5 ms·

‘Maus’ is an Amazon bestseller after Tennessee school ban

78 points by donsupreme 5y ago

josephcsible 5y ago
It wasn't banned. It's just no longer mandatory to read.
Lammy 5y ago
Also available in Hypercard form! https://macintoshgarden.org/games/the-complete-maus https://macintoshgarden.org/games/the-complete-maus
lnxg33k1 5y ago
It was a mix of hilarious and sad to read the transcript of that school meeting, like you read a book about holocaust and your concern is about a open nipple, or come up to say like "the guy used to work for playboy and it's enough to make his works banned" I don't really like to call people idiots, usually i can justify with myself that people might be having a bad day, but if i have to describe what an idiot is to an extraterrestrial form of life i would let them read that transcript
- apostacy 5y ago
  What if the author said something slightly problematic on Twitter 14 years ago, would that be a good justification for banning their book? Rednecks stopped being the biggest laughing stock in this country years ago.
  - lnxg33k1 5y ago
    Yeah, I mean if we want to make fun of wokes count me in. But I think the situation is different, saying something racist? sexist? As a grown adult on social requires a certain mindset and / or cultural background, that might be considered harder to change Working for Playboy, is a bit different, there is not substantial issue working for playboy, it's not like being racist or sexist, unless you got a religious brain damage one of those who make you see invisible people in the sky
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
_dain_ 5y ago
as is usual with these "bans", it was no such thing; it was merely taken off the curriculum.
rsj_hn 5y ago
There was no school ban. The district was using Maus (a graphic novel) in the curriculum to teach about the holocaust, and opted to search for an actual textbook to use in its place. That's all. The comic book remains in the school library, and if they can't find an actual textbook they'll go back to the comic book. It was the right call. The extreme freakout over this as well as hordes of sanctimonious diatribes that resulted is unfortunately common in our current social-media driven news cycle, where facts so often succumb to Narrative, in this case, the narrative being that a school does not want to teach the holocaust, rather than the fact that they don't want to use a comic book to do it. I like Maus, but would not rely on it as textbook, either.
- version_five 5y ago
  Is there something false or misleading in the above comment? A few people have posted something similar. Why is it getting modded down?
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    All I can think of is that a lot of people enjoy outrage so when someone points out "No, the facts are different, so there is nothing to be outraged about", instead of viewing that as good news - that hey, schools are not actually censoring the holocaust and Maus was not banned anywhere - they get really angry as the legitimacy of their outrage is threatened. It's really strange because if you tell someone who was convinced that say, a man was killed a robbery, that actually no, there was no robbery and no one was hurt, most would breathe a sigh of relief and view that as good news. But when it comes to these culture war issues, the reaction of hearing the facts is often people taking offense that their previous offense was not justified. IMO that's a good way of determining whether something is a real issue or a culture war issue -- if it was a real issue, people would be glad to hear that a bad thing didn't happen.
    - NoraCodes 5y ago
      I would argue that people are primarily reacting to the reasoning given by the parents; they're not upset that the book will not be used, but that the people making the decision feel that the inclusion of (censored) profanity and nudity are objectionable enough to call for a change in curriculum. Certainly this is perhaps somewhat overblown, but I don't think it's fair to say that people are "angry that the legitimacy of their outrage is threatened" - I think your downvoters feel that you're missing the point. (I did not flag your comment, to be clear.) There's also the matter of disagreement about the word "banned"; personally I think it's not the right word to use here, but there is an argument to be made that the object of the verb is not students - that is, not making the book totally unavailable - but teachers. They have "banned" teachers from using it in the curriculum. Again, I don't agree with this use of the term, but I don't think it's as clear-cut as "the media is lying about what happened to support their narrative."
NikolaeVarius 5y ago
> Minutes of the McMinn school board meeting that led to the book being banned show that while some parents said they supported the idea of teaching about the Holocaust, they had problems with some profanity in the book. They also had an issue with an image showing a nude woman, who is Spiegelman's mother. "We can teach them history and we can teach them graphic history," board member Mike Cochran said, according to minutes of the meeting. "We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don't need all the nakedness and all the other stuff." Is this 1890?
- rayiner 5y ago
  That’s 2021 nearly everyone outside some European countries and parts of America.
ALittleLight 5y ago
I do not understand how it's national news that a random school in Tennessee is changing their curriculum by substituting a book.
akvadrako 5y ago
It isn't that hard to become a bestseller so it probably happens to any book that gets so much media attention. I'm not sure why people would upvote this story except to call conservative parents idiots.
version_five 5y ago
Every comment in this thread (except the Hypercard one) has been modded down at the time of writing. Maybe some would like to talk about why they don't like any opinions about this story?
- apostacy 5y ago
  After spending the last few years gleefully cheering for Republicans to be banned from every online platform, it feels pretty fake to be outraged over a single schoolboard somewhere editing their suggested reading list. I used to see stories like this all the time in my social media feed 10 years ago, during the peak of the new atheist phenomenon. But it feels really out of place now. Especially because of people's warming to censorship.
  - NoraCodes 5y ago
    You've made essentially the same comment in three separate places in this thread. This kind of passive-voice imputation is neither productive nor intellectually honest. _Who_ has been "spending the last few years..."? Is it the same people who are now "outraged over a single schoolboard..."? Can you show that? I suspect you can't, and that you're suggesting it only because it fits your ideological biases.
    - apostacy 5y ago
      > _Who_ has been "spending the last few years..."? Is it the same people who are now "outraged over a single schoolboard..."? Can you show that? Of course it is the same people, that was implied by my sentence, obviously. Just being willfully dense and refusing to comprehend what someone says does not refute them. If you had spent any time reading HN, you would see the plethora of commenters who would defend actions far more egregious than what is alleged to have been done by this schoolboard. In threads discussing California's changes to their curriculum, there was a sea of commenters defending things far more absurd than the scopes monkey trial. It would take me less than five minutes to use the hackernews search tool to find these threads, must I do that for you? Are you really going to make me spoon feed you?
rayiner 5y ago
It’s funny what “bans” we get worked about and which ones we don’t: https://ncac.org/news/blog/images-of-muhammad-banned-from-book-by-yale-press https://ncac.org/news/blog/images-of-muhammad-banned-from-bo... The next generation of leaders and elites will be educated at Yale. Meanwhile nobody can even find this town in Tennessee on a map.
- throwaway_4ever 5y ago
  Ya last round of book controversy making the rounds was local progressive groups banning Huckleberry Finn.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- c0nducktr 5y ago
  If you think it is important, please feel free to submit that as a post to news.ycombinator.com.
- tptacek 5y ago
  Seems... not at all really comparable?
  - rayiner 5y ago
    It’s not. People in rural America removing a book from the curriculum because of nudity and violence is innocuous. Yale censoring political speech is important.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      A bunch of adults negotiating over a university press book --- one about the subject you're saying is being censored --- that nobody in the rest of the world will read seems pretty unimportant to me. I also don't think that the actions of a random rural K-8 district 45 minutes outside of Chattanooga is all that important, except to the extent that it got a whole bunch of new people to read Maus, and created more fodder for the obligatory bookstore "Banned Books" displays. Neither incident seems all that impactful, but the Maus incident seems clearly more ignorant and intolerant.
Avatars 5y ago
Of Maus and Man.
andrei_says_ 5y ago
Wait, someone decided to ban Maus, the comic describing the artist’s father’s experiences of going through the Holocaust? What the hell?! What are the arguments for this ban?
- the_biot 5y ago
  Didn't read the article, huh. Not even the bullet summary of the article. Just went straight into outraged commenter mode.
  - andrei_says_ 5y ago
    You’re right, I did. Turns out nothing’s banned, just no longer required. Clickbait outrage worked perfectly on me!

