Tennessee School Board Bans Holocaust Graphic Novel

[Jimmy Higgins]

Dude, why don't you download and read the meeting minutes in question, and highlight the sections in it that you think have to do with racism or anti-semitism. Then we can have a discussion. At this point, it seems you and others seem to think that's what this is all about, but my interpretation is its the wrong focus. Its a little community in Tennessee that's got some prudish attitudes...that's about all you can say about the whole story IMHO. Just show me the racism. "Dog whistles" and "personal feelings about rural southern people" don't count.

First rule of Racism Club is never mention Racism Club.

It is funny. Hotel Rwanda was on TCM, and I stopped on it for a short bit. My daughter recognized War Machine, but I told her this was not a fantasy movie about something real, something very bad. As I ponder when my daughter is ready to understand the scope of the Holocaust and genocides at a cerebral level, the question of mouse nudity or naughty language never seems to enter the picture. When she is ready to absorb it, the mouse nudity and naughty language issue is well in the rear view mirror.

If this is nothing but an issue of prude, they are in terrible amount of denial about language and nudity with their teens. Seeing these people voted for Mr. Prude for the White House, I call bullshit on the Prude.

 

[thebeave]

Dude, why don't you download and read the meeting minutes in question, and highlight the sections in it that you think have to do with racism or anti-semitism. Then we can have a discussion. At this point, it seems you and others seem to think that's what this is all about, but my interpretation is its the wrong focus. Its a little community in Tennessee that's got some prudish attitudes...that's about all you can say about the whole story IMHO. Just show me the racism. "Dog whistles" and "personal feelings about rural southern people" don't count.

Are you truly naive enough to believe that this is about mouse nudity? There are a lot of images of animals without clothing on the shelves of any children's library, both illustrated and in photographs. Hundreds of titles, even in a small library. Why, in your opinion, are they concerned about this specific book and not any of the others?

For the time being, I am taking them at their word about their concerns with Maus, as discussed in the meeting minutes. I don't have any reason or evidence to believe there is some other nefarious plot at play here, but if you have something concrete to show me, I will happily change my mind. Innocent until proven guilty, and all that. Do you automatically presume it has something to do with them being bigoted, despite the fact that you know nothing about these people? And as I said, I don't know the context of the nudity(is it really a mouse or a woman, I don't know) in question, so I have refrained with comments on that until I see it.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

And as I said, I don't know the context of the nudity(is it really a mouse or a woman, I don't know) in question, so I have refrained with comments on that until I see it.

Don't know and apparently uninterested in finding out.

 

[ZiprHead]

I haven't quite figured out the nude picture thing yet. Apparently, the image in question is of Spiegelmen's mother laying nude in the bathtub after she committed suicide in 1968. Whether his mother is depicted as a "naked mouse" or its an actual photograph of her, is not clear. She is referred to as a "woman", but I have yet to see the image in question, so its hard say how offensive or inoffensive it is.

Yes, she is depicted as a mouse and, as I understand, the frame containing the image in the comic book is actually smaller than a postage stamp.

Post it here, and we can all have a look for ourselves. Hopefully, it doesn't violate IIDB's terms of use for showing naughty bits.

If you can find it post it.

 

[thebeave]

I haven't quite figured out the nude picture thing yet. Apparently, the image in question is of Spiegelmen's mother laying nude in the bathtub after she committed suicide in 1968. Whether his mother is depicted as a "naked mouse" or its an actual photograph of her, is not clear. She is referred to as a "woman", but I have yet to see the image in question, so its hard say how offensive or inoffensive it is.

Yes, she is depicted as a mouse and, as I understand, the frame containing the image in the comic book is actually smaller than a postage stamp.

Post it here, and we can all have a look for ourselves. Hopefully, it doesn't violate IIDB's terms of use for showing naughty bits.

If you can find it post it.

I don't want to get in trouble. We need to protect the grown ups here.

