Good Morning! It’s the last day of January, somehow. Soon the bowls will be super, the hogs will be grounded, the Valens will be tined.
Are you thinking about some crowdfunding in the near future? If so, maybe skip Kickstarter and all of its NFT-supporting nonsense, and instead go with a platform like TopatoGO, a new venture from the folks at Topato Co. This sounds like ad copy! I don’t know. I know that they’ve been around doing merch for webcomics since the mid-’00s or so, which makes me feel old as shit! Anyway, the planet’s dyin’, Cloud. Maybe we stop playing games with corporations who don’t care about killing it or us for a quick buck. Maybe we crowdsource a few guillotines, have a party.
What else is going on? Oh, right. That whole Maus thing in Tennessee. If, for some reason, you do not yet know about this, first, thank you for making WWAC your first choice for comics news. Second, the deal is that the McMinn County School Board just voted — unanimously — to ban the Pulitzer-Prize-winning account of the Holocaust from its curriculum. When the board meeting minutes were posted, it was revealed that the excuse — sorry, reason they voted to remove it was due to “rough language” and “nudity.”
I'd like to note here that this is what the "nudity" in "Maus" looks like. pic.twitter.com/JrJfDKEpxx
— Jane Coaston (@janecoaston) January 26, 2022
There are a few points worth clarifying here: first, there have been reports that the ban was enacted on Holocaust Remembrance Day. That isn’t true, it was enacted on January 10th. The news broke on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is some clever timing on the part of the site reporting the information, but that’s not the same as the event occurring that day, and it’s important to keep the facts straight.
Another point worth clarifying, though, is that this book is not a recent addition to our cultural understanding and remembrance of the Holocaust. This is not a brand new book that folks in Tennessee took offense to at first sight. Maus began serialized publication in 1980, and completed in 1991. It was available in my high school library when I was a teenager, and I graduated in 2001. This is a book that has existed for literal decades, for the express purpose of educating readers about the horrors and atrocities of Nazi Germany. It is not a salacious, titillating tale. It is a harrowing account of the author’s parents’ survival. It is a call to action, to never forget what was done to Jewish people, to never forget what can be done to any people if we so much as become complacent.
The third point worth clarifying is that the book was not removed from the McMinn County school libraries, only from the curriculum. This seems like a small point but it remains an important one. The fact that it’s still present means that students can still access it. Not as many will, and this is a heartbreaking truth, but the information has not been removed completely. I’m not mentioning this as a point of hope. I’m mentioning it because folks defending this act will cite points like this as evidence that removing the book from the curriculum isn’t that big a deal. It is. The fact that Maus was being taught in classrooms means that children who might never feel safe bringing a book about the Holocaust home from the library were exposed to it in an environment that was safe for such a thing to occur. It means that there were standards enforced to ensure that kids were taught about a vital piece of international history, and now there are not. That’s a HUGE deal. It’s a huge problem. Refusing to teach a thing that must be remembered violates the very concept of never forgetting it.
Additionally, school libraries, like public libraries, operate all too often on a shoestring budget. The same organizations that do things like challenge Maus being on a school’s curriculum also attack funding for public works on a larger scale, because the education of the masses is their enemy. When steps like this are taken, then yes, it is technically possible for a student to check such a book out from the library, or to buy it from a store. But how many copies does the library have? How long have they been checked out? How long is the waitlist? How much access to libraries does the area have? If library copies are unavailable, what happens when a student can’t get to a bookstore, or can’t afford a book even?
The bottom line here is that moves like this are made to restrict access to information. Maus was not being taught to small children. It was not, as one member of this board attempted to assert during the meeting, being taught to third-graders. It was being taught to eighth-graders. Thirteen and fourteen-year-olds. Two years away from driving, entering the workforce. Four years from being able to vote. Kids these days are learning about death from the moment they enter a classroom. They’re doing active shooter drills regularly from kindergarten. They’re taught, in deed, that the price of access to something as basic as education runs the risk of their lives.
In what way can we afford to pretend those same kids can’t handle learning about the Holocaust?
