THERE ISN'T TIME to write about everything.
I'm generally opposed to the use of fiction as a replacement for teaching history, which isn't written in a quasi-fictional form, nor can it be. Fiction has its own goals and exigencies and those are not compatible with the necessities of history. God help us that most Americans get their history from the movies and TV and goddamned Broadway musicals, not history. If a graphic novel is a superior form for teaching history, I've got my doubts. I am highly suspicious of the use of any fiction as a replacement for that because all fiction dealing with historical topics leaves things out and bends things for the purposes of the author and their planned narrative. And all of fiction will do what is most dangerous of all, create words and events that never happened.
I would be entirely in favor of them teaching MAUS as literature especially if they go over the problems with the book, such as Art Spiegelman's controversial and rather detestable choice to depict Poles as pigs with all of the baggage that choice brings with it. I think it would be worth getting into a deep discussion over whether or not he was guilty of some of the things that such a book might be expected to be calling out as evils to reject instead of to exploit it for his own reasons. I would contrast and compare the use of pigs by Orwell in Animal farm where they were used to represent the members of an economic class and not of an ethnicity who were on the Nazis extermination list, too. One of the problems in this is that the teaching of literature is only as good as the teacher who teaches it. I had one decent teacher of literature in public school over the approximately seven years I'd consider as them actually trying to teach us something about literature. I suspect a lot of students weren't as lucky as I was.
Using actual history to teach history instead of a graphic novel would be better. If it was honest history, entirely better. Though MAUS was actually the book that convinced me that the form of the Graphic novel could rise to the point of actual literature, it as well was part of confirming what I'd long before learned that teaching history through fiction was probably about as valid as teaching algebra or physics by fiction or interpretive dance.
The interview he did with Walter Isaacson, I mostly agreed with what he said except for a few inaccuracies, he seems to have believed some of the common received nonsense about the Scopes trial, I suspect about everything he learned about it was learned from that stupid movie supposedly about it. I will say that until Holocaust Studies comes to open and honest discussion of the Darwinian nature of the Nazis race theories and practices, they will never really get to the questions of why it happened. I went over why what Whoopi Goldberg said was not said out of ignorance. It was a good example of how the term "race" has different meanings at different times, among different people of different experience. I noted the Pew survey that showed that most American Jews consider themselves white. I do have an issue with how Spiegelman seems to reduce all questions to a matter of intelligence when a lot of times things like the variable meaning of words is a better explanation. Like most post-WWII Americans, he's far too hesitant to discuss the most basic problem in all of this, the rejection of the morality of equality, the moral obligation to not do to others what is detestable to you. He is also, surprisingly, more hesitant than I'd be to attribute the latest campaign to organized, financed at least Nazi-friendly ideology though, I was glad to see that he realized that his book being banned was part of the wider white-supremacist agenda.
I do think the reason they went after that is because MAUS is anti-fascist in that it is anti-Nazi and Republican-fascism is a fascist, white supremacist front. I am on record as favoring the banning of all content that supports Nazism, the American indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy and all other anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic ideologies. I favor the exposure and suppression of all of that, though I think popular entertainment, including hate-talk radio and cabloid TV and their like on the internet are far more dangerous than most books are. That said, The Turner Diaries have been used to kill enough Americans that I would favor its total suppression if that were possible. I certainly would favor banning it from any school or public library. It's been given the test in reality and deserves the death penalty. I could make a list of such books that I'd ban from schools for similar reasons. Though I wouldn't want it to cause them to become a cause celebre leading idiot civil libertarians to champion them and the morally ill to shoot them to the top of the Amazon rankings.
Update: For Pete's sake. Art Spiegelman is a friggin' comic artist dealing in serious topics using comics. If I can't criticize his work on the basis of what he says in it because A FRIGGIN' COMIC is too sacrosanct, it's a graven image, an idol held to be beyond criticism and its value has become degraded by making it into one.
If you think I was way past the line hard on him over the one or two things I criticized, what do you make of what the late, far more exigent and qualified critic, the underground comic creator Harvey Pekar said about MAUS, including the bigotry of personifying Poles as pigs? His review of the book from 1988 is one of the best book reviews I've ever seen, ready to give praise as well as criticism. The issues he raised should certainly be part of any discussion of the book. I hadn't read it before preparing this post. His criticism of Speigelman's use of "animal metaphors" as diminishing instead of enhancing the content is something I agree with completely. His similar criticism of the use of "cutesy big-eyed characters" by Keiji Nakazawa in "Barefoot Gen" puts his finger on something I didn't care for when I read it (in Esperanto) a long time ago. Though I didn't think it out into words. Sometimes a picture can defeat the power of a thousand words, or ten in a frame. I think Alison Bechdel's use of the form (which wasn't invented by A. S. ) is better, though tastes vary.
IT'S NOT FRIGGIN' HISTORY AND USING IT TO TEACH HISTORY IS TO FALSIFY HISTORY. The falsification of history is dangerous, the Nazis and now the Republican-fascists want to do it, that's what the book-banning and "parental rights" and anti-Critical Race Theory Republican-Nazism is all about. We shouldn't be doing it in another way while we argue against it. As I noted given the topic and the tone of MAUS we had a right to expect the author to not engage in what he was supposed to be arguing against in his text.