78 points by donsupreme 5y ago

It wasn't banned. It's just no longer mandatory to read.

Also available in Hypercard form! https://macintoshgarden.org/games/the-complete-maus https://macintoshgarden.org/games/the-complete-maus

lnxg33k1 5y ago

It was a mix of hilarious and sad to read the transcript of that school meeting, like you read a book about holocaust and your concern is about a open nipple, or come up to say like "the guy used to work for playboy and it's enough to make his works banned" I don't really like to call people idiots, usually i can justify with myself that people might be having a bad day, but if i have to describe what an idiot is to an extraterrestrial form of life i would let them read that transcript

apostacy 5y ago
What if the author said something slightly problematic on Twitter 14 years ago, would that be a good justification for banning their book? Rednecks stopped being the biggest laughing stock in this country years ago.
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  Yeah, I mean if we want to make fun of wokes count me in. But I think the situation is different, saying something racist? sexist? As a grown adult on social requires a certain mindset and / or cultural background, that might be considered harder to change Working for Playboy, is a bit different, there is not substantial issue working for playboy, it's not like being racist or sexist, unless you got a religious brain damage one of those who make you see invisible people in the sky

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

_dain_ 5y ago

as is usual with these "bans", it was no such thing; it was merely taken off the curriculum.

rsj_hn 5y ago

There was no school ban. The district was using Maus (a graphic novel) in the curriculum to teach about the holocaust, and opted to search for an actual textbook to use in its place. That's all. The comic book remains in the school library, and if they can't find an actual textbook they'll go back to the comic book. It was the right call. The extreme freakout over this as well as hordes of sanctimonious diatribes that resulted is unfortunately common in our current social-media driven news cycle, where facts so often succumb to Narrative, in this case, the narrative being that a school does not want to teach the holocaust, rather than the fact that they don't want to use a comic book to do it. I like Maus, but would not rely on it as textbook, either.