From the IIDB Rules:

2. Not to post or transmit unlawful or pornographic information.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I haven't quite figured out the nude picture thing yet. Apparently, the image in question is of Spiegelmen's mother laying nude in the bathtub after she committed suicide in 1968. Whether his mother is depicted as a "naked mouse" or its an actual photograph of her, is not clear. She is referred to as a "woman", but I have yet to see the image in question, so its hard say how offensive or inoffensive it is.

Yes, she is depicted as a mouse and, as I understand, the frame containing the image in the comic book is actually smaller than a postage stamp.

Post it here, and we can all have a look for ourselves. Hopefully, it doesn't violate IIDB's terms of use for showing naughty bits.

If you can find it post it.

I don't want to get in trouble. We need to protect the grown ups here.

From the IIDB Rules:

2. Not to post or transmit unlawful or pornographic information.

You are just trolling now. ZiprHead owns the board.

The transcript is a fucking disgrace. The guy most upset about it is a hypocrite. Others just go along because they can undo it. Almost no one of them knows the book at all. They note it is in the State Curricula, but then Mr. Hypocrite plays the big government card. At best, a bunch of pussies.

 

[ZiprHead]

I haven't quite figured out the nude picture thing yet. Apparently, the image in question is of Spiegelmen's mother laying nude in the bathtub after she committed suicide in 1968. Whether his mother is depicted as a "naked mouse" or its an actual photograph of her, is not clear. She is referred to as a "woman", but I have yet to see the image in question, so its hard say how offensive or inoffensive it is.

Yes, she is depicted as a mouse and, as I understand, the frame containing the image in the comic book is actually smaller than a postage stamp.

Post it here, and we can all have a look for ourselves. Hopefully, it doesn't violate IIDB's terms of use for showing naughty bits.

If you can find it post it.

I don't want to get in trouble. We need to protect the grown ups here.

From the IIDB Rules:

2. Not to post or transmit unlawful or pornographic information.

You think a drawing of a naked mouse dead in a bathtub would be considered porn???

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Maybe we should call this The "We're Not Racists, We're Snowflakes" Defense.

 

[laughing dog]

I haven't quite figured out the nude picture thing yet. Apparently, the image in question is of Spiegelmen's mother laying nude in the bathtub after she committed suicide in 1968. Whether his mother is depicted as a "naked mouse" or its an actual photograph of her, is not clear. She is referred to as a "woman", but I have yet to see the image in question, so its hard say how offensive or inoffensive it is.

Yes, she is depicted as a mouse and, as I understand, the frame containing the image in the comic book is actually smaller than a postage stamp.

Post it here, and we can all have a look for ourselves. Hopefully, it doesn't violate IIDB's terms of use for showing naughty bits.

If you can find it post it.

I don't want to get in trouble. We need to protect the grown ups here.

From the IIDB Rules:

2. Not to post or transmit unlawful or pornographic information.

You think a drawing of a naked mouse dead in a bathtub would be considered porn???

It is not surprising that someone defending that school board would think so. Or that in a state that allows children to go hunting and kill naked animals, there are people who think children seeing a drawing of a naked mouse is pornographic.

I wonder if they banned National Geographic from the school library, since there is usually an issue every couple of years with nakedness somewhere in it.
You cannot make this stuff up.

 

[SLD]

here are the naked mice:


not sure where the swear words are, or their context.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

here are the naked mice:

View attachment 37020
not sure where the swear words are, or their context.

Unless there are Reich-wingers popping boners over these vague incompletely drawn penises on naked mouse men, I agree this art cannot qualify as porn because of its social and educational value.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

NSFW:

Show

I was reading things on the Internets and trying to search for the picture and I am not sure if this is the final product. What I read is that there was a precursor to the Maus work and that further it was sort of implied that this is a thing that made it into the final, but I cannot be absolutely sure that this is exactly how it was done and why that is generally inconsistent with the anthropomorphic mouse people. Perhaps it was fit in as an epilogue sort of thing since the event is in 1968 as opposed to the Holocaust cats and mice. In any case, I believe for now that is what we're talking about and that hardly anyone has come across this pic.

