'Maus,' Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Holocaust, is pulled from Tennessee school districtThe decision was unanimous. The school board cited 8 curse words and an image of a naked woman as their justification.
The image of the naked woman is (CW suicide)
Spiegelman's mother dead in a bathtub. It's a disturbing image, but, y'know, not because it's got bare breasts in it.
And that kinda describes these objections in a nutshell. If the argument was "this book is full of extremely disturbing material and we don't want young children reading it," that would still be a wrong position (there are kids in elementary school who aren't old enough to read Maus and kids who are; I read it for the first time when I was in fifth grade and don't feel it was age-inappropriate for 11-year-old me; the book's been in school libraries for over 30 years and if there were really a problem with age-inappropriate kids checking it out we would have heard of it before now), but at least they'd be concerned about the right thing.
What kind of sick fuck reads Maus and thinks the most concerning thing in it is curse words? What kind of sick fuck sees the image of
a corpse in a bathtub and thinks the disturbing thing about it is that you can see her nipples?
That's rhetorical. As
Neil Gaiman put it, "There's only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days." I know exactly what kind of sick fuck votes to ban Maus. Spiegelman depicted them as cats.