Monday
When do we start attaching the word “fascist” to America’s authoritarian Christians? From jailing a woman for a self-induced abortion (although the charges have been dropped) to attacking school libraries for possessing The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Handmaid’s Tale and Cider House Rules to firing teachers for purportedly teaching Critical Race Theory to supporting Donald Trump’s coup attempt to, now, attacking public libraries, there appears to be no limit to how far these people will go. If democracy obstructs their vision of establishing God’s kingdom on earth, then goodbye democracy. One of the latest casualties of their efforts is Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, one of my children’s favorite books when they were growing up.
A Josh Dawsey article in the Washington Post about a Texas library tells the story. Apparently someone wrote to the Llano library complaining of “pornographic filth”:
“It came to my attention a few weeks ago that pornographic filth has been discovered at the Llano library,” wrote Bonnie Wallace, a 54-year-old local church volunteer. “I’m not advocating for any book to be censored but to be RELOCATED to the ADULT section. … It is the only way I can think of to prohibit censorship of books I do agree with, mainly the Bible, if more radicals come to town and want to use the fact that we censored these books against us.”
On her list of 60 objectionable books were books
about transgender teens, sex education and race, including such notable works as Between the World and Me, by author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, an exploration of the country’s history written as a letter to his adolescent son. Not long after, the county’s chief librarian sent the list to Suzette Baker, head of one of the library’s three branches.
“She told me to look at pulling the books off the shelf and possibly putting them behind the counter. I told them that was censorship,” Baker said.
In subsequent action, Judge Ron Cunningham, who heads the governing body of Llano County, took it upon himself to become an official censor:
Cunningham, a two-term judge who was once part of the security detail for then-Gov. George W. Bush, acted quickly on the complaints. He strode into the main library a few weeks later and took two books off the shelves — Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen— because some parents had objected to the main character in the story, a little boy, appearing nude — and It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health, a sex education book for parents and children ages 10 and up, that includes color illustrations of the human body and sex acts.
He also ordered librarians to pause buying new material and to pull “any books with photos of naked or sexual conduct regardless if they are animated or actual photos,” emails reviewed by The Washington Post showed.
According to the Post article, Cunningham had previously questioned “whether public libraries were even necessary.”
When my three sons were small, we read Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen so many times that we all have lines we still remember and will quote at a moment’s notice. These include “Milk in the batter, milk in the batter, we make cake, and nothing’s the matter,” and “I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me. I’m Mickey!” The story is a wild dream in which Mickey one night falls out of his bed and out of his clothes, landing in the batter of the night cooks. Just as they’re about to push him into the oven, he fashions an airplane out of the dough (which I guess makes him a “doughboy” to make the World War I pun), flies up to the top of a giant milk bottle, and delivers the milk the bakers need.
So yes, he’s naked for parts of the book, which is part of the pleasure. If you’ve had kids, you know there are times when, early in life, they love to run around naked. It’s a sensuous book, filled with touch, taste, sights, smells, and wonderfully rhythmic language. Mickey is also a confident kid who, after escaping being devoured by someone else’s project, asserts his autonomy at the end: he crows like Peter Pan atop the milk bottle before sliding down and back into bed, having made everyone happy. It’s wild and crazy Sendak, on a par with Where the Wild Things Are and Outside Over There.
Here’s the thing: my kids, now parents themselves, were not corrupted by the book. They are the kind of people you want running your businesses (Darien) and teaching your kids (Toby). Between them, they have five children of their own, to whom they have read In the Night Kitchen and who are themselves well on their way to developing into integrous individuals. The only sickos around are those repressed fundamentalists who see perversion everywhere.
Oh, and guess what. Suzette Baker, the head Llano librarian who warned about censorship, has been fired. Meanwhile, this has happened:
“God has been so good to us … please continue to pray for the librarians and that their eyes would be open to the truth,” Rochelle Wells, a new member of the library board, wrote in an email. “They are closing the library for 3 days which are to be entirely devoted to removing books that contain pornographic content.”
[Lelia] Green Little [member of a local anti-censorship group] said little is known about what administrators did during the time the libraries were closed. The book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a work about systemic racism by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson, has mysteriously vanished, and the fate of several other works remains unknown, she said.
We are currently witnessing, in Vladimir Putin, a graphic example of how the authoritarian mindset works: it will go for Chechnya and then Georgia and then Belorussia and then Crimea and then the Donbas and then Kyiv and Mariupol and Odessa. Fascists push and, when they sense a lack of resistance, push some more. In America, fundamentalist Christians may start with critical race theory and transgender individuals and abortion but, before long, they are attacking any mention of America’s slave past and all LGBTQ rights and birth control itself. They will use the system when it benefits them and violate the system when it doesn’t. They, no more than Putin, can be placated because, as they see it, they answer to a higher call than the American Constitution and the needs of a multicultural democracy.
Public schools and public libraries are just the opening salvo. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.