Here is what I read about it in my searching:

In the process, Art Spiegelman became a master of the formal complexities of the comics syntax. Much of his work published at this time, including Ace Hole, Midget Detective; Nervous Rex, The Malpractice Suite, and an early snippet of Maus, deconstructed the formal and narrative strictures of the comics medium. In one gut-wrenching early work, Prisoner on the Hell Planet, Spiegelman relayed the story of his mother Anja's suicide, which happened when Art was in his early twenties. He included Prisoner in its original form in Maus. The story, depicted in a stark Expressionist style, conveys the anguish, depression,and guilt experienced by so many Holocaust survivors and their children, and serves as an emotional anchor in the larger narrative. Having grappled with this dark legacy from such a young age, Spiegelman felt ready in his thirties to finally tell his parents' story in its entirety.

Emphasis added and that explanation is why I have concluded this early work Prisoner on the Hell Planet is included as sort of an epilogue within the greater work of Maus, but this source could be wrong or I could be misinterpreting it, but I believe it for now...unless proved otherwise.

I will add, any porno aspect to it is overshadowed by other emotional things...as stated the size of the partial nudity relative to the 6.* in. x 9.* in. book is easily less than a postage stamp. That whole piece is insignificant next to the story of the emotions from all the traumas.

So I will say again this does not qualify as pornography or offensive, though it is obviously powerfully, emotionally provocative. It isn't just that this isn't pornography or jerk-off material, this is an artistic memoir from the author who spent a month in a mental hospital and toward the end of that month, his mother's brother died (both Holocaust survivors) which triggered her suicide, showing the lasting effect on mental states of the horrific traumas people went through.

 

[Politesse]

Dude, why don't you download and read the meeting minutes in question, and highlight the sections in it that you think have to do with racism or anti-semitism. Then we can have a discussion. At this point, it seems you and others seem to think that's what this is all about, but my interpretation is its the wrong focus. Its a little community in Tennessee that's got some prudish attitudes...that's about all you can say about the whole story IMHO. Just show me the racism. "Dog whistles" and "personal feelings about rural southern people" don't count.

Are you truly naive enough to believe that this is about mouse nudity? There are a lot of images of animals without clothing on the shelves of any children's library, both illustrated and in photographs. Hundreds of titles, even in a small library. Why, in your opinion, are they concerned about this specific book and not any of the others?

For the time being, I am taking them at their word about their concerns with Maus, as discussed in the meeting minutes. I don't have any reason or evidence to believe there is some other nefarious plot at play here, but if you have something concrete to show me, I will happily change my mind. Innocent until proven guilty, and all that. Do you automatically presume it has something to do with them being bigoted, despite the fact that you know nothing about these people? And as I said, I don't know the context of the nudity(is it really a mouse or a woman, I don't know) in question, so I have refrained with comments on that until I see it.

Yes, I do. When I hear that people are banning books, I make a certain set of assumptions about them based on certain facts in history, and if I learn that their target is arguably the second best known book concerning the Holocaust, that is further evidence of what already seemed likely. "They must be really offended by naked mice" is not a thought that pops into my head, nor would any rational person make such an assumption. Even if they were on a general Crusade against non-graphic cartoon nudity, their choice of which book to target first is telling.

You keep appealing to your own ignorance concerning the contents of the book as though that's some sort of convincing argument, or in any way relevant. It's not, and it's not. Go read the book, it is neither difficult to find nor a particularly long read. Don't worry, there aren't many long words, and there are enough illustrations that you should be able to follow the plot even if you're confused by some of the bigger ones. If you are going to make an argument in favor of state censorship, you owe it to the future victims of the policies you support to at least read the books before putting them on the burn pile.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't want to get in trouble. We need to protect the grown ups here.

From the IIDB Rules:

2. Not to post or transmit unlawful or pornographic information.

Nudity != pornography.

