Frank T. Pool

A dear friend sent me a t-shirt emblazoned with a stack of books, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Brave New World,” “Of Mice and Men,” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” At the top was the phrase, “I’m with the banned.”

Book banning is in the news a lot these days, and that’s too bad. Rising polarization, everybody seemingly angry all the time, and self-righteous aggressiveness has led to calls for restricting what can be read by young people.

Considering that nationwide reading scores have been in decline, with the steepest drop-offs for the lowest-achieving students, you might think that maybe we would be happy if kids were actually reading books instead of playing on their infernal cell phones. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I will grant that not all books are appropriate for all students. Sometimes it’s merely a matter of intellectual maturity. A middle-school library doesn’t really need to have “The Critique of Pure Reason” or an unabridged “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” on its shelves. These works are beyond the abilities of 13-year-olds.

The word “inappropriate,” an elastic word if there ever was one, seems to be applied to works dealing with human sexuality and racial identity. Both the left and right have their own targets and techniques, with the result that the engage in asymmetrical cultural warfare. “Age-appropriate” is even more vague. I guess you know it when you see it.

Discussions of book “banning” suffer from a lack of clear definition. Publishers and booksellers are not banned from promoting and selling books. The term is also used when schools choose to take some works off the required reading list, as well as to remove them from library shelves. It’s a sloppy and emotional designation most of the time.

Yet sometimes the word seems to fit. In a very thoughtful essay last week in the New York Times, “This Summer, I Became the Book-Banning Monster of Iowa,” Bridgette Exman, an assistant superintendent in charge of curriculum, writes about trying to comply with a new law that bans books from libraries and classrooms if they depict sex. The state education agency, of course, gave no guidance. Faced with an overwhelming number of books to review, she used ChatGPT to ask if they had sex scenes.

Some of these books included Jodi Picoult’s “Nineteen Minutes,” Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple,” Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Some of these books depicted sexual violence, like Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

I read the Picoult book a few months ago to see what the fuss was about. It deals with a school shooting, and also has a teenage couple who have sex. Oh, my gosh! Who would have imagined? I have it on good authority that teenagers had sex even in my time, and have less of it nowadays. But it’s banned in Iowa.

In Picoult’s book, what looked like a perfect young relationship turned out to be anything but that. In a time when pornography is available on teenagers’ smartphones, why is it suddenly so urgent that kids not read about sex?

I’ve also taught “The Handmaid’s Tale” on several occasions. Once I had a parent calling me to complain about her child reading the book. I said, “Oh, are you talking about the scene on page 109?” (In writing this, I looked up the page in a copy signed by Margaret Atwood and dedicated to me and my students.)

That’s where the narrator submits to sex with The Commander. “This is not recreation, even for The Commander. It is serious business.” When the mom couldn’t talk about that scene, I realized she hadn’t read the book. I asked her, “And how does reading this harm your child in any way?” Ultimately she backed down.

It’s hardly the kind of passage that would inspire a young girl to rush out and do the wild thing with her boyfriend. But it’s banned from schools in Iowa.

I guess one of my other favorites, Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” would also be banned. I taught it a couple of decades ago in my Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate English classes. We used the cheap Dover edition of selected tales, and I instructed my students to write in the table of contents, next to the Miller’s Tale, that they were FORBIDDEN TO READ! that one.

It’s a story about adultery and swiving, and flatulence, and a red-hot poker. We never talked about it in class, and my admonition was ironic and humorous. I never heard a peep out of parents, though one wrote a long letter to the principal commending me for having students read classic literature. But this classic of medieval English literature is not age-appropriate in Iowa.

Although this dumbing-down of literature has been coming from legislatures controlled by the ideologues of the political right, the leftists have their own beef with books.

I once got into a long argument at a party with my department chair about “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” She said it shouldn’t be taught. For one thing, she said, it didn’t develop the character of Jim, the escaping slave. I pointed out that he’s not the central character, and besides, nowadays a white author trying to get inside his head would be accused of “racist appropriation.”

But the biggest reason was the use of one word, a word in common use at the time, the word the slaves themselves used, but which has become taboo to utter. I never could get a straight answer about why the word in that context was objectionable. It just was. (This is also the same teacher, who when I came into the lunch room fuming about how only three of my advanced seniors even knew what the Dred Scott decision of 1857 was, she admitted that she too didn’t know.)

I’ve called this current intolerance asymmetric culture warfare. The left and the right go about suppressing undesirable opinions in different ways. Put most simply, conservatives take control of state mandates through legislative action, and illiberal leftists rely on publishers, online agitation, shaming, and sometimes school boards to get undesirable books, like John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” or Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” out of the classroom. (I’ve taught both of those.)

The organization Pen America, dedicated to free speech and free literature since 1922, has issued a long report, “Booklash,” on the ways that “progressives” inhibit freedom to read and to write. That’s a good subject for another column.

Lots of books don’t belong in the classroom, but taking them off the library shelves is an assault on liberty. Yes, I’m with the banned.