Book banners and insurrectionists....boiled in the same cauldron

 Book banning is and always has been a clear sign that fear is the motivating impulse of those energized by the need to “protect” their children.

The Roman church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum forbade books as “dangerous to the faith or morals of Roman Catholics was relegated to the status of a historic document in 1966 after existing from 1564. In 1954, the dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, offers a future U.S. society where books are outlawed and ‘firemen’ burn any that are found. In that novel, books were forbidden as a way for the government to control the thoughts of the public. Just like this week, reasons (really excuses) such as offensive language and bitterness over different levels of intellect that made people “feel bad” were used to justify the bannings.

Digging a little deeper into the issue on readingpartners.org, in a piece dated September 28, 2020, entitled ‘The little0known history of banned books in the United States, we read:

In 1624, English businessman Thomas Morton arrived in Massachusetts with a group of Puritans. But he soon found that he didn’t want to abide by the strict rules and conventional values that made up their new American society. So, he left. Morton established his own colony (now known as Quincy, Massachusetts) with the forbidden old-world customs that the Puritans abhorred. He was eventually exiled by Puritan militia, which sparked him to file a lawsuit and write a tell-all book. His New English Canaan was published in 1637. In it, he critiqued and attacked Puritan customs so harshly that even the more progressive New English settlers disapproved of it. When a book compares you to a crustacean, it’s unlikely you’ll be begging the author for a sequel. So the Puritans banned it, making it likely the first book to be banned in the United States.

From literature.stackexchange.com, we find this:

The book 1984, being about suppression of information itself, was banned in the USSR for being anti-communist, but it also was banned in the USA for being pro-communist. In the U.S. it was banned in Jackson County Florida in 1981 “because the book was ‘pro-communist and contained explicit sexual matter’.” (the georgeanne.com, Rebecca Munday, September 28, 2021)

Challenged books in Canada include some very popular titles.

From penguinrandomhouse.ca, we read these words:

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: challenged because of ‘profane language, anti-Christian overtones, violence, and sexual degradation.

Such is My Beloved by Morley Callahan: In 1972 two Christian ministers tried to get this novel removed from a high school in Huntsville, Ontario on the basis fo the depiction of prostitution and the use of strong language.

A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence: In 1978 a school trustee in Etobicoke, ON, tried but failed to remove this novel from high school English classes. The trustee objected to the portrayal of teachers ‘who had sexual intercourse time and time against out of wedlock’. He said the novel would diminish the authority of teachers in students’ eyes.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck: In the mid-90’s this book’s presence in the Alberta curriculum was challenged as part of a petition to withdraw books that ‘demean or profane the name of God and Jesus Christ’.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler: Parents demanded the removal of this novel from high school reading lists, objecting to ‘vulgarity, sexual expressions and sexual innuendoes’ in the text.

The Diviners by Margaret Laurence: Letters written in Canadian newspapers at the time opined that the ‘educators in Peterborough would be deficient in their duties if regard were not had for those whose values and sensibilities might be offended by profanity and explicit sex as found in Mrs. Laurence’s ‘work of art’. From the Archives of CBC, “Fundamentalist Christians deem The Diviners ‘blasphemous’ and ‘obscene’ and pressure school boards to ban Laurence’s novels. Several schools comply.

Today, the hue and cry about books that demand banning centres around the title Maus. Detailing Dan Spiegelman’s (the author) father’s experience of the Holocaust, ‘inappropriate language and  nudity’ motivated a Tennessee school board to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel from its eighth grade curriculum. Writing in the Washington Post*, former middle school English teacher Paul Regelbrugge writes this:

“It’s almost indescribable actually. At first blush, it’s like—okay, let’s try to put this in perspective, that it’s one small district in the state of Tennessee. But clearly there has already been an international response to this, as part of a much larger issue. My personal response is that having used this book with kids in middle school and up, I have never seen a text change the dynamic of a classroom the way this one did for several years that I used it—with different demographics, different background. I taught it to mostly African American kids in Buffalo, and to all Hispanic kids in Chicago, and kids from all over the world in Kent School District (in Washington). It becomes an unbelievable vehicle. And all the students that I’ve ever had have connected so profoundly to it. It’s become truly life-changing for many students. So, taking it away is incomprehensible.”

There is a cannonading collision occurring in many public spaces around the world. On one side of the crash is the demand for absolute control by people like trump, based on not only false information, but actually on a conceived executive decision to overthrow a duly elected democratic government. This side believes that is must take control of all levers of power away from those they consider robbing them of all of their freedom, legitimacy and agency.

Funded in part by foreign dollars, (read United States money), this past week has seen the literal hostage-taking of the city of Ottawa, by people in large rigs, hundreds of them, blocking main thoroughfares, businesses, robbing food from homeless shelters, defecating and urinating on private snow-covered lawns, and defaming public statues (e.g. Terry Fox, a national hero who attempted to ‘run’ across Canada on one leg and a prosthetic, to raise money for cancer research). The Canadian version of January 6, 2021 on the steps and in the hall of the Capitol in Washington, this vehicle insurrection is now moving into other Canadian cities, like Toronto and Quebec, to wreak havoc there as well. Opposing vaccine mandates, masks and various other government-imposed regulations, these insurrectionists, like the banned-book insurrectionists, need and demand total control. And they select the first-available, most easily targeted and least likely to push back of a number of targets while envisioning themselves as the “purifiers” and “cleansers” of an evil force, that, according to their conspiracy theories, is creeping over the world like some monster in a Hollywood movie.