They didn't pull it because it falsifies history -- they pulled it because of one use of the word "damn" and one nude mouse. On other words, hey're philistine prude shitheads -- hm, who does that remind me of? :-)
ReplyDeleteI've recommended remedial reading to you before Simps.
DeleteI didn't call for pulling the book I CRITISIZED THE USE OF FICTION TO "TEACH HISTORY" FOR FALSIFYING HISTORY.
They're Republican-fascists, their excuses for pulling the book are lies, fascists lie, that's inevitable. I SAID THEY PULLED THE BOOK BECAUSE OF ITS ANTI-FASCIST CONTENT. I didn't choose to repeat their lies because, as you prove, reading comprehension is fast reaching its nadir and repeating a lie to refute it runs the risk of the semi-literate mistaking that as a point the writer is making.
They probably didn't like it because the author is Jewish, just as others are being pulled because they're Black or LGBTQ.
You really are an idiot who doesn't think in ideas or even in sentences but in vague signifiers, probably inevitable in an age where visual stimulation has replaced text and its practices of checking evidence and rational analysis. One of the dangers of putting too much baggage on them. A picture is only worth a thousand words if the words were badly chosen or were dishonest.
By the way, Simps, did you even bother to look at Harvey Pekar's critique because it really is one of the best reviews of a book, certainly of any kind of pop-cultural item of the kind that I ever read. I ask knowing you never look at the links.
Delete"I noted the Pew survey that showed that most American Jews consider themselves white."
ReplyDeleteAnd most of you Christians don't and never have, schmucko. That's the problem.
The law of the United States until the Darwinists got laws excluding Jews from entering the country in 1924 certainly treated Jews as if they were white, unless they weren't white. I am unaware of anyone being excluded from voting on that basis, can you point to any legal exclusion of Jews from the rights of citizenship by the government before then?
DeleteHere's a clue, schmucko. The vast majority of European Christians in this country have always believed that they are the only white people here. The fact that you don't know that, or pretend that you don't know that, is really unpretty and obviously you being deliberately and willfully obtuse.
ReplyDeleteYou can't answer my point that the laws of the United States have never excluded Jews from voting, from holding office, from owning property, the laws of the United States until the 1924 law didn't discriminate against Jews, with the possible exception of some war-time measures taken by Grant in the occupied territories of the South which Abraham Lincoln immediately rescinded. The KKK, especially as revived with the help of The Birth of the Nation was probably the foremost force for corrupting the country with European style antisemitism in a big way.
DeleteThe United States has been one of the least antisemitic countries in the world, Jews have never been treated like Native Americans, Black People, Latinos, in the 19th century and up into the 20th century Irish, Italians, French Canadians and Catholics in general suffered more overt discrimination. Though that was nothing like what happened to people who weren't white. When I was trying to research the history of lynching to find out who had been, I found three victims identified as Jewish, Leo Franks and two unnamed men in the South - I couldn't find any more information on that so I don't know if it was accurate or not. In one incident in New Orleans that I read about ten Italians were lynched. And that's not to mention the acts of war against Black neighborhoods with many dead at the hands of white mobs, such as in Tulsa and East St. Louis in which the number of Black People murdered is anywhere from a few dozens to 150, or maybe more, not to mention homes and businesses destroyed. Nothing like that was done against any group of white people in the United States. The antisemtism around today is largely media driven, Hollywood pushed that just like it did racism, sexism and LGBTQ stereotyping and violence. I will never forget watching the putrid Midnight Cowboy at a college theater right after the thing was released and hearing them cheer when John Voight's character brutally murdered Bernard Hughes' character. I think it was in 1970 on an allegedly liberal college in New England. It gave me a real education in how dangerous things were, though by that time I'd certainly known enough gay men who had been brutally beaten up, often by the cops, and one who had been murdered. Of course for Black People that's not rare, especially Black people who are women or LGBTQ. For any white people other than women to pretend they have anything like the experience of People of Color is offensively absurd.
"The KKK, especially as revived with the help of The Birth of the Nation "
ReplyDeleteUh, no, the KKK wasn't revived by Birth of a Nation. It was revived a few years later, specifically by a Public Relations firm down South who made a fortune licensing and selling Klan merchandise to the rubes.
The man who revived the KKK explicitly said he did it through the use of that movie years before the public relations firm was brought in to help it expand farther. We went through that before more than once. I proved it through the contemporaneous comments of him and those who opposed the movie being shown, including a promient Rabbi from Boston, in 1919, BEFORE THAT PUBLIC RELATIONS FIRM WAS INVOLVED. I know the media a couple of years back pushed that story as if it were the thing that started it, what an idiot such as yourself probably started and stopped with, but, as the media freed from fact checking itself does, it distorted the actual record.
DeleteWow. A Rabbi from Boston. He must have been totally a movie expert and hip to how pop culture works.
ReplyDeletesteve simelsFebruary 21, 2022 at 5:13 AM
ReplyDeleteWow. A Rabbi from Boston. He must have been totally a movie expert and hip to how pop culture works.
He knew it better than you, he knew that Birth of a Nation would get people killed, or, rather, he had what you lack, a moral life so he cared about that more than being kew-el and a part of the promotion of commercial crap for pay. I would bet that like Alexander Nevsky, you've never actually watched that piece of white supremacist propaganda, you just know what other parasites in the profession of "criticism" have deemed you're to think of it to be in the "know."