Guy Montag, eat your heart out

by David Benjamin

“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way”

—Juan Ramon Jimenez, quoted by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451

 

MADISON, Wis. — Nobody is quite sure whether the school board in Keller, Texas has “officially” banned from its libraries the Bible and The Diary of Anne Frank. They seem to be waffling on a few titles. What’s clear is that the prudes of Keller have tapped in to America’s time-honored tradition of shielding schoolchildren from the moral degradation that comes from reading great books and studying brilliant authors. Once more, with feeling, the thought police are banning books they haven’t read.

(Wait, wait! What about the Bible? Okay, yes, we’ve all had the Good Book preached at us, really, how many of us have read it cover-to-cover?)

I regard myself as an expert on school censorship! For six years, I attended a Catholic grade school whose history texts recast the Reformation as the Protestant Revolution and where we weren’t allowed to sing “Away in a Manger” because Martin Luther wrote the lyrics. Our geography books measured the worthiness of countries by their percentage of Catholics: Italy, good; Egypt, fuggedaboudit!

However, given the paucity of lively literature on the St. Mary’s School bookshelves, I harkened early in my reading career to a secular source, the Tomah Public Library, where I indulged in the tacitly forbidden works of Holling Clancy Holling, Jim Kjelgaard, Dr. Seuss, Jules Verne, just about every title in the 122-book Landmark series and Joel Chandler Harris. It was Harris, author of Tales of Uncle Remus, who steered me indirectly toward a curiosity about slavery—which led me to the adult history stacks. There I found a Civil War history of a thousand-odd small-type pages that was impenetrable even for a fourth-grader reading at eighth-grade level. 

But, I never let go of the clues sown by B’rer Rabbit and B’rer Fox, which flowered into a lifelong hunger for more knowledge of America’s cruel legacy of human bondage, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Reconstruction and the Klan, Plessy v. Ferguson, Jim Crow, “Strange Fruit,” Brown v. Board of Education, C. Vann Woodward, Kenneth Clark, Native Son, Invisible Man, Soul on Ice, Malcolm X, and Letter from Birmingham Jail. Etcetera!

To this day, I mark July 25th, the birthday of Emmett Till, with a pang of heartbreak and a quiet toast to the impossible courage of his mother, Mamie.

Most of the above sources, authors and heroes, of course, will not be found in the libraries of the Keller Independent School District—nor, for that matter, back at good old St. Mary’s.

But the Keller folks, white and cloistered though they are, haven’t come out particularly against racial enlightenment. They have other sins in their craw. Like most American censors, these folks are all about sex. They think they can regulate carnal knowledge among a demographic of Americans whose sexual curiosity is ravenous and whose resourcefulness is boundless. If I could speak to the benighted do-gooders on the Keller school board, I would emphasize three points.

First, kids are autodidacts. By a factor of thousands, they learn more stuff on their own—especially about the frolicking of birds and bees—than any teacher or librarian, if allowed, could convey more discreetly and accurately.  

Second, kids today don’t read. They didn’t read when I was in school, either, but the dropoff—with the ubiquity of television, movies, pop-music apps, the Web and social media—has rendered printed “content,” for at least a generation, a sort of golden-oldie curiosity.

Third, almost every kid over the age of seven has a phone that makes available to him or her—with a click or two—the full text of the Bible (including all that smut in the Song of Solomon), The Diary of Anne Frank, Tropic of Cancer, Fifty Shades of Grey, six million cat videos, and nude selfies of their town’s entire high-school cheerleading squad. 

This truth bespeaks my own experience (and the denialists in Keller). Like all my peers, I learned about sex not in Health class but on the street. Well, actually, behind the livestock pavilion at the Monroe County fairgrounds. I also picked up pointers from John Updike, James Jones, William Goldman, François Rabelais, “The Playboy Advisor” and a brief, disturbing plunge into the Marquis de Sade, none of which I checked out from my school library. 

Given the simple reality that kids today, thanks to digital communications, are awash in sexual, political, cultural, religious and racial knowledge, the Keller school board is either abysmally ignorant about 21st-century technology and the irrepressible curiosity of their own kids or—more likely—all this tut-tutting and book-banning is virtue signaling. They are, in a spasm of illiterate symbolism, demonstrating their Christianist identity, affirming their whiteness in a nation of growing diversity, trumpeting their Trumpian loyalties and asserting their “parental right” to crush their kids’ inquisitiveness and shrink their children’s world into a hard, beige, homogeneous, uncrackable hickory nut. 

C’mon, Mom!

I think of my stepbrother Gary, whose childhood education was even more constrained than mine. He’s a preacher’s son. He attended a tiny, sectarian Bible college in Oklahoma (it might have been Texas). After school, he joined a U.S. Army almost as conservative as his college, but ended up posted in Germany, from which he traveled to Paris and vigorously exercised a curiosity about the world, its peoples, its art and music, and its faiths that his fundamentalist upbringing should have nipped in the bud.

Gary’s lobotomy did not take. They gave him ruled paper and he wrote the other way.

Now, Gary remains conservative. He votes Republican reflexively, even when his candidate is a flagrant pagan who cheats on his numerous trophy wives, stiffs his creditors and steals from Uncle Sam. But never mind that. Despite his brand-loyal politics, he is in every other respect one of the most engaging and inquisitive conversationalists in my life. He gets my sense of humor, reads my books—and lots of other books—and he’s always open to what’s on my mind. 

Gary—who grew up in the same Texas where the Keller atavists sit in judgment on Ray Bradbury, Toni Morrison and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.—is a role model for those Lone Star censors. Gary embodies a lesson that those allegedly educated grownups, despite their advanced years, have yet to learn.

You can take the books away from kids, but you can’t take the kids away from books.