An Alaska school board recently voted to remove five books from their high school curriculum.
The books are:
- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”
- Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”
- Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22”
- Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”
- Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”
I’ve read all five of those books, including three in high school, and I’ve read “The Great Gatsby” and “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” multiple times.
Board vice president Jim Hart, who voted to have these books removed from the curriculum, did not actually read the books. Instead, he read summaries of each one.
Just what I want from an elected official who has the power to alter the reading curriculum for students:
A guy who doesn’t read.
I’ve never been to Palmer, Alaska, nor do I know anyone on the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School Board, so I can’t be sure why they made this decision, but I have a hunch:
They are ignorant, misguided fools. The same kind of conservative, authoritarian morons depicted in movies like “Footloose” and novels like “Fahrenheit 451.”
You know the type:
Usually older, white men who are desperately trying to cling to a past that never actually existed and see temptation around every corner. The kind of guy who decries references to sex in music while secretly nurturing his own pornography addiction.
Matanuska-Susitna Borough members were provided with a one-page flier from the district’s Office of Instruction explaining why the five books were deemed controversial. Reasons included language, profanity, violence, sexual references, and in the case of Angelou’s book, “anti-white messaging.”
Anti-white messaging?
The vote was also taken in the midst of the pandemic, when public attention was focused elsewhere, and it was done as an amendment, meaning that no public comment was permitted.
So add a little bit of secrecy and a dash of voter suppression to the mix.
Happily, the response to the removal of these books from the curriculum has been glorious:
- One city council member is reading excerpts from her favorite book on Facebook every night.
- A law firm created a lottery that students could enter once they had read all five of the removed books.
- Hundreds have joined a Facebook group to voice their opposition to the removal.
- A local bookstore owner says donations have been pouring in since the vote from community members who want her shop to give teenagers those books for free.
I have already purchased three copes of “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” to be donated to a teenager in the community.
You can do the same here.
The banning of books is certainly nothing new, and the ignorance, bigotry, and religious zealotry that typically motivates such bans is also fairly common. Last year, for example, eight of the ten most challenged books in America had one thing in common:
LGBTQ content.
Stupid, religious bigots thinking that presenting children with an accurate depiction of the world that includes LGBTQ characters is somehow dangerous to impressionable, young minds. They are also the bigots who hate the LGBTQ community in general, almost always because of their misguided religious beliefs. The kind of people who use The Bible as a cudgel without ever having read it cover to cover.
Does anyone really think that Jesus – historic or religious figure – would hate a transgender child?
The two other books in the top 10, by the way, are “The Handmaids Tale,” for profanity and sexual overtones, and the Harry Potter series, for referring to to magic, witchcraft, curses and spells.
Witchcraft?
More religious nut-jobbery.
All of this has led me to a new aspiration:
To have one of my books someday banned by a bunch of underhanded, narrow-minded, religiously-motivated morons. To have some old, white, authoritarian board of religious or political zealots decide that the lesbian mom, the transsexual albatross, the bisexual teenage entrepreneur, or the gay wizard are too insidious for their precious, little students.
It’s kind of like an author’s badge of honor. Don’t you think?
