One, it seems obvious to me that the MAUS story *as a story* has blown up in the way it has because a) MAUS is universally beloved and b) it fits into broader anxieties about anti-CRT bills and censorship.
-
Show this thread
-
But while banning MAUS from the McMinn County curriculum is obviously bad, it's unclear from the reporting on it that it's part of the same *coordinated* censorship efforts on the part of the institutional right.
3 replies 3 retweets 39 likesShow this thread -
My read on it -- and I very well could be wrong, but this is the impression I'm getting from the reporting -- is that this is a highly localized story of an individual small rural school district making policy.
2 replies 2 retweets 37 likesShow this thread -
David 2022-RELATED PUN Walsh Retweeted Jonathan Dresner
Right, exactly -- it's to say that this particular case has clearly made possible by local activists and school boards feeling emboldened by the anti-CRT climate to make even further demands on curricula and censorship.https://twitter.com/jondresner/status/1487521357474709504?s=20&t=MxWEqH_zN5-6MOF7v5ow-w …
David 2022-RELATED PUN Walsh added,
3 replies 7 retweets 71 likesShow this thread -
Which is to say that I think Corey Robin's basic argument -- take the McMinn school board at its word when it says this isn't about the Holocaust per se but an objection to the viscerality of MAUS -- is probably true. I also don't think it's relevant.
4 replies 4 retweets 50 likesShow this thread -
MAUS is a difficult and frequently unpleasant read because, well, it's about the Holocaust. But I think it's important to bear in mind that Americans *in general* do not feel responsible for the Holocaust.
2 replies 5 retweets 45 likesShow this thread -
The specific language of so many of the anti-CRT bills focus on the horror of white students feeling bad about themselves through encountering the visceral horrors of American slavery and racial violence, which help but pose questions about responsibility, complicity, and guilt.
1 reply 3 retweets 48 likesShow this thread -
The Holocaust, on the other hand, does not pose the same to *American* identity, at least not in the same way as slavery.
3 replies 3 retweets 42 likesShow this thread -
But this actually makes the removal of MAUS from the curriculum more disturbing rather than less, because it suggests that what's really at stake is an understanding of history that is so sanitized as to render people in the past as not people.
1 reply 8 retweets 115 likesShow this thread -
People live. They laugh. They swear. They pray. They eat. They shit. They get naked. They fuck. They are capable of immense joy and immense despair, of cruelty as well as kindness. People are complicated. That vision of history is, for many, profoundly disturbing.
3 replies 10 retweets 90 likesShow this thread
Maus is not a redemption narrative or an American exceptionalism narrative (since shadow of Holocaust is intergenerational and continues). That's part of the scandal.
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.