More MAGA madness

Whether or not one can write fiction about the Holocaust is a stimulating question. That people can write such books goes without question. Been done, after all, and will continue to be done. Styron's Sophie's Choice creates a moment that, at least for me, has come to epitomize what I can grasp of the horror.

But the question remains. Does any approximation of the bloody madness that was Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz--does any attempt at imagining that madness even come close to the reality of what happened?

It's not difficult to understand why a Holocaust survivor might not want to speak of the experience or why hundreds of thousands wouldn't and didn't. Such silence could stem from sheer revulsion at remembering, but I've long believed a survivor's choice not to speak of the human suffering is created by the how hard it is to "explain," to describe, or to recreate something so unimaginable and inhuman.

Can it be done?--is a wonderful academic question. Simply to think about it expands the limitations of our understanding of what happened, and in Germany itself--how a nation of thoughtful people could buy into a madman's recipes for inhumanity. It's an academic question because Holocaust stories have been and still are being created about that horror, lots of them, today by people who weren't there, including me. 

Maybe one of the most significant classroom events of my teaching life happened in 1995, fifty years after the end of World War II, fifty years after the liberation of concentration camps all over Europe. I created an ad hoc, night course, "The Literature of the Holocaust," that met once a week. We entertained a variety of speakers and survivors, and invited community participation. 

It's fair to say that one of the books became the class's favorite--Maus, by Art Spiegelman, a book difficult to describe because its genius seems sheer impossibility. It's a comic book. Art Spiegelman, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, wrote--and illustrated--a comic book about the Holocaust.

Impossible as it sounds, it works so well that Maus won a Pulitzer in 1992, when scholars far more distinguished than I am awarded it the nation's top literary prize. 

Last week, Tennessee's McMinn County School Board voted 10-0 to ban Art Spiegelman's Maus. 10-0. 10-0. 10-0. Read it and weep.

Is Maus good reading material for a first-grader? Of course not. Third? Maybe a few. Fifth? We're getting close. But to ban Maus from McMinn County Schools is a despicable act too reminiscent of Nazi Germany itself, where book burning was a national sport. 

There's a movement afoot in this country that's as dangerous as it is hateful, as wrong-headed as it is vindictive, and it's done in the name of moral values, of purging schools of evil, of keeping things pure and clean and good, of "making America great again."

That movement is not only stupid, it's insane, and it's perpetuated by our own political leaders. It's madness, and, in the name of good, it's evil. 

 I hope and pray we somehow get through this madness.