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Snippets

The reports from Texas repeatedly said that it was a girls’ Christian camp. Would the flooding tragedy have been different if it had been a boys’ camp? Or if it had been a Girl Scout camp? Or an unaffiliated camp?

Do the Christian parents who sent their girls to the camp view God differently now?

 Trump was surprised that the President of Liberia spoke English so well. He would no doubt also be surprised that English is an official language of over twenty African countries, including Botswana, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.

I have been giving inspirational talks to youth groups, and I always tell them not to let others tell you what you can do. I tell them to consider Beethoven. People told him that he could not be a composer because he was deaf. But did he listen?

What is Beethoven doing now? Decomposing.

In his book A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father David Maraniss reports that Arthur Miller, who was part of David’s father’s college circle, thought that Americans tended to blame themselves and not the system. Thus, the country had no revolutionary movement even during the Depression. Even if that was true then, it is at best only partially true today. People still don’t blame the system if they are not thriving, but they don’t blame themselves. They blame the “other”—Blacks, browns, immigrants, Jews.

I know that “conservative principles” is an oxymoron. Instead, there is one conservative principle. That is to reduce taxes on the wealthy. To make that palatable the conservatives might also have to reduce taxes on the non-rich, but the goal is to reduce taxes on the rich. Conservatives may talk about other goals. For example, when they are not in power, they are concerned about the deficit and debt. But when given a choice about reducing the debt and reducing taxes on the rich, they always pick the latter. Conservatives also denounce government interference in private and business affairs, but when Trump does it, no conservative seems to point out Trump is acting against basic conservative principles. Although there are many examples, I thought this again when Trump suggested that he would block the construction of a new football stadium if the Washington football team did not change its name back to the Redskins. Apparently the private corporation should not make this decision. The president should.

Perhaps I am wrong about there being only one conservative principle. In Trump’s first term, he was clearly motivated to oppose any policy or initiative if it had been adopted by Obama. Now Trump-led conservatives are opposed to anything that looks like what they think is DEI.

Perhaps, you think, they have another principle: opposition to antisemitism. Although under the banner of antisemitism, Trump is trying to coerce or perhaps destroy various institutions, you should doubt whether antisemitism is the principle driving Trump’s actions. Recently during a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing, Rep. Mark Takano asked Education Secretary Linda McMahon whether refusing to hire a Holocaust denier at a university like Harvard would constitute an impermissible ideological litmus test. McMahon deflected by stating that “there should be diversity of viewpoints relative to teachings and opinions on campuses.” The administration’s preferred definition of antisemitism is one promulgated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The IHRA gives examples of contemporary antisemitism. The third example: “Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).” The fourth example: “Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.” So the Trump administration is against antisemitism, but favors “viewpoint diversity.” Apparently hiring the antisemite is ok because it will further viewpoint diversity. On the other hand, the real principle is that Trump wants to control as many elite institutions as he can.

“Times have changed and times are strange/Here I come, but I ain’t the same/Mama, I’m coming home. . . .” R.I.P. Ozzy.

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It Was So Age-Inappropriate What I Read

My grade and high schools must have had libraries, but I have little memory of them. I certainly don’t remember any controversies surrounding what books they should or should not shelve. On the other hand, I have many memories of the Mead Public Library, the facility that served the entire town of 45,000. I went there obsessively. It was a two-story building with the adult section on the entrance floor and the children’s books upstairs.

I gave little thought to who or how it was decided what books were in the children’s library. The decision, no doubt, was made by the librarians as to what was age appropriate. Appropriateness, I would guess, had to do with reading ability. Third graders were not ready for War and Peace or Descartes. Such books would be in the adult section.

Now, however, books are kept from children not just because of vocabulary, complexity, or length. Instead, the books in many places are segregated because the subject is not considered age-appropriate or, as an Arkansas statute says, because the book will be “harmful” to the young reader or even because it may make a reader “uncomfortable.”

Take Heather Has Two Mommies by Lesléa Newman. It has been frequently removed from shelves for being age-inappropriate, but it is written with a simple vocabulary and structure with innocent, colorful illustrations. It is not age-inappropriate for first and second graders because it is too difficult to read. Instead, some adults insist it is age-inappropriate because of its subject matter. The book readily accepts as normal a same-sex relationship, although nothing in the book states that Heather’s mothers have sex. Is this age inappropriate? The answer should be no.