version_five 5y ago
Is there something false or misleading in the above comment? A few people have posted something similar. Why is it getting modded down?
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  All I can think of is that a lot of people enjoy outrage so when someone points out "No, the facts are different, so there is nothing to be outraged about", instead of viewing that as good news - that hey, schools are not actually censoring the holocaust and Maus was not banned anywhere - they get really angry as the legitimacy of their outrage is threatened. It's really strange because if you tell someone who was convinced that say, a man was killed a robbery, that actually no, there was no robbery and no one was hurt, most would breathe a sigh of relief and view that as good news. But when it comes to these culture war issues, the reaction of hearing the facts is often people taking offense that their previous offense was not justified. IMO that's a good way of determining whether something is a real issue or a culture war issue -- if it was a real issue, people would be glad to hear that a bad thing didn't happen.
  - NoraCodes 5y ago
    I would argue that people are primarily reacting to the reasoning given by the parents; they're not upset that the book will not be used, but that the people making the decision feel that the inclusion of (censored) profanity and nudity are objectionable enough to call for a change in curriculum. Certainly this is perhaps somewhat overblown, but I don't think it's fair to say that people are "angry that the legitimacy of their outrage is threatened" - I think your downvoters feel that you're missing the point. (I did not flag your comment, to be clear.) There's also the matter of disagreement about the word "banned"; personally I think it's not the right word to use here, but there is an argument to be made that the object of the verb is not students - that is, not making the book totally unavailable - but teachers. They have "banned" teachers from using it in the curriculum. Again, I don't agree with this use of the term, but I don't think it's as clear-cut as "the media is lying about what happened to support their narrative."

NikolaeVarius 5y ago

> Minutes of the McMinn school board meeting that led to the book being banned show that while some parents said they supported the idea of teaching about the Holocaust, they had problems with some profanity in the book. They also had an issue with an image showing a nude woman, who is Spiegelman's mother. "We can teach them history and we can teach them graphic history," board member Mike Cochran said, according to minutes of the meeting. "We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don't need all the nakedness and all the other stuff." Is this 1890?

rayiner 5y ago
That’s 2021 nearly everyone outside some European countries and parts of America.

ALittleLight 5y ago

I do not understand how it's national news that a random school in Tennessee is changing their curriculum by substituting a book.

akvadrako 5y ago

It isn't that hard to become a bestseller so it probably happens to any book that gets so much media attention. I'm not sure why people would upvote this story except to call conservative parents idiots.

version_five 5y ago

Every comment in this thread (except the Hypercard one) has been modded down at the time of writing. Maybe some would like to talk about why they don't like any opinions about this story?

apostacy 5y ago
After spending the last few years gleefully cheering for Republicans to be banned from every online platform, it feels pretty fake to be outraged over a single schoolboard somewhere editing their suggested reading list. I used to see stories like this all the time in my social media feed 10 years ago, during the peak of the new atheist phenomenon. But it feels really out of place now. Especially because of people's warming to censorship.
- NoraCodes 5y ago
  You've made essentially the same comment in three separate places in this thread. This kind of passive-voice imputation is neither productive nor intellectually honest. _Who_ has been "spending the last few years..."? Is it the same people who are now "outraged over a single schoolboard..."? Can you show that? I suspect you can't, and that you're suggesting it only because it fits your ideological biases.
  - apostacy 5y ago
    > _Who_ has been "spending the last few years..."? Is it the same people who are now "outraged over a single schoolboard..."? Can you show that? Of course it is the same people, that was implied by my sentence, obviously. Just being willfully dense and refusing to comprehend what someone says does not refute them. If you had spent any time reading HN, you would see the plethora of commenters who would defend actions far more egregious than what is alleged to have been done by this schoolboard. In threads discussing California's changes to their curriculum, there was a sea of commenters defending things far more absurd than the scopes monkey trial. It would take me less than five minutes to use the hackernews search tool to find these threads, must I do that for you? Are you really going to make me spoon feed you?

rayiner 5y ago

It’s funny what “bans” we get worked about and which ones we don’t: https://ncac.org/news/blog/images-of-muhammad-banned-from-book-by-yale-press https://ncac.org/news/blog/images-of-muhammad-banned-from-bo... The next generation of leaders and elites will be educated at Yale. Meanwhile nobody can even find this town in Tennessee on a map.

throwaway_4ever 5y ago
Ya last round of book controversy making the rounds was local progressive groups banning Huckleberry Finn.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
c0nducktr 5y ago
If you think it is important, please feel free to submit that as a post to news.ycombinator.com.
tptacek 5y ago
Seems... not at all really comparable?
- rayiner 5y ago
  It’s not. People in rural America removing a book from the curriculum because of nudity and violence is innocuous. Yale censoring political speech is important.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    A bunch of adults negotiating over a university press book --- one about the subject you're saying is being censored --- that nobody in the rest of the world will read seems pretty unimportant to me. I also don't think that the actions of a random rural K-8 district 45 minutes outside of Chattanooga is all that important, except to the extent that it got a whole bunch of new people to read Maus, and created more fodder for the obligatory bookstore "Banned Books" displays. Neither incident seems all that impactful, but the Maus incident seems clearly more ignorant and intolerant.

Avatars 5y ago

Of Maus and Man.

andrei_says_ 5y ago

Wait, someone decided to ban Maus, the comic describing the artist’s father’s experiences of going through the Holocaust? What the hell?! What are the arguments for this ban?

the_biot 5y ago
Didn't read the article, huh. Not even the bullet summary of the article. Just went straight into outraged commenter mode.
- andrei_says_ 5y ago
  You’re right, I did. Turns out nothing’s banned, just no longer required. Clickbait outrage worked perfectly on me!