Nudity is permitted so long as either the thread is marked NSFW or the image is behind spoiler tags and marked as NSFW. Consider this post of mine:

The Important Stuff

I'm afraid I may have missed the Event of the Decade... Just saw the last couple seconds of a Tucker Carlson piece. Took a while to figure out WTF he was upset about this time, but further research revealed that he had unusually good cause for his usually unwarranted daily conniption fit. THE...

iidb.org

 

[laughing dog]

The school board made a very stupid decision - that us nefarious enough.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Dude, why don't you download and read the meeting minutes in question, and highlight the sections in it that you think have to do with racism or anti-semitism. Then we can have a discussion. At this point, it seems you and others seem to think that's what this is all about, but my interpretation is its the wrong focus. Its a little community in Tennessee that's got some prudish attitudes...blah blah blah...

Okay, here is the relevant section from the Minutes:
"You see the naked pictures, you see the razor, the blade where the mom is cutting herself. You see her laying in a pool of her own blood. You have all this stuff in here, again, reading this to myself it was a decent book until the end."

I have submitted the picture to the thread.

Let's go over this slowly.

• "naked pictures" -- to be less ambiguous, it's not a photo but a drawing and you see small curved lines used to draw the breasts only, the things that we have all seen as younglings naturally from breastfeeding.
• "...you see the razor." You don't see a razor.
• "...where the mom is cutting herself" - present tense makes it sound present which it wasn't. It showed drawing of mother without showing razor, cuts, or the act, but suicide was implied and explained.
• "laying in a pool of her own blood" - technically pool of blood is on the floor. The bath water may or may not have visible blood or shadow.
• "decent book until the end." - idiot complains about the ending but it's a fucking memoir, not a fictional happy ending the author can lie about. The suicide happened to his Holocaust survivor mother in 1968 after her Holocaust surviving brother died. This isn't a fantasy but about the long term effects of the trauma.

Its a little community in Tennessee that's got some prudish attitudes...that's about all you can say about the whole story IMHO. Just show me the racism. "Dog whistles" and "personal feelings about rural southern people" don't count.

This isn't about characterizing everyone in the south as racist. Nice try! It is about how the Moms 4 Liberty group was so popular in Tennessee and the popular anti-anti-racist movement there was so strong they made legislation about so-called CRT and further in all these cases of book banning there's a statistically non-random connection to their political ideology, like protecting white feelings.

Given the actual complaint is highly counter-factual and given your counters, i.e. porno claims, are also counter-factual in conjunction with the statistical inference of complaining about anti-racist books, it looks pretty suspicious. But even if it's not racist, it's illogical and stupid. And you should be against it or you are inconsistent and tribalist.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Let's go over this slowly.

• "naked pictures" -- to be less ambiguous, it's not a photo but a drawing and you see small curved lines used to draw the breasts only, the things that we have all seen as younglings naturally from breastfeeding.

And it's so minor that my first reaction was what's NSFW about this?

The spoiler tag requirement is simply about the possibility someone is browsing at the office during lunch or the like.

 

[thebeave]

Dude, why don't you download and read the meeting minutes in question, and highlight the sections in it that you think have to do with racism or anti-semitism. Then we can have a discussion. At this point, it seems you and others seem to think that's what this is all about, but my interpretation is its the wrong focus. Its a little community in Tennessee that's got some prudish attitudes...that's about all you can say about the whole story IMHO. Just show me the racism. "Dog whistles" and "personal feelings about rural southern people" don't count.

First rule of Racism Club is never mention Racism Club.

It is funny. Hotel Rwanda was on TCM, and I stopped on it for a short bit. My daughter recognized War Machine, but I told her this was not a fantasy movie about something real, something very bad. As I ponder when my daughter is ready to understand the scope of the Holocaust and genocides at a cerebral level, the question of mouse nudity or naughty language never seems to enter the picture. When she is ready to absorb it, the mouse nudity and naughty language issue is well in the rear view mirror.

