I have not posted a new blog since June of last year primarily because no one neither wants to nor cares to hear what I have to say. But, sometimes there comes a time when I have to open my big mouth. I chose to do it on my blog for a number of reasons. The main reason is that since relatively no one reads my blog I am shielded from an onslaught of attacks. (Rational responses are always welcome.) I have accounts on FB, Twitter and Instagram. I hesitate to use any of those forms of communication because by sharing thoughts on those venues you place yourself in the wild, Wild West where everyone shoots their mouth off even though their brains might be loaded with blanks.
I feel safe here on the Yellow Brick Road in a world that is so divided on everything. I was raised and educated on the idea that there is much more to an argument than arguing. Where I come from my intellectual training an argument is defined as “a reason or the reasoning given for or against a matter under discussion — compare evidence, proof. 2 : the act or process of arguing, reasoning, or discussing especially : oral argument.”
Today most arguments are reduced to arm wrestling where a winner has to be declared. Today with a plethora of venues (television, radio, podcasts, etc.) for voicing opinions we are at a point where one side hears what another side says (rarely do they listen because that would involve objective thinking) and gleefully jumps all over it for the sole purpose of exploiting not just the message, but the messenger. It’s what I call “got ya” warfare.
Unfortunately, many people who have a platform where opinions are the soup du jour, fail to understand that their opinions sound like facts. That’s where we run into a problem. Dressing up an opinion to make it sound like a fact is dangerous, especially when the supposed fact is actually not factual, especially when many listeners only want to hear what they want to hear.
I have no political bias or ax to grind. I would never align myself politically to anything. I, as I already mentioned, believe in a rational and reasoned approach to any argument. If after applying such I find the argument to be faulty, I will make a statement based on the evidence in the argument.
Now to the meat of this blog. It’s about Whoopi Goldberg’s stumble on the Yellow Brick Road. Far too many people are running through the streets of banal public opinion cheering that the wicked witch is dead. Most of those people have no “reason” to hold the opinions they hold. They are ecstatic because the “right” nabbed someone on the “left.” They want blood. They are not satisfied that Ms. Goldberg was placed on a two-week leave of absence. They want her out.
I am not a cheerleader for Ms. Goldberg. While I might not always be on the same line of the same page she’s on, I find many of her arguments to be reasoned and rational. There are times when I think she has dressed up an opinion to make it look like a fact, but even then I don’t believe she’s gone over the edge.
She has been castigated for remarks she said in regard to a segment about the banning of the graphic novel “Maus.” The hair on the backs of Ms. Goldberg’s enemies only stood up when she declared that the Holocaust was not about race. It was about man’s inhumanity against man. It was white against white, as she stated. (Kudos to Joy Behar who did interject that it was about race since the Jews had been identified by the Nazis as a race.)
Ms. Goldberg’s “opinion” on that matter moved over to the area of fact because if you follow her comments you will see that she was making statements of facts…based on what she believed to be true.
That’s what the maelstrom is all about. Her vocal critics are making claims that she minimized the Holocaust by “dismissing” it as a white-only issue. Since the show was live and the segments on the View are limited to just so much time, there was no opportunity to introduce the elements of real argumentation.
But you know what? We all missed something. The segment was not really about or positioned to be about the Holocaust. The segment was supposed to be about two school districts that had removed some books from either a required reading list or from the list of books available for teachers to use.
I would bet that if you asked Ms. Goldberg’s critics what books were used for the segment, they wouldn’t be able to tell you. Well, I will. The two books used in the segment were “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Maus.”
Here’s some background on the reading controversy regarding those two books:
A Seattle-area school board voted to remove “To Kill a Mockingbird” from student reading lists this week, just days before news surfaced that a Tennessee district had, earlier this month, banned the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the holocaust, “Maus,” from its curriculum.
According to the Seattle Times, the Mukilteo School Board voted unanimously Monday night to remove Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” from the required reading list for ninth graders while still allowing for teachers to choose to teach the classic novel to students.
The board acted after months of discussion among teachers, parents and students, and in reaction to concerns over racism in the classic novel, first published in 1960.
In the Times report, John Gahagan, a board member since 2011, stressed that members were not banning the book, just removing it from the list of required reading. He said a 20-member instructional committee of teachers, parents and community members had voted by a nearly two-thirds margin to no longer have the book be required reading.
Gahagan told the Times he reread the novel, about a white lawyer’s efforts to defend a Black man wrongly accused of rape, last week for the first time in 50 years.
“It’s a very difficult book and a lot of thorny subjects are raised, and we felt that some teachers may not feel comfortable guiding their students through it,” Gahagan said. “It deals not only with racism, but it reflects a time when racism was tolerated.
“Atticus Finch, of course, is in everyone’s memory the great hero of the book, but in fact he was kind of tolerant of the racism around him. He described one of the members of the lynch mob as a good man.”
