Author battles censorship in heartland
Culture wars and cancel culture loom large in the short documentary “The Turning Point: To Be Destroyed” (9 p.m., Sunday, MSNBC). The film follows author and publisher Dave Eggers as he travels to Rapid City, South Dakota, to meet with teachers and school board members after his novel “The Circle” was pulled from the shelves.
As the show’s title tells us, the school board not only removed his novel from circulation, but stamped “to be destroyed” on its copies, dramatically consigning its contents to either the shredder or the flames. Eggers’ book joined four others works, by Alison Bechdel (“Fun Home”), Stephen Chbosky (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower”), Bernardine Evaristo (“Girl, Woman, Other”) and Imbolo Mbue (“How Beautiful We Were”).
The books were consigned for destruction after enraged parents and one police officer chastised school board members for introducing their children to “pornography.” They argued that the curriculum was part of a homosexual agenda that was “turning” their students toward the LGBTQ “lifestyle” through obvious “indoctrination.” Others complained that books were “anti-white,” “cop-hating” or “pro-antifa.” Whatever that means.
While speaking as individuals, much of their rhetoric was scripted by “grassroots” organizations well-funded by so-called conservative activists and religious organizations. It represented Astroturf activism at its most obvious. But they did manage to elect four new board members who subsequently voted to ban Eggers’ novel and the other books.
Upon his visit, Eggers found many in the community eager to meet at an independent bookstore and listen to the students who were horrified to hear that they were being “protected” from the right to read books of their choosing.
Apparently, it never occurred to the “parentsrights” groups that censorship is the best publicity. Suddenly, the forbidden books were the talk of the town. And eventually, voters elected a progressive board member who ran on the platform of protecting teachers and students from the so-called “parents-rights” groups whose ideology was bought and paid for by scheming agitators far outside of the community.
More than one person quoted here decries this chapter in the culture war(s) as something new that “has never happened before.”
History proves otherwise. Public schools have long been seen as places of indoctrination. For much of the 19th century and at least half of the 20th, Catholic organizations lobbied for public support of their parochial schools. They argued that their taxes were being used to support public schools that forced “Protestant” values on students. Public schools were seen as places of antiCatholic indoctrination.
During the McCarthy era, the red-baiting senator’s counsel (and later friend and mentor to Donald Trump), Roy Cohn, took a junket to Europe to terrorize American diplomats and purge American libraries abroad of books he saw as “leftist” and “undesirable.”
Many of the most contentious moments of the civil rights era involved the integration of public schools and the fear that a culture and long-held “values” were being trampled. An entire industry and subculture of private Christian academies were founded to protect students from exposure to integration and multicultural settings.
In the 1970s, Florida activists, most notably orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant, lobbied for all gay teachers to be fired, lest they “turn” impressionable students “that way.”
Bryant’s gay-bashing campaign was defeated at the polls. But not before it inspired a memorable rebuke from New York Times columnist and humorist Russell Baker. Writing about his publicschool education in the 1930s, he quipped that had his teachers’ “lifestyle” been able to transform him, he would have grown up to be a spinster.
Eggers’ film concerns a form of anti-intellectual paranoia of very long standing — one worth taking very seriously, but one that rarely passes the laugh test.