to Cats and Mice. They’re fighting not to burn the book burners or whatever, but really trying to make some kind of bridge-although I think it might be a bridge too far-it’s such an admirable thing to do. Was that because they have a battle that has been joined? Some of the people in the webinar appeared quite pleased. It’s like these people that I met last night are wonderful … talking about building bridges rather than blowing bridges up. What this thing last night did show is that caricatures aren’t the way through unless you really know how to use them. I don’t think I’ve changed and hearts and minds. I just can’t tell to what degree this carried water for more whacked out people than they are, the ones who really stand to profit from getting more charter schools in the area that teach religion, thereby taking money away from a public education that needs far, far more to do its job well. Naked, which means a kind of vulnerable lack of covering, is enough to get you livid, because look, what do they want me to show, like her upside down in the bathtub? Or wearing a bathrobe splattered with blood in the bathtub? Which didn’t make any sense. So they focus on how terrible it was to see what they described as a nude woman-what I saw as the naked corpse of my mother in the bathtub having slashed her wrists in that bathtub. Did they rewrite their minutes to get rid of all the terrible things actually said to each other in order for us to sanitize the meeting minutes, two or three weeks later? How would I know? My guess is that what they did was the law of the land still is based on the 1982 decision that you can ban things further affect young minds and whatever but you can’t on the basis of content. That’s where I started this conversation with you. The board later put out a statement that their decision “does not diminish the value of Maus as an impactful and meaningful piece of literature.” Do you take them at their word? It’s not banned in its broadest meaning, but it is a ban of sorts to use authority to keep people from things. And your only response was, “God, did you see the fingernails on that creep’s hands? They’re dirty.”ĭo you think it would help to meet the people? Am I just a total Pollyanna naive idiot? Or are these people really idiots? Or are they actually sinister forces that have gathered to, like, kill America for their own profit? Or what are they? I don’t know to what degree they’re genuinely out to destroy America and to what degree they’re actually just like I the metaphor I used last night: If you saw somebody like a psycho killer, strangling a loved one of yours, and you couldn’t reach that person to stop them. That’s what left me so filled with flop sweat before the conversation last night, because I kept veering back and forth. If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it.” history, but in Maus, one member of the McMinn County school board found “it looks like the entire curriculum is developed to normalize sexuality, normalize nudity and normalize vulgar language. Progressives may argue for an unvarnished instruction of U.S. Public school curriculums feature prominently in the culture wars that many Republicans are hoping to ride to electoral victory. With predictable results.Īlready alert to a flurry of previous efforts to remove titles deemed inappropriate by state and local politicians-including a Texas state lawmaker’s demand that every school district “investigate” some 850 books dealing with race or sexuality-liberals smelled a rat. 10 to remove it from the middle school curriculum. Maus is taught in thousands of schools, including, until recently, to eighth-graders in Tennessee’s McMinn County, where the local school board voted 10-0 on Jan. The book communicates the history of the Holocaust through the history of his family- Polish Jews, who are rendered as mice, sent to death camps by Nazis, who are rendered as cats. In the four decades since Art Spiegelman began Maus, the graphic novel has sold millions of copies, won a Pulitzer Prize, and secured a place in the Western canon.
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