I’m So Fucking Sorry Your Child Had to Read a Fucking Swear Word in a Book About the Holocaust
I’m So Fucking Sorry Your Child Had to Read a Fucking Swear Word in a Book About the Holocaust
Is he fucking okay?
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
A few days ago The New York Times reported that a school board in Tennessee banned the brilliant graphic novel Maus because it included “rough language,” a naked person, violence and suicide. By way of reminder, Maus is a Pulitzer-prize winning novel about the Holocaust — so yeah, there’s gonna be some fucking violence, and maybe a little fucking suicide, for fuck’s sake. (The author’s mother, a survivor of Auschwitz, committed suicide). Also by way of reminder, the Holocaust was a murderous campaign against anyone the fucking Nazis thought didn’t fit into the definition of a master race — mostly Jewish people but not only Jewish people — and therefore needed to be destroyed. Add some economic insecurity and megalomania and you’ve got yourself a fucking genocide.
This genocidal campaign included fucking gas chambers, fucking death marches, fucking shooting babies and throwing them into ditches, fucking hangings, fucking starvation, among other fucking unthinkable things. Fun fact: the word “genocide” was coined in 1944. Before that, there simply wasn’t a word to describe not only what the Nazis had done, but also the Armenian genocide that had occurred during WWI. Genocide isn’t new, but our awareness of what it means — the systematic destruction of a particular group of people — is.
Like the process of creating the word genocide, after the Holocaust survivors created a body of artistic and literary work to try to make sense of it all. This body of work includes Maus. But genocide still occurs, so it’s clear humanity hasn’t really made sense of fucking anything.
There was Iraq’s fucking Anfal Campaign, which included the brutal as fuck Barzani Operation, against the Kurds. There was fucking Rwanda and fucking Serbia. There are the fucking genocide-adjacent massacres carried out by the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador. Before you get mad as fuck at me for saying “genocide-adjacent,” keep in mind the term “genocide” is a very specific term of art, that applies only when the objective is to wipe out a particular group of people. The massacres in those civil wars were a little more indiscriminate, but still fucking horrifying. While we GenXers were watching Def Leppard on fucking MTV, a small village in Guatemala was being fucking exterminated.
So it’s pretty clear we haven’t solved the genocide thing, but God forbid a fucking tween in Tennessee is exposed to “rough language” in between fucking active shooter drills. Can’t have that, no sir! The school board issued a statement saying that the decision was made to “reflect the values of the community.” And that — get this — they wanted to find a way to teach students about the Holocaust with less violence and disturbing imagery. Who wants to fucking tell them?
And what are these so-called fucking values, exactly? I’m not a parent, teacher, nor do I live in Tennessee. I think parents should have (some) fucking influence over what their kids learn. But if you value your child never hearing a fucking dirty word or seeing a fucking naked person over telling your kid the truth about the fucking Nazis, then fucking RIP America. The experiment is fucking over.
Perhaps they forgot that children younger than the eighth-graders assigned Maus were actual fucking victims of the Holocaust. Being seven years old didn’t save you from being fucking gassed, fucking shot, or fucking starved. Elie Wiesel’s book Night starts when he was twelve fucking years old, and don’t get me started on fucking Anne Frank. But in Tennessee a fourteen-year-old can’t learn about this if it means he’s going to see some fucking tits. And not even real tits, but fucking cartoon tits. A fourteen-year-old can be taught the best way to survive a fucking active shooter, but he can’t learn about fucking suicide.
I tried to convince myself that the decision was simply pearl-clutching stupidity. But we all know something else is fucking going on here, and my money is on the sanitization of anti-Semitism. It’s all a farce: these same eighth graders have access to the Internet, to YouTube, to Twitter, to Instagram, and to cable, where fucking tits and ass and violence and fucking bad words run amok. Kids fucking commit suicide because of bullying. Society has coarsened in a way that should be fixed, but if you’re trying to fix it by pretending a fucking genocide wasn’t fucking violent, then the school board is full of a bunch of fucking liars and they’re just trying to not say the quiet part out loud. For fuck’s sake.
I guess we shouldn’t really be surprised, because the attempt to sanitize racism via school curriculums has been going on for quite a while. In 2013, a Virginia mom wanted to fucking ban Toni Morrison’s Beloved from the school curriculum because it gave her son nightmares. Lady, the fucking nightmares are the fucking point. Beloved is a terrifying book about the ghosts of slavery, and if it doesn’t give you nightmares you need to get your fucking head checked.
But again, we know this isn’t about the nightmares. Something else is afoot. This same mom was trotted out in an ad for now-governor Youngkin, who ran on an education platform. In the ad, the mom describes being shocked when her son showed her what he was reading, but she conveniently doesn’t mention that he was reading Beloved. Perhaps that’s because whoever made that ad knew that we all know you can’t teach kids about slavery without including the fucking gang rapes and the fucking torture part. There is no other fucking way to teach it. Unless, of course, your fucking plan is to not teach it at all, by just pretending to teach it.
My grandparents had a friend, Sonia, and she used to tell me stories. Sonia was a doctor in Paris during World War II, and was part of the The Resistance. She was blonde and blue-eyed, and only had one Jewish grandparent, so she didn’t catch the attention of the Gestapo right away.
To save Jewish girls, Sonia would put one on the handlebars of her bike, ride out of Paris past the Gestapo, as if she and her girlfriend were going to have a picnic in the countryside. Sonya would then drop off her young friend at the next Resistance point, and ride back into Paris with empty handlebars, the Gestapo none the wiser. Sometimes she smiled and waved at them.
Eventually the Gestapo turned its attention to Sonia, so she fled, winding up in New Jersey as a doctor’s wife. When she wasn’t fucking yelling at me that I put too much salt on my food, Sonia would tell these stories, with my parents and grandparents looking on. I was mesmerized. I was also seven. As in fucking seven years old. I fucking handled it.
No one told Sonia to stop telling her stories, no one told her that it was too much for a kid, and certainly no one told Sonia not to fucking swear. I’m not saying this was the result of good parenting — my parents weren’t that great, actually — it was most likely the result of apathy. But the result was the same; I was never protected from any story about anything. The horror humans are capable of is simply not a surprise to me. My view of the world is unsanitized, thank you very fucking much.
But what is a surprise to me is that the sanitization of anti-Semitism and racism is right out in the fucking open at this point, under the guise of protecting fucking kids. The same fucking kids who are glued to a fucking screen all day. The fucking folks who want to ban Maus and Beloved and other books like them (a Missouri school board just banned The Bluest Eye, another Morrison book) might as well put on fucking Groucho Marx glasses at this point, because the claim that this is about protecting kids is so fucking laughable. We fucking see you. This is not about the fucking kids.
Of course, the good news is that teenagers love nothing more than fucking rebelling. So good job, Tennessee school board. You just made Maus alluring as fuck.