No wonder I'm warped

So the tighty righties are at it again:

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) - A central Missouri high school drama teacher whose spring play was canceled after complaints about tawdry content in one of her previous productions will resign rather than face a possible firing.

"It became too much to not be able to speak my mind or defend my students without fear or retribution,'' said Fulton High School teacher Wendy DeVore.

DeVore's students were to perform Arthur Miller's "The Crucible,'' a drama set during the 17th Century Salem witch trials.

But after a handful of Callaway Christian Church members complained about scenes in the fall musical "Grease'' that showed teens smoking, drinking and kissing, Superintendent Mark Enderle told DeVore to find a more family-friendly substitute.

DeVore chose Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream,'' a classic romantic comedy with its own dicey subject matter, including suicide, rape and losing one's virginity.

DeVore, 31, a six-year veteran teacher, said administrators told her that her annual contract might not be renewed.

"Maybe I need to find a school that's a better match,'' she said.

Or maybe people in the United States need to get a fucking clue and throw the theocrats out of office. These people control both houses of Congress, the White House, whole swathes of the federal judiciary, and far more local government entities--including school boards--than I like to think about. Yet as Mustang Bobby noted earlier today, to hear them talk you'd think they were "...two steps away from being thrown into concentration camps by the baby-killers, the secular humanists, and the queers."

I call Bu$hit. Arthur Miller's The Crucible is one of the classic American plays. Ironically, Miller wrote it as a critique of the Red-baiting McCarthy era. So not only does the play overtly deal with a significant event in American history, about which our high school students should definitely be learning--especially the tighty-righty types who may, if not shown the error of their ways, grow up to re-enact it--but it also critiques another highly significant event in American history, also one that our students should be learning about, even though it may disquiet the Dear Leader and his minions, who daily look more and more like the late and unlamented (except for Ann Coulter, whose opinion does not count) senator from Wisconsin.

I pity the Bard, too. Four hundred years after his death, and people are still trying to censor his plays. Another classic in the canon, too. If it weren't so deadly serious, this would almost be funny. These are the same people, I would be willing to bet real money, who are up in arms that their kids have to go to school and read "Eskimo poetry" (to steal a line from Alan Sorkin's The West Wing), instead of "the classics." But they don't want their kids reading the classics, either, because they're full of smut and innuendo and people having sex out of wedlock, killing each other, worshipping other gods, or what have you. Can't have that in the schools, or our kids will grow up to be Jeebus-hating godless secular humanists, and probably queer, too.

Guess that explains what happened to me, then. Because here's a partial list of what I remember reading--either voluntarily or as assigned material--from my junior-high school years through high school:

• Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Among the more popular of the Holocaust-denier genre. Checked it out of the public library, read it, and was appalled.)
• Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account (Also checked it out of the public library, and one of the reasons I was appalled when I read Butz's drivel.)
• Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. (The Odyssey was assigned reading in high school, but by that time I already owned three different dog-eared translations, all of which I'd read multiple times.)
• Dante's Inferno (Required reading in high school, but I'd already read Ciardi's translation of the whole of the Divine Comedy many times. And Ciardi doesn't blush at accurately translating Dante's coarse Italian, as when one of the demons in Hell "made a trumpet of his ass," Inferno xxi.139)
• Beowulf (Required reading in high school. Dark tale of drinking and murder with overtones of bestiality, don't'cha know.)
• Shakespeare. (I distinctly remember having to read all or parts of Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar my freshman year in high school. May have been more, but those two stand out. And if I'd had time for Senior Humanities, we'd have definitely read more in that class.)
• Sophocles, Antigone. (Required reading my freshman year of high school. Can't remember if we also read Oedipus Rex at that time, or if that came later.)
• Tolstoy, Воина и Мир (In translation, of course. Picked that as my "Victorian novel" for that unit in Junior Humanities. I'd been trying to read it for some years by that time, but this was the first time I ever got all the way through it. Wrote my first 25-page paper on the novel, too: something else more people should have to do in high school. Eight hundred-odd pages, chock full of sex and death and revolutionary ideas.)
• Tennyson, Idylls of the King (Required for Junior Humanities. Illicit love affairs, illegitimate children, murder, black magic.)
• Herman Melville, Billy Budd (Gets my vote for the single most boring piece of fiction ever written. Dark tale of homosexual lust and murder. Required for Sophomore Humanities.)
• James Clavell, Shogun and Tai-Pan. (A friend of mine turned me on to Clavell's writing my freshman year in high school. Chock full of adultery, promiscuity, drugs, murder, chicanery of all kinds, hostility to Christianity, yada, yada, yada. Oh, and Scott and I also used to play D&D together: for which I'm sure we'll go straight to hell. Not.)
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (Required reading, in the original French, for French IV my senior year in high school.
• Albert Camus The Stranger. (Required for Junior Humanities. I have a vague recollection of also having to read The Plague, but that may have been in college. I know I had to read it in French for a college course I took as a student-at-large in French literature.)
• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Required reading for Sophomore Humanities. I hated it. Also had to read "A Rose for Emily" my freshman year. That was easier to get through, but still weird.)
• The Epic of Gilgamesh (Required reading for Junior Humanities. Babylonian creation myths. Need I say more?)
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Один ден' Ивана Денисовича (In translation, for an informal elective in Russian in the sixth grade.)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tanglewood Tales (My folks got me the book for Christmas, I believe, one year. Retellings of classic Greek and Roman myths.)
• Edith Hamilton, Mythology (The classic popular work on mythology. Bought it, I believe, from the public library's remainder shelf.)
• Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich and the Spandau diaries. (Got one for a Christmas or birthday present, bought the other one myself.)
• Dennis Drew and Jonathan Drake, Boys for Sale: A Sociological Study of Boy Prostitution (Stumbled onto this one in the university library stacks while browsing for materials on homosexuality. I think I was in junior high at the time. Fascinating, but repellent study of the boys, but even more so of their clients.)
• Something on chemical and biological warfare (may have been Sy Hersh's Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal, but I can't swear to that; checked it out of the public library--repeatedly. Once because it caught my interest, and subsequently when I was using it for reference in a dungeon I was creating for D&D.)
• Gray's Anatomy (Bought it on a French Club field trip to Chicago my sophomore or junior year in high school. Plates and plates of pictures of naughty bits.)

I'm starting to grasp for additional titles, so I think I'll leave the list there. Obviously, I read widely, both on my own and for my classwork. No one ever told me that these were "dangerous" books, no one ever tried to shield me from the fact that people have sex, frequently with people to whom they are not married or who are married to other people. No one worried that I'd convert to paganism if I read the Iliad. (Of course, in this time frame I hadn't yet technically become a Christian, since I was not baptized until my senior year in high school.) These were just things I needed to know, or know about, because they played some part in Western civilization: the civilization from which American democracy sprang and within which it is alleged still to operate (though personally, especially these days, I have some doubts on that score).

On the whole, I don't think I've turned out so badly, either. "Humanist," hell yes--but in the original meaning of that word, as someone who is a student of human affairs or human nature, and also as someone who is interested in literature and the classics. "Secular," yes, where and when appropriate. Just like the Framers of our Constitution, who felt that religion should be a private matter between the individual citizen and his or her god(s), not something the state should be involved in. Sue me. "Godless," not hardly. "Queer," well, you got me there. But I guarantee you it wasn't anything I read.

I wonder how many of the tighty righties have ever seen Disney's Beauty and the Beast? Because there's a very apt line in one of the songs from that movie that fits them and their ideology to a "T":

We don't like what we don't understand: In fact, it scares us.

To which I say, "Get over yourselves, girlfriends. It's a brave new world out here in the reality-based community. The water's warm, and the libraries are chock-full of good things to read. C'mon in!" Or if not, then keep your narrow-minded prejudices to yourselves and get them the hell away from my books.

Comments

[Mustang Bobby]

My last theatre teaching job was at a private school. When I was hired I was told that the spring musical would be Grease. Fine with me, I thought, and to complete the year's visit to the 1950's, I decided to do Picnic by William Inge since a lot of the same types of characters are in the two shows: the Goody-Two-Shoes prom queen, the roguish outsider, the angst-ridden adolescents, and the spinster school teachers. When I got to final dress and the assistant headmaster saw that there was smoking and drinking and kissing in the play, I was told to remove it. I refused, saying A) it would violate the licensing agreement that specifically prohibits alterations to the script, and B) it would ruin the play; the entire second and third act rely on the smoking and drinking and kissing. So I had to put a "warning" in the program, and I still got a stiff talking-to after the show (which, by the way, was a huge hit) from the head of the school who labeled himself as a "good Christian conservative." But when we did Grease five months later, the smoking, drinking, and pregnancy scare were perfectly acceptable because "it's an old favorite and everybody loves Grease." I got dizzy from the hypocrisy, and frankly, I was relieved when my contract was not renewed.

By the way, if you know Inge and Picnic, there's a whole subtext of Brokeback Mountain in the relationship between Alan, the rich college boy, and Hal, his well-muscled ne'er-do-well frat brother. Needless to say I did not explore that with my 17-year-old actors.

[Michael]

I'm not familiar with Inge or with Picnic, alas. My drama knowledge is more oriented toward the classics. (I wrote my Colorado M.A. thesis on "The Role of the Chorus in the Eumenides of Aeschylus." I argued they should be considered the play's "tragic hero," since they're the only ones to undergo the classic Aristotelian περιπετεία.)

[Mustang Bobby]

You ought to catch up with Inge. He wrote four plays that basically represent his best work: Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic, Bus Stop, and Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Aside from pretty good characters and drama, Inge also created an archetype character of the well-built young man as the object of attention and affection who is a catalyst for the drama. I did a paper for a playwriting conference called Boots, Jeans, T-Shirts, and Biceps: William Inge's Ideal Male. It was a fun topic to research, trust me. And presenting it in front of an audience in rural Kansas was also, uh, interesting.

[Michael]

Sounds a little bit like Clifford Odets. Was Inge also a member of the (closeted) tribe?

[Mustang Bobby]

In a word, yes, and never came to terms with it. Someday I'll have to tell you the whole story about growing up in a little town in Kansas where social mores and religious oppression made his life miserable.

[NTodd]

I read the Bible when I was a kid. Fucked me up but good.

[andante]

My youthful reading list gives great insight into my personality. I read a bunch of stuff back in the day, but my chief memory is a lot of Mad magazines.