It's Book Banning Week!
Amazing what they'll ban and what they won't.
We’re in a new wave of local public school book bannings as “concerned” parents take aim at Judy Blume novels, Maus and other creative works that help young people navigate the absurdities, cruelties and joys of life.
People on Twitter recall reading lurid and twisted books like Flowers in the Attic or the very adult works of Stephen King in their tween and pre-tween years. I remember middle schoolers sneaking glances at a novel by the late Anne Rice, writing under the bodice-ripping and hand-cuffing pseudonym, “Anne Rampling.” The book was later played for laughs as a movie starring Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Akyroyd.
Ask these parents what they’d have children read instead and they’ll invariably say, “the classics.” Well, Middlebrow grew up with shelves stocked with classic books and attended a middle school and high school that embraced the “great books” notion of liberal arts education. Middlebrow actually believes in “the canon” for all its faults and would simply add books to it rather than swap books out. True, nobody can be expected to read and study everything, but pretty much everybody (Middlebrow included) could stand to read and study more.
A book I remember reading in 6th grade and then over and over for fun was Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths by Bernard Evslin. Like so many of these compilations, it is accessible Ovid, with some Homeric Hymns thrown in. These tales were not sterile. Zeus serially rapes everything from people to nymphs to titans, (often in the guise of animals since no human can look directly at his magnificence and survive — he knows this but allows one lover to be vaporized because she asked for it). The Minotaur, a mythical half man/half bull, is born that way because the Queen of Crete ordered the inventor Daedulus to fashion her a cow costume so that she can have sex with a bull. Pasiphae was the world’s uber-furry, and I read about her in sixth grade.
Then came the epic poems: The Illiad and The Odyssey. The Illiad is a war story, but largely about Agememnon and Achilles arguing over possession of captured women as slaves. The Odyssey, the homecoming of Odysseus, ends with the mass murder of hundreds of unarmed suitors who have been seeking the hand of Odysseus’ wife after he’s been gone and preseumed dead for more than a decade. The carnage is retroactively justified by the suitors being rowdy and greedy guests.
The Old Testament of the Bible is full of sex and human sacrifice. Everybody knows that Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt for looking back upon the divine destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, but before that, when the city is visited by angels that his neighbors want to rape, Lot offers his virgin daughters to them instead. In Middlebrow’s school we read both the ancient Greeks and the New and Old Testaments as literature, but themes of rape, murder, deceit and just outright displays of power play into the religious stories of all ancient cultures. We might have found the same in Nordic myths or old stories from Japan.
Nothing in Judy Blume matches the depictions of sex and violence from the old tales. One might argue that distance from a story like makes it more acceptable. But this relies on a fallacy — the ancient Greeks or the people in the Bible were not recognizably people.
The ancient Greeks did live in a very different political system. The islands that now make up Greece were all separate kingdoms and there were customs and obligations meant to keep them all from going to war constantly. One custom was the obligation to treat travelers and guests well. Another was to be a good guest. Another was to keep promises. None of these are alien values to us but it helps explain why disparate Greek kingdoms assembled to invade Troy — the kingdoms had pledged to support each other and to break that promise meant risking war among themselves. The United States suffered a devastating civil war far more recently when some states chose the right to own slaves over the obligations of mutual support and governance. Humanity hasn’t evolved since The Illiad or The Odyssey were told. Our circumstances have changed but not our humanity.
One of the reasons Maus and other works of Holocaust remembrance are vital is as a reminder of our common humanity, not as potential victims but as potential criminals. Among the first question children ask about the Holocaust is “What was wrong with the Germans?” We seek an explanation. Maybe they were tricked. Maybe they were forced. Maybe they didn’t know. The literature, history and scholarship teach that this is the wrong question. There was nothing particular about Germans as people. We all must guard against their choices, indifferent impulses and willingness to either participate or to go along. What’s scariest to Middlebrow about the impulse to ban Holocaust literature is that it expresses the hubristic notion people have that they are better than the Germans were and could never be victims or monsters. Comforted by that falsehood, which is also deemed false by all of the old stories, including those of the Bible, they become careless with themselves and their communities.
No doubt, Judy Blume’s stories are much more true to contemporary life, but it’s amazing that so many parents don’t realize that Blume makes parenting easier by rendering issues of sex and society less awkward. We all deal with developing sexuality, pre-teen and teenage social problems. Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t answered a lot of questions Middlebrow had on terms that were far more comfortable than a sit-down with the parents.
Please, let the books help your children. If you don’t understand how they might help, read them yourself. We could all benefit from a new book in our lives.