Of Maus And Men - (Alternately: Riding The Moral Panic Into National Divorce)

So the latest thing to trigger the "How Dare You!" response on social media comes to us out of Tennessee. Some local school there has banned a graphic novel called "Maus", which from what I understand tells the story of the author's parents as Jews living under Nazism. The story is told using anthropomorphised animals, mice for Jews and cats for Nazis. The complaint raised? Apparently there might be some spicy language and nudity (the nudity being... how do describe it... 'historical', I guess? Well, from what I'm told it's not intended to be 'pornographic' or 'sexy' if that makes sense.) So that's all I knew about it by the time the below interaction took place.

Obviously NOT a picture from the graphic
novel 'Maus'.

So I have a friend that I haven't spoken to in person for at least 15 years, sadly. He lives on the other side of the city but we were still friends on social media. For the sake of this rant, I'm going to call him Roger.

Now like I said, I haven't spoken to Roger in person for many years. But there was a time when I use to see him and others quite a bit, especially for tabletop games. Roger's a nice guy, affable and smart. And when I say he is a 'nice guy', I don't mean just polite on the surface. Roger is the kind of guy I'm genuinely sure would give the last $5 to his name to someone who was hungry. He's that kind of guy in my opinion.

This whole discussion took place on Facebook. The red bar designates Roger's posts, and green designates mine. I have of course blanked out profiles and names throughout. It started with his post here:

 

Sorry about the tiny pictures. This is 'Blogger', a free product and you get what you pay for. Just pinch and zoom or mousewheel to see the text if you have to.

Now this struck me as somewhat hyperbolic: The idea that the only type of person who would raise a concern about this being in a Tennessee school is a Nazi or some such. Yes, the ONLY reason anyone could ever object to a book, that has some nudity in it, is because they are all Nazis.

Now keep in mind, I'm open to the idea that the person(s) who objected to this might indeed have been Nazis, I guess. But we don't know that, and neither does Neil Gaiman. And neither does Roger. My problem with this is that some dark, anti-Semitic plot to try to conceal the Holocaust is far less likely in a school in Tennessee than someone being prudish about nudity devoid of any context. We are talking about Tennessee, after all, where schools banned "Harry Potter" because, and yes this is the real reason apparently, "it showed that magic could be good instead of just evil."

So I responded. BTW, sorry about the missing text, as I forgot to open the comment up before I took the screen shot:

So for Roger the fact that it got banned on "Holocaust Remembrance Day" is a huge thing for him. I didn't even know that "Holocaust Remembrance Day" was an official day in the US (I seriously doubt the person who brought up the objection knew either).
 

So he's all in on an anti-Semetic conspiracy. But showing government inconsistency as 'proof' of a conspiracy is shaky ground to say the least. Expecting consistency in action requires a greater leap of faith than believing in the Easter Bunny. It's almost as big a leap of faith as thinking all people who have expanded degrees must be smart.

Now Roger is extremely emotionally invested in this idea that the Tennessee schools are a bunch of anti-Semites. This isn't surprising as he's by nature a very passionate person. You can tell when someone is emotionally invested when they take any objections you may have and interpret them as a irrational denial of any and all evidence or as a personal attack, as we see next.

Fuck it. This has already gone way past the single post I made just cautioning we shouldn't just to conclusions, so surprise me. Hit me with your best shot, Roger.

Why do I ask for his #1 thing? Saves time. Whenever anyone is super emotionally invested in something, be it politics, gadgets or even just the latest game they found on Steam, they will gush about every detail and you'll find you're not really swayed by anything and it gets tiresome. If you can get them to give you their #1 thing about the topic, you can quickly decide if you want to go on. If it's lame, you know not much else is going to be worth the time. If it piques your interest... tell me more!

I've heard there is a saying in sales: the first person to mention a specific price loses. I don't know if this is a principle in official debates. I never went to debate camp. Roger, however, actually did debate in school. I'm not sure if he's using those skills here or not, perhaps he didn't want to say a specific thing as his #1 argument because he thought it was a losing setup or something, I have no idea. It wasn't my intention anyway. It was after 11pm at this point and I was wanting to sign off for the night so I wanted to save some time.

I don't know what it is about people who have done formalized debates, but they all seem to have this habit of attempting to 'summarize' everything you say in the most negative light possible. He wants me to make his argument for him, which is weird because I've already said I don't know much about the details and he obviously has read a lot about it. So I tried to explain why I was asking for his #1 reason.