If children are asking about a topic, a book in age-appropriate language is not inappropriate. It is only natural for curious kids to wonder why they have a mother and father while another child has two mommies or only one parent or only a grandmother. Books written at a suitable language level about divorce, single motherhood, and untimely death are appropriate for kids who wonder about such things. The same is true for a family with two mothers or fathers. Heather has been banned not because young’uns are not inherently interested in the topic but because adults are uncomfortable with it.

Some book removers go further when books for kids deal more directly with sexuality. They maintain that the goal of the authors and librarians is to groom or indoctrinate children. If the fear is that schoolkids will be transformed into  gay or trans or nonbinary people, it’s just plain silly…worse, ignorant. On the other hand, these books introduce the concept that gay, lesbian, trans, nonbinary, and other queer folk should be accepted into the community, should be free from legal and societal discrimination, should be treated with the same respect as we treat others. (I recall there being something in the Bible about loving thy neighbor as thyself.) However, if that’s the kind of dangerous indoctrination the censors fear, they may be right.  

Attacking books because of their sexuality might mask broader concerns than just gay sex.  What comes to mind is what Masha Gessen wrote about Vladimir Putin in The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. When Putin feels politically vulnerable, he launches anti-gay attacks. He has produced his own version of don’t-say-gay laws by enacting legislation that bans “homosexual propaganda.” Putin has also anticipated those loyal Americans who don’t want topics taught that might make school kids uncomfortable. Russia under Putin “protects” kids not merely by eliminating reference to homosexuality. He has also banned “any mention of death, violence, suicide, domestic abuse, unhappiness, and, really, life itself.” In putting in place these restrictions, Putin has said that he is defending “traditional values.” As far as I am aware, however, he has not said that he was promoting “family values.” When he is criticized, Putin has been a master at diverting that criticism by attacking gays.

When I hear concerns that books are in the library for purposes of  “indoctrinating” children, I think back to what I recall of my elementary school reading. I remember few of the books I consumed except for a series which I labeled in my mind the “orange biographies” because they all had orange bindings. Of appropriate length and vocabulary for a third grader, they were hero books with an emphasis on the childhoods of the likes of Thomas Edison or Andrew Jackson, but they also contained enough about the subject’s adulthoods for me to learn a bit of history. These books have stayed with me on some level, forming some of my background knowledge about various personages and historical eras. Looked at another way, however, they were books that indoctrinated.

Although the spouse remembers an orange biography about the first woman doctor, almost all were about men. Although there might have been biographies about Booker T. Washington or Washington Carver, almost all were about whites. They were about “great” white men with little, if any, suggestion that “ordinary” people did important things. They were all about Americans as if “foreigners” could not or did not contribute to a better world. The books were a subliminal indoctrination into the American myth that any American child (at least any white male) could become a great person—just work hard and live right and, perhaps, be a little adventurous. The subliminal corollary to this belief, however, is that if you or your parents have not become rich, are not powerful, or are not important, it is your or their fault. (David Maraniss reports in A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Family that the playwright Arthur Miller thought Americans had the tendency to blame themselves for economic shortcomings and not the economic system. He theorizes that this proclivity to blame oneself prevented America from ever facing a real challenge to the economic system.)

So yes. Reading indoctrinates. By using a much less charged synonym, however, we also know that reading teaches. That is, of course, why education should present all sorts of information and all sorts of views to children. Presentation of only one viewpoint might be indoctrination; presenting more than that gives a child a true opportunity to learn.

(The fear by conservatives of indoctrination in our schools is not new, but the concern over subject matter has not remained constant. I found it amusing when I read that William “Big Bill” Thompson ran for Chicago mayor in the 1920s on an America First platform charging that the English monarchy was planting pro-British propaganda in the Chicago schools. Sarah Churchwell, “America First” in Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Myth America: Historians Take the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.)

Concluded June 19

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Red Scare, Deep State

The history book group recently discussed A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Family by David Maraniss. Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist, has written excellent histories and political and sports biographies. A Good American Family is, however, more personal; it is about his mother, Mary, and father, Elliott, who had been American communists. (A member of the discussion group, whose relatives had also been American communists, had urged us to read the book.)

