Maus
Robert's memory is better than mine, but what's in mind goes back to about fifth grade and we had different teachers that year: he had Mr Sandilos, I had Miss Martin. There were two Roman Catholics in our class, one was Warren, the other a girl whose name I do not remember. She may have been, but I don't think so I think that was another girl, the girl whose father was Principal of Cove School for a year: don't remember their name at all, just that he drove a large 1936 Buick sedan.
But I think this was a different girl. Anyway, this blogpost isn't about the girl, nor is it about her father the Principal. It's not even about the 1936 Buick - - which I always thought, even in its day, the 1936 was bulbous and homely, not Buick's or GM's best by any means. GM's 1935 Fisher body Turret Top cars were crisp, their 1936 cars were lumpy looking, the 1937 year model cars were crisp again.
Though now that I'm on cars, Buicks, I'll digress for just a moment. The 1936 Buick was their first car with the Fisher "Turret Top", the steel roof that replaced the traditional car roof that was a fabric, wood and wire insert. Other GM cars made the changeover to the Turret Top and v-windshield with the 1935 model,
but Buick's management (was it Harley Earl, or Harlow Curtice?) had put so much money into other things that they could not afford to change over for the 1935 model year. Therefore there was no change for Buick that year, so that the 1935 Buick was a continuation of the 1934 Buick, with no differences whatsoever, including the 1935 Buick having the fabric insert roof and flat windshield, while all other GM cars had the new Turret Top and V-windshield.
Well, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Lasalle and some 1935 Cadillac cars changed to Turret Top (as I recall, the Fisher body Cadillac for 1935 had the Turret Top but the flat-windshield Fleetwood body cars did not - - however, it was The Great Depression, so that would have been an issue).
But I was on Buick.
No I wasn't, I was on Roman Catholics in our class at Cove School, and the reason was that I was recalling the girl telling us about their Banned Books that Roman Catholics were forbidden to read on possible pain of excommunication and loss of salvation. Which meant that the Church could deny you the Sacrament in this life and consign you to Hell after you die if you read a forbidden book. Real flexing of authority and power, eh?!
"The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of books banned for lay Roman Catholic readership. Officially — though the Church was never fully explicit in its means of prosecution of such rules — any individual who dared read any books included on this list risked excommunication and, thus, spiritual damnation. As mentioned above, the Index was definitively compiled Church-wide starting around 1600 and semi-regularly published in Latin (and, later, in translation) by the Vatican starting in 1632.
"The process of deciding which books were to be included was regulated in accordance with various canons (religious laws) regulating the Church’s official policies on printed literature. Before they were consolidated into one master serial publication, various subsets of the Church such as the Universities of Paris and Louvain and the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions had independently published their own indices of forbidden books throughout the sixteenth century. Finally, after almost 400 years, as a result of the reforms promulgated by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the Index and its official mechanisms were officially decommissioned in 1966."*
An outrage that surfaces again here with the Church's history of incredibly arrogant assertion of authority, power, and control over people's lives, bodies, minds and souls, to bend members to the will of its institution; publishing rules and dictating beliefs, including the earth-centric doctrine that got Galileo tried and condemned for insisting the earth revolves around the sun, that the sun does not revolve around the earth as the Church dogmatized. Which, if one is caught in one great big whopper of abusing people in willfully blind butt-headed ignorance, one has used up honor and integrity and has expended one's credibility for all time, for everything and anything else forever; having reduced oneself to laughingstock. As for those being abused: they willingly submit to ecclesiastical authority.
And as for the legislative book-banners, we have seen their ilk in our history, and now again, themselves driven by political populism or the morally self-righteous ignorance of religious certitude.
So banned books. There's a list, there's always a list**. In the Bible Belt South of my growing up years, one such would have been Charles Darwin
This year already America is treated to the spectacle of a Tennessee school board banning Art Spiegelman's classic "Maus", one Jew's story of the Holocaust, told in cartoon format, readable and comprehendible. The central lesson of the ages, revealing from our own history and Time, the unspeakable horror of the worst that humanity can be. I have the book. No, I wouldn't want it used as a teaching resource in kindergarten, but upper grade school, maybe; middle school, yes, and high school.
If the greatest sin is Certainty - - forcefully laying one's religious certainties on Others - - (over against Certainty's opposite, which is Faith), the greatest evil has to be hiding Truth, destroying the Evidence, burning the Books and executing those who write and read them.
Every age has its book-burners.