If this is nothing but an issue of prude, they are in terrible amount of denial about language and nudity with their teens. Seeing these people voted for Mr. Prude for the White House, I call bullshit on the Prude.

That's nice that you are teaching your daughter about morality and justice via movies. Might I suggest your next father/daughter movie be To Kill a Mockingbird? Its part of the reading list for McMinn County schools. In this movie you will learn about the hideousness of false, unfounded accusations. Kinda like in post #11 where you said, (prior to reading the meeting minute transcripts) "These anti-Semites are trash." And later on in post #26, after you had apparently read them, you made no reference whatsoever about any anti-semitism (because there wasn't any). But you still felt the need to hurl some sort of insult at them, so you said, "At best, a bunch of pussies."

Nice.

 

[thebeave]

Dude, why don't you download and read the meeting minutes in question, and highlight the sections in it that you think have to do with racism or anti-semitism. Then we can have a discussion. At this point, it seems you and others seem to think that's what this is all about, but my interpretation is its the wrong focus. Its a little community in Tennessee that's got some prudish attitudes...blah blah blah...

Okay, here is the relevant section from the Minutes:
"You see the naked pictures, you see the razor, the blade where the mom is cutting herself. You see her laying in a pool of her own blood. You have all this stuff in here, again, reading this to myself it was a decent book until the end."

I have submitted the picture to the thread.

Let's go over this slowly.

• "naked pictures" -- to be less ambiguous, it's not a photo but a drawing and you see small curved lines used to draw the breasts only, the things that we have all seen as younglings naturally from breastfeeding.
• "...you see the razor." You don't see a razor.
• "...where the mom is cutting herself" - present tense makes it sound present which it wasn't. It showed drawing of mother without showing razor, cuts, or the act, but suicide was implied and explained.
• "laying in a pool of her own blood" - technically pool of blood is on the floor. The bath water may or may not have visible blood or shadow.
• "decent book until the end." - idiot complains about the ending but it's a fucking memoir, not a fictional happy ending the author can lie about. The suicide happened to his Holocaust survivor mother in 1968 after her Holocaust surviving brother died. This isn't a fantasy but about the long term effects of the trauma.

Its a little community in Tennessee that's got some prudish attitudes...that's about all you can say about the whole story IMHO. Just show me the racism. "Dog whistles" and "personal feelings about rural southern people" don't count.

This isn't about characterizing everyone in the south as racist. Nice try! It is about how the Moms 4 Liberty group was so popular in Tennessee and the popular anti-anti-racist movement there was so strong they made legislation about so-called CRT and further in all these cases of book banning there's a statistically non-random connection to their political ideology, like protecting white feelings.

Given the actual complaint is highly counter-factual and given your counters, i.e. porno claims, are also counter-factual in conjunction with the statistical inference of complaining about anti-racist books, it looks pretty suspicious. But even if it's not racist, it's illogical and stupid. And you should be against it or you are inconsistent and tribalist.

I asked you to point out where in the meeting minutes there are racist or anti-semitic comments. You did not do that. Instead, out of the 20 pages to choose from, you focused on some minor, fairly inconsequential inconsistencies between what one school board member remembered about the picture and what the picture actually showed. This tells me you got nothin'. You're just blowing steam at this point. And if you read what I wrote, I never claimed I was "characterizing everyone in the south as racist". I said "personal feelings about southern people". I also don't have any "porno claims". I specifically said multiple times in this thread that I was not commenting on the image, because I hadn't seen it. My reference to it being "porno" was (I thought) obviously tongue-in-cheek. Even Jimmy Higgins figured that out. So, don't put words in my mouth.

This whole thread is one of the biggest clusterfucks I've seen in a long time. People insisting that the issue is about the school board seeing "naked mice" or insisting that the image in question was of a naked mouse, when it was quite clearly a woman. And of course, insisting it was all about anti-semitism, but no one can produce any evidence of it. SMH.

 

[marc]

Ok, found the suicide image, and it is not of a mouse.

Spoiler: suicide image