          Elliott Maraniss, raised on Coney Island, went to the University of Michigan in the late 1930s, where he met and later married Mary Cummins. Both were active communists. He enlisted in the army in World War II and as a captain headed a black salvage-and-repair company in the still-segregated army. He admired both FDR and Eisenhower and voted for Ike in 1952. After the war, the elder Maraniss became a newspaperman with a Detroit newspaper but apparently remained a communist and surreptitiously also wrote for a communist newspaper.

In 1952 Elliott was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was fired. For years after his dismissal he bounced around from job to job, often losing the work after the FBI visited his employer. He eventually ended up in a secure position at the Madison Capital Times published by one of my heroes, William Evjue. (While growing up, my family received two daily papers—the local The Sheboygan Press and the more worldly The Milwaukee Journal. Evjue published a weekly expanded edition of his paper with more political news and opinions than on other days, and our family got that weekly edition. My memory is not completely clear here, but I believe that the Capital Times was the first newspaper to publish a letter of mine. When a young man, Evjue had worked for the Madison newspaper the Wisconsin State Journal, but he founded the Capital Times when the State Journal opposed Robert M. La Follette, Sr. and the Progressive Party during World War I. Evjue was chair of the Wisconsin Progressive Party in the 1930s.)

          Reading about Americans who were communists in the mid-twentieth century reminded me of Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, which I read shortly after it was published in 1977. I admit my memories of it are less than complete, but from what I remember Gornick, too, had parents who were communists, and this set her off on a nationwide journey in the 1970s to interview other Americans who had been communists.

The interviewees expressed the excitement, allure, drudgery and sacrifices of being a party member. These were people who felt that they were part of something bigger than themselves. They were seeking a better world not just or even necessarily for themselves individually, but they sought a more just world for workers generally. I was struck that several of the interviewees said that they had not expected significant changes to come in their lifetimes but believed that their work would lead to them eventually after they were gone. They had a faith, and to me it often seemed akin to a religious belief.

          The American Marxist movement, broader than just the communist party, however, was schismatic. Socialists were Marxists but also anti-communists Even so, there were several socialist parties that differed with each other, and over time there was more than one American communist party. They battled each other over correct dogma, and these fights often seemed more important to them than the fights against their supposed common enemies—the capitalists and plutocrats. It reminded me of religious schisms—think Sunni and Shia, Roman and Orthodox Catholics, Catholics and Protestants, one Protestant denomination against another, each proclaiming the correct path to salvation and a better world.

          The communist party also confronted something like what religious people have had to. How does the believer handle learning that those in authority have violated what had been their accepted beliefs? In Christian churches this has often involved sex and money, but for American communists the major test first came at the beginning of World War II with the Hitler-Stalin pact. There were good reasons to be entranced by communism in the 1930s, including a struggle promoting workers’ rights to a fairer economic system and fights for civil rights in a United States that oppressed racial minorities. And it seemed admirable that communists stood firmly against German fascism.

  Overnight, however, with the pact between Germany and Russia, the communists were asked to abandon their fundamental tenet of anti-fascism. Gornick’s book makes clear the agony this produced for American communists. Many had their faith shattered, could not stomach the new directives from Moscow, and left the party. Others did mental gymnastics to accept the new direction, but for every American communist this was a gut-wrenching time. More disillusionment followed when the famous “secret” speech of Nikita Khruschev in1956 became public, openly acknowledging the purges, the anti-semitism, the needless starvation, and other abominations under Stalin’s dictatorship.

          Maraniss’s book is lacking here. His father, an editor on the University of Michigan newspaper, defended the Hitler-Stalin pact, a position that the son-author labels “indefensible.” About the father who later wrote soviet propaganda under an assumed name, the son says, “I can appreciate his motivations, but I am confounded by his reasoning and his choices.” The adult son clearly wondered about Elliot’s decisions, but nothing in the book indicates that the author ever asked his father and mother about these issues. I understand that topics are often avoided in families, but that they were left unspoken in the Maraniss family leaves a hole in the book.

Concluded April 10.