{"id":2029,"date":"2022-02-18T10:49:25","date_gmt":"2022-02-18T16:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/?p=2029"},"modified":"2022-02-18T10:49:25","modified_gmt":"2022-02-18T16:49:25","slug":"on-banning-text-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/?p=2029","title":{"rendered":"On Banning Text Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It must be some sort of rule or law that every twenty years books must be banned, come hell or high water.\u00a0 We are in the twentieth year of the process.<\/p>\n

As you must know, each time a book is considered objectionable, questionably offensive, or outright banned, sales of that book will skyrocket into the orbit of the unavailablesphere<\/em> because of high demand.<\/p>\n

Noticing some of the books that are being brought into question made me feel nostalgic.\u00a0 My freshman year in high school we studied Shakespeare.\u00a0 Have any of these parents who want certain books banned ever read Hamlet?\u00a0 \u201cThroughout the play Hamlet refers to his mother as an incestuous, cold hearted, whore, whose actions are only defined by her sexual desires.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps these overbearing parents read King Lear instead.\u00a0 Talk about misogyny.\u00a0 \u201cwhile Lear\u2019s misogyny manifests in his belief in the inferiority and weakness of women, Hamlet expresses his misogyny through his Freudian confusion of sexuality and womanhood.\u201d\u00a0 In any case, we had discussions in class about these plays.\u00a0 Bear in mind that I attended a Catholic parochial school.\u00a0 The nun teaching English Literature, Sister Isaia, was about 100 years old.\u00a0 At least I thought she might be.\u00a0 And being a nun, she emphasized that \u201cget thee to a nunnery\u201d meant get thee to a whorehouse (experts disagree on this \u2013 I am not an expert).<\/p>\n

We were supposed to have read \u201cThe Merchant of Venice,\u201d but I had a difficult time getting into it.\u00a0 I must have picked something up in class discussion to get a passing grade on this.\u00a0 Again, the story is somewhat anti-Christian.\u00a0 If a Catholic school can teach about this play, how come it wasn\u2019t considered offensive?<\/p>\n

During my senior year at Kuemper, my English class was taught by a nun that was much younger than Sister Isaia.\u00a0 Sister Charla was a young, hip, motivator.\u00a0 One of her projects was for us to study the poetry of the Beatles \u2013 in 1968.\u00a0 Our reading assignment for this year was \u201cThe Good Earth\u201d by Pearl S. Buck.\u00a0 If you\u2019ve ever read this classic, you might ask yourself what is this book doing in a Catholic school?\u00a0 The book is rife with slavery, opium use (or abuse), prostitution, adultery, elder abuse, and greed.\u00a0 One of the daughters was slain after birth because they couldn\u2019t provide for her.\u00a0 The main character builds a separate wing of his home to provide for his concubine.\u00a0 He stows his wife in a small room and leaves her to die.<\/p>\n

I saw \u201cThe Good Earth\u201d at a used book sale and bought it.\u00a0 I realize I didn\u2019t appreciate it enough when I was supposed to read it.<\/p>\n

Should kids be reading these things?\u00a0 Perhaps the classics mentioned above are not visually pornographic, but if the subject matter was appropriate for young Catholic high schoolers in the 1960s, what crosses the line today?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It must be some sort of rule or law that every twenty years books must be banned, come hell or high water.\u00a0 We are in the twentieth year of the process. As you must know, each time a book is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[945,644,946,949,944,947,948,950],"class_list":["post-2029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-hamlet","tag-kuemper-catholic-high-school","tag-misogyny","tag-pearl-s-buck","tag-shakespeare","tag-sister-isaia","tag-the-good-earth","tag-the-merchant-of-venice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2029"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2030,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029\/revisions\/2030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}