On the other side of this crashing are those who actually hold the idea of an open and free public forum, (including all of the applications of that space, in school board rooms, in legislatures, in public health decisions even including mandates in the public interest of protecting the vast majority from a still-evolving and thus elusive pandemic). This side seems incredulous to not only the basis of the “freedom cry” of their opponents, but also to the methods selected to impose their will on the public square. Of course, the public institutions, like the Ottawa police, as well as the Capitol Police in Washington, or the English teachers across the globe, are neither armed nor prepared for such an insurrection, whether it takes place in front of the Parliament on Wellington Street in Ottawa, on in some board of education committee room wherever.

Assaults on the legitimacy of the public square, irrespective of the specific agents holding office, just like the banning of book considered offensive, are not only to be expected, and prepared for. They are also, ironically and paradoxically, the very monster they claim to be attacking. Projection, on a very large scale, funded and propagandized by social media, itself still neither regulated nor exercising self-regulating controls, drowning as it is in tidal waves of cash, is not only a feature of human-to-human relationships.

Projection, the act of projecting onto another (person, agency, institution, government, authority figure) those features of what is in one’s own mind whether positive or negative, is a phenomenon with which no one has been yet able to wrestle to its knees. In its negative application, of course, it has to lead to ascribing traits, behaviours, attitudes and even beliefs that are so heinous as to be unacceptable to all. In the case of the “rigged insurrection,” we are all fed up with the pandemic, frustrated by the various and evolving directions, mandates, incursions into our private lives that everyone has had to undergo for nearly thirty months. Nevertheless, we are not storming the barricades; even the vast majority of those actually responsible for the trucking industry, approximately 90% have all willingly and responsibly received vaccines, including boosters where available.

With respect to the book-banning exercise, to clean up the “smut” that seems, to those self-righteously self-proclaimed “puritans” (without a capital) who seek and demand that their religious views, and their camouflaged prurience reign, exhibit a degree of insecurity and neurosis that, if actually implemented in any elementary or secondary school classroom, would drive the pedagogue out of the profession. Furthermore, the elimination of courageous teachers, administrators and school board officials would render the education system into a tragic eunuch. Children would be “spared” things they are more then capable of relating to and even to not merely comprehending but actually integrating into their world view.

I encountered a similar “resistance” while teaching in a senior elementary school, from the “language arts consultant” who opposed even the teaching of the Diary of Anne Frank to grade eight students. I also encountered a similar book-banning insurrection in the mid-seventies, when The Diviners was under the ‘political’ and moral ‘gun’ of the holy-rollers. Fortunately, the school board wisdom prevailed, and the title remained in the list of permitted texts.

Protecting “children” from many of the more harsh features of the human race’s history, while at the same time, filtering the manner of the contextualizing of the most difficult information, remains a challenge to all sentient educators. Nevertheless, not being injecting into many professional discussions about literature, is the fact that many of our students are experiencing behaviour in their own families that would curl the hair of most of the puritans set on banning books for their own reasons.

At the end of one grade twelve class, in the late 70’s, a young co-ed asked to speak to me after class. A quiet, reserved, shy young girl, from whom I had heard little throughout the term, approached my desk sheepishly. “I really don’t know how to say this,” she began; “but last night was rough at home.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Well, my father, who was angry, threw me down the stairs into the basement!”

“Oh my God!” I gulped. “Are you OK?”

“Well, I’m sore and bruised, but nothing’s broken, I think,” she responded.

“Does anyone in your family know about this?” I inquired. “No,” she replied.

“Do you have any supports that can help you through this situation?” I asked.

“Well, I think I can talk to my grandparents about it; they have been supportive,” she offered.

In another class, this time, a grade ten business English class, when the subject of abortion arose, from the students, the conversation shifted between those who favoured one side to those who supported a woman’s right to choose. At the end of the discussion, another shy, polite and self-effacing young girl raised her hand, “Well,” she began, “I am certainly glad that my mother did not accept her family’s pressure when she was carrying me. Otherwise, I would not be here!”

As a teacher whose reputation is tainted by public criticism of those who considered my classroom management style too “liberal” and “too close to the students” and “too unrestricted as to the subjects discussed,” I retort, both proudly and also humbly, that I would and even could not have done it any other way. Integrating the English language into the lives of young men and women, includes not only critical examination and discussion of works of literature, naturally including the reactions and responses those works generate among the students, but also a comfort and a courage to express what one is sensing, experiencing, agreeing or disagreeing with in the classroom atmosphere. And my job was always to monitor that often turbulent, and exciting conversation to prevent personal injury or attack, to probe the reasons behind whatever they were thinking and feeling, and to guide the conversation to a modest summary.

Today, I remain appalled by the insurrection in Ottawa, as well as the book banning in Tennessee and elsewhere. Both dynamics are growing on a wave of hate, contempt, neurosis and what can feasibly be termed social psychosis for which there is only highly tentative and even more long-term address…in which we all have to participate.

 

*Caitlin Gibson, Washington Post, February 3, 2022, “When should my kids read Maus? How parents can help children learn about the Holocaust