A informational supplement from the Department of Unintentionally Subversive Hilarity:
A Caney Creek High School dad is fired up because the Conroe Independent School District uses the book “Fahrenheit 451” as classroom reading material.
Alton Verm, of Conroe, objects to the language and content in the book. His 15-year-old daughter Diana, a CCHS sophomore, came to him Sept. 21 with her reservations about reading the book because of its language.
“The book had a bunch of very bad language in it,” Diana Verm said. “It shouldn’t be in there because it’s offending people. … If they can’t find a book that uses clean words, they shouldn’t have a book at all.”
Alton Verm filed a “Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials” Thursday with the district regarding “Fahrenheit 451,” written by Ray Bradbury and published in 1953. He wants the district to remove the book from the curriculum.
“It’s just all kinds of filth,” said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read “Fahrenheit 451.” “The words don’t need to be brought out in class. I want to get the book taken out of the class.”
He looked through the book and found the following things wrong with the book: discussion of being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, “dirty talk,” references to the Bible and using God’s name in vain. He said the book’s material goes against their religions beliefs. The Verms go to Grand Parkway Church in Porter.
Well, of course not. It’s filth.
I’m also troubled by the suggested replacement:
Diana Verm and another classmate decided to read an alternative book. They leave the classroom when the class reads or discusses “Fahrenheit 451,” she said. The two students were given “Ella Minnow Pea” by Mark Dunn because it shares common themes with “Fahrenheit 451,” said Chris Hines, CISD assistant superintendent for secondary education.
No. Ella Minnow Pea is about censorship:
The story, such as it is, is an epistolary dialogue, mostly between the eponymous character and her cousin Tassie, but littered throughout with notes and notifications from various other family members and neighbours, all residing on the Pitcairn-like island of Nollop (formally Utoppiana), which is located twenty-one miles to the southeast of Charlestown, North Carolina.
The islanders pride themselves on a sense of community and the apparent equality in which all live their lives, until, that is, the cenotaph bearing the pangram attributed to the island’s favoured son, Nevin Nollop, loses one of its letters. The novel begins with a letter from Ella to Tassie, in which Ms Minnow Pea informs her cousin of this news. It doesn’t take long for the island’s mysterious Council to decree a ban on the use of the fallen letter. (‘Z’ being the particular letter in question.)
Whilst Ella sees this development as an exciting challenge, inaugurating a new era for the island, the more savvy Tassie sees through the new law and rejects it for the totalitarianism it is.
Of course it doesn’t take long for more letter-bearing tiles to begin dropping from the monument, and soon people are abandoning the island in their droves for the promised land that is the USA. (Funnily enough no mention made of Green Cards or work permits at this stage.) The Council start requisitioning the abandoned property and it’s not long before the misuse of certain letters of the alphabet results in a number of floggings, imprisonments and yes, even executions, all the more disturbing when juxtaposed with the jollity of the storytelling.
But it’s not the same thing. First of all, Ella Minnow Pea’s characters are censored out of a kind of alphabet fetish. Censorship does represent a totalitarian level of control over the citizenry, but not in quite the same way. Farenheit 451 is censorship of books as books because the authority in question believes–correctly–that literature is a way to transmit ideas. Farenheit 451 contains people who suffer and die in order to defend ideas. Book-burning is a means to suppress free thought, not an end in and of itself. The moral of Ella Minnow Pea is, “We need language in all its vibrant fullness to express ourselves.” Ella Minnow Pea reverses the cause-effect relationship. The moral of Farenheit 451 is, “Censorship is the suppression of thought in all its vibrant fullness and is therefore evil of the lowest order; people who censor you do so because they don’t want you to think for yourself.” I can easily see why the Verms would find that message threatening, but it’s not clear to any given reader of Ella Minnow Pea, let alone Verm junior.
Second, an epistolary novel? About a pangram? With a restricted alphabet? Called Ella Minnow Pea? I have some problems with Ray Bradbury’s work and with Farenheit in particular, but I admit that the novel moves. It’s an excellent high-school selection, and the kind of thing that can get teenagers very interested in the physical and emotional cost of Guy Montag’s life. It’s exciting, and pessimistic, and creepy as hell. It can’t hold a rushlight to 1984, but it’s an effective dystopian novel. I barely remember Ella Minnow Pea; all that sticks with me is the sense of irritation.
There was this depressing paragraph:
“Fahrenheit 451” is a science fiction piece that poses a warning to society about the preservation and passing on of knowledge as well as asks the question about whether the government should do the thinking for the people, Hines stated in an e-mail to The Courier. Other themes include conformity vs. individuality, freedom of speech and the consequences of losing it, the importance of remembering and understanding history and technology as help to humans and as hindrances to humans, Hines stated in the e-mail.
“They’re not reading books just to read them,” Hines said in a telephone interview. “They’re reading it for a purpose. … We respect people’s rights to express their concerns and we have a policy in place to handle that.”
And when we live in a society where the principal of a high school even has to defend the idea that thinking about civil liberties is a good thing, we’ve got a problem.
There was this, too, which Doppelganger commented on:
NCISD banned “Draw Me a Star” by Eric Carle and “Absolute Power” by David Baldacci, but it has not received a book challenge in three years, Cindee Reynolds, NCISD superintendent/community relations executive assistant, stated in an e-mail to The Courier. Montgomery ISD received one request from a parent to review instructional material, but the district has not banned any books, Babette Eikenberg, Montgomery ISD human resources executive director, stated in an e-mail to The Courier.
Draw Me a Star is a gorgeous book by one of my favorite children’s book authors, Eric Carle. Even if you don’t know the man, it’s likely that you’ve encountered The Very Hungry Caterpillar Has the Right to Chooseand Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Make Out With Me! I have no idea why it would be banned or restricted. I don’t want to know.
No, wait, I was confusing it with Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me, which is also a gorgeous book, about a man who climbs a ladder to the sky to fetch his child the moon. Here’s a synopsis of the banned book from the website, and the key to its removal:
The artist’s drawing of a star begins the creation of an entire universe around him as each successive pictured object requests that he draw