![]() Author Art Spiegelman told CNN on January 27 - coincidentally International Holocaust Remembrance Day - that the ban of his book for crude language was "myopic" and represents a "bigger and stupider" problem than any with his specific work. A school board in Tennessee has added to a surge in book bans by conservatives with an order to remove the award-winning 1986 graphic novel on the Holocaust, "Maus," from local student libraries. This photo taken in Los Angeles, California on Janushows the cover of the graphic novel "Maus" by Art Spiegelman. People are still free to read it-even if they're in the 8th grade. It's still in the public libraries and can be purchased online or in any brick-and-mortar bookstore that's still standing. Maus has not been banned in McMinn County. It shouldn't happen, especially in a country that values freedom of expression as much as we do. Headlines from New York to California have attacked the move, depicting it as the act of small minds and bigoted people who object to teaching children about the Holocaust.īook banning is bad. And they've been doing so abundantly ever since the school board of McMinn County, Tennessee-located just 37 minutes east by car from Dayton-voted 10-0 to withdraw Maus, a Pulitzer-prize winning graphic novel about the Holocaust that uses mice as stand-ins for the Jews, from the 8th-grade language arts curriculum. It's a libel that stuck, and which the media glitterati trot out whenever they can. The trial-and its subsequent depiction on stage and screen in Inherit the Wind-did much to create the impression that white, religious-minded American southerners are, as a writer for The Washington Post once put it, "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command." Mencken named "the monkey trial," proved so embarrassing for evangelical Christians throughout the South that they more or less withdrew from the public life of the nation for nearly six decades. The resulting court case, which famed journalist H.L. It was just about 100 years ago that the good people of Dayton, Tennessee, decided to put Charles Darwin's theories on trial.
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