Unless you have been living under that proverbial rock, you should know that more and more parents are chiming in on what should and what should not be taught in schools. I believe parents do have a right to know what the curriculum includes or doesn’t include. I get scared when either side (the school’s curriculum committee or the parents) has an agenda that does not include open-minded thinking. (Here’s the rub. Open-mindedness has unfortunately become synonymous with liberal or far-left thinking. That’s not what it means. A mind that is open is prepared to let in new or different ideas. It does not reject an idea just because it does not fit a rigid measurement. I am also of the “school of thinking” that just because something is hip and current, does not mean it has to be embarrassed without some evaluation. Again, reason and rationality need to be part of the discussion.)
“It’s a very difficult book and a lot of thorny subjects are raised.” That’s a mouthful. Education should be if not difficult, at least challenging. I tell my college students they need to read things that make your hair hurt.
Is “To Kill a Mockingbird” appropriate reading for a third-grade, a fifth grader, a seventh-grader? Forget content for a minute and focus on what reading level the student is at the moment. That should be considered. And then consider the content. Is the student capable of understanding the content as written. Is the content out of context, simply meaning does the student have any idea what the story is all about? Does the reader have to know the “back story” to the story to understand it?
I read Mockingbird in 1964 when I was a sophomore in high school. I loved the book on many levels. As literature it was wonderful. As a lesson it gave me a lot of food for thought. It made me think. (That same year we read A Catcher in the Rye. One parent objected to reading a book her son told her was called Catch her in the Raw.)
Mockingbird was the first book Ms. Goldberg and the members of the View discussed. The racial nature of the book opened up Ms. Goldberg’s emotional spigot. She has had to deal with racism her entire life. Just the way she talked about removing such a classic book dealing with a topic that should be discussed in schools…and elsewhere, was very disturbing for Ms. Goldberg (as it should have been because once you “remove” such a book from a reading list, required or otherwise, it is so easy to remove “similar” books).
In the Goldberg story all over the news, not one person has even mentioned Mockingbird or that the real segment was about removing and banning books.
I could tell Ms. Goldberg’s heart was racing. When the discussion moved to discussing Maus, I could see Ms. Goldberg was still digesting the Mockingbird controversy.
Here’s the background on Maus:
On Jan. 10, the McMinn County (Tennessee) School Board decided to remove Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” from its curriculum, citing “inappropriate language” and an illustration of a nude woman as the reason for banning the book, according to the board’s meeting minutes. The nude woman is drawn as a mouse in the graphic novel in which Jews are drawn as mice and the Nazis are drawn as cats.
Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for the work that tells the story of his Jewish parents living in 1940s Poland and depicts him interviewing his father about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.
In an interview, Spiegelman told CNBC he was “baffled” by the school board’s decision and called the action “Orwellian.”
“It’s leaving me with my jaw open. Like, ‘What?’” he said.
Instructional supervisor Julie Goodin, a former history teacher, told The Associated Press she thought the graphic novel was a good way to depict a horrific event.
“It’s hard for this generation, these kids don’t even know 9/11, they were not even born,” Goodin said. “Are the words objectionable? Yes, there is no one that thinks they aren’t. But by taking away the first part, it’s not changing the meaning of what he is trying to portray.”
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which does not play a role in McMinn County, noted the timing of the news on Twitter. Weingarten, who is Jewish, pointed out that Thursday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“Yes it is uncomfortable to talk about genocide, but it is our history and educating about it helps us not repeat this horror,” Weingarten said.
The U.S. Holocaust Museum tweeted that “Maus has played a vital role in educating about the Holocaust through sharing detailed and personal experiences of victims and survivors.
“Teaching about the Holocaust using books like Maus can inspire students to think critically about the past and their own roles and responsibilities today.”
Back to Ms. Goldberg. The View team immediately shot down the idea that the book was being “removed” because of questionable graphics. I believe using that as a reason was just a smokescreen for the real reason, i.e. teaching about the Holocaust in schools.
With two books being used in the same context, Ms. Goldberg’s initial comment about Maus not being about race came about, I think, because as a Black woman who knows about race in America, wasn’t able to apply the same term (race) when talking about Maus. Instead of supporting her understanding of race, I only wish Ms. Goldberg had asked the question: “As a Black American, is Maus really about race?” Her response in the form of a question would have moved the conversation into a broader understanding of what race is and what it was. (Coming from Irish stock, I am well aware that the British considered the Irish to be an inferior race with no hope of ever joining the “pure” white race of civilized people. For well over 300 years the Irish were demonized and this subject of genocide.)
The Nazis considered themselves a superior race and that Jews belonged to a “race” of inferior subjects. So, the Holocaust was about “race” in a sense that might have escaped Ms. Goldberg.
BUT…to nail Ms. Goldberg to the wall without taking a wider “view” of the segment is, in my opinion, wrong.
At 73-years of age, I have no reason to believe aliens will ever come to earth looking for intelligent life. Social media has the power to unite us. But instead of using it to our advantage, we have used it as a wedge to divide us even further than we are. The egg we call home has been cracked. I only hope that we don’t suffer the same fate as did Humpty Dumpty who could not be put together.
While this blog post might not be read by anybody, I needed to vent.
Along The Yellow Brick Road 