Halle-fucking-lujah! Finally. Ok, I was quite happy about getting this. Hard and fast info, probably the strongest thing he could offer by the sound of it. Fair enough, I dug right it.

You can read this Twitter thread on your own if you like. Long story short, this lady has a couple of general tweets about censorship and notes, importantly, when censorship of materials happens in schools and libraries, it's most often due to people being offended by some perceived explicit material (ie, being prudish). She then goes on to talk about historical censorship over the past near century and notes how such censorship has harmed important causes, and how there have been historical instances of coordinated censorship in the past by organized groups.

Fair enough... but nothing of what she said actually gives any proof that the person(s) who complained about the this book in Tennessee is an anti-Semite. The only way it could be an argument is to make an inference leap, sans evidence, and just assume that because it happened sometimes over the past century it MUST have been the case here too.

 

So yeah, moral panics about banning silly things isn't exactly a new thing. It also doesn't provide any actual proof of anti-Semetism.

But here is where the real kicker came in. I got some actual info on the complaint about the book, namely that we DON'T KNOW WHO EVEN RAISED THE OBJECTION at this point (still the case as of this writing, 2/1/2022).

So even his strongest source admits we have no idea who these people are and what their 'real' motivations are. Which is exactly what I was saying. QED, right?

Here the responses get a little out of sync based on my slow typing. I'm going to paste the images in the order that they were being responded to instead of their timestamp. It's not too much. Also, again apologies for forgetting to expand the post content prior to screencap.

I didn't even know you could be an official 'scholar' of a graphic novel. I didn't know that was a thing. The whole CRT thing was an instant red flag, as was the final line insisting that 'since racism is growing, this is obviously caused by racism.' None of that proves anything about the nature or the motives of the person who complained about this particular book. That's all of his proof: I believe there is a growing racism problem, THEREOFRE the person(s) who complained about this book are obviously anti-Semites. WTF?

You can tell he's starting to get flustered. Now keep in mind my position here. I am making no positive assertion about the people who made the complaint. All I'm saying is that we don't KNOW what they 'really' intended, we just have what they SAID they intended, and their assertion matches with the 'evidence' that his source claims: being offended by nudity. In fact, we really can't know what they 'really' intended, because we don't even have a clue who they are. He's getting flustered that I don't agree that this unknown phantom of a person(s) must be raging anti-Semites because they got offended by a book he likes. The next post and response were posted almost simultaneously, hence they seem a bit out of sync.

I was kind of mistaken to be using the term "Occam's Razor" up to this point, BTW. The more correct idea is "Don't assume a conspiracy when stupidity, laziness or incompetence will suffice as an explanation." There's a term for that, but it escapes me now. Anyway, again, my point is that we don't know this person(s) and so we really have no factual way of inferring their 'real' motivations, and it's just as likely, if not more so, that you're dealing with a prude and not an anti-Semite. So I had to know, does he really think there is no way, no possibility no matter how remote, that the person might not be a Nazi. His response:

I don't agree with Pen Gillette on much, but he had something he said several times, that if someone tells you that they will not consider any questioning of a belief they hold, then that person is fundamentally irrational. I don't have the exact quote so I'm paraphrasing here. Roger here can not even entertain a possibility that his assumption of the nature and motives of a person he knows nothing about could be wrong. Roger is fundamentally irrational.

So the red outline means I wasn't able to post as he unfriended me. Keep in mind, my premise and 'impossible standard' is that we have no evidence that this unknown person is a Nazi, so we should keep an open mind about it. But to a zealot, doubt and open-mindedness is intolerable.

So what does this have to do with 'national divorce'? I think this simply showcases how even minor rifts in opinion are now unbridgeable. One must either be a 100% total, unquestioning believer, or you are being unreasonable. This phenomenon is growing throughout our country, even to the point where disagreement over what is, at the end of the day, a comic book, ends friendships. Balkanization, in my opinion, is inevitable. But hey! I'm willing to entertain the idea that I'm wrong about that.

So what is the answer? I dunno. I think all one can do when faced with such zealotry is the standard:

1. Smile and deescalate and extricate yourself if you can

2. Quarter away

3. Maintain distance

4. Watch their hands

*UPDATE*
My wife mentioned something that I hadn't thought of regarding this, BTW. Tennessee is mostly made up of Evangelical Protestants according to national statistics. Also Evangelical Protestants, in general, are VERY supportive of Israel. Now, that may mean something or not, I don't know. But in my opinion it simply adds more doubt that this unknown person is some kind of Nazi.