Censor This!

You know, when I started this blog two months ago I has a serious concern that I would run out of topics after about two weeks. I knew that I had a good backlog of material in my writer’s journal and could always steal from The Onion but at some point I thought that the well would run dry. Luckily, I live in Kansas City so there is always something to write about…

Saw this on the news yesterday. Out where I work there are a number of parents up in arms about the high school reading list. I am not making this up, check out www.classkc.org. Honestly, I never thought that I would find myself living in a place where they want to keep high school kids from reading The Catcher in the Rye and Slaughterhouse Five. I mean, are these people serious?

Well, if you check out the web site they apparently are because they have catalogued every objectionable phrase and questionable topic in every book on the recommended reading list. They did make me click on a button stating that I was 18 and could look at objectionable language before I looked at that list, though. (And I really do wonder who kept the tally for The Catcher in the Rye. Talk about being obsessive compulsive.) You wouldn’t believe how much ignorance like this upsets me.

No, I don’t want a teenager reading Salinger, wouldn’t want them to find a character who is a disillusioned youth (or in other words, an actual teenager). Can’t have them reading Vonnegut’s portrayal of the pure inanity and randomness and meaninglessness of war. That would be putting thoughts into their heads. They of course include books by Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison because lord knows what reading from alternate viewpoints could result in. And that is not the worst one that I saw.

They included Tim O’Brien’s short story “What They Carried”. You probably haven’t heard of it but it is the best short story written in the past forty years. It is a gripping and simultaneously poetic account of what it was like to be a soldier in Vietnam. I read it back in college and it still stays with me, the detailing of the exact weight of each issued item, which is nothing compared to the weight of the picture of the girl that he left behind. A picture of the girl playing volleyball with one knee just inches above the ground. So, a senior in high school, even though they could be off to Iraq in a matter of months, should not be allowed to read this story. That is beyond ludicrous.

Of course, their potential replacement list shows just how off-base they are. So, what should the senior read instead? How about the book that caused one of the most famous obscenity cases in modern legal history. A book that was banned for years. I’m talking about the greatest novel of the 20th Century, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Whoever put this list together obviously has never actually read Ulysses. Or at least made their way to the last chapter, which is one long sexual dream by Molly Bloom. And that’s skipping over the masturbation and alternative lifestyle overtones that exist in other parts of the book. You’d think that whoever would put together a site like this would actually think for a second. Well, actually if they thought for a second they wouldn’t put together a site like this in the first place.

(Side note: props to any kid in high school who reads Ulysses. I waited until I was 25 before I made my way through the book. It is serious heavy lifting and I know that I wouldn’t have understood any of it in high school.)

What really kills me about all this is the reasoning behind it all. The idea that we don’t want to have our kids exposed to this type of material, even if it is literature. Yet you know that all of these people have HBO, their DVD collections are not kept under lock and key, and all of the kids have laptops with high speed internet connections. It’s just so much hypocrisy and it leads to the dumbing down of students. Can’t read anything that might be offensive. Next week, can’t read anything that is difficult, that would make my kid feel stupid. Can’t challenge the kids, we should let them live in this bubble that is completely unlike the real world.

It frightens me that at this day and age I still have to read stories about this type of censorship. What is worse is that the people doing the censoring are the same people that I am working with. Not all of them of course, more like a very vocal by very small minority. Still, it’s one of those things that makes you wonder what exactly is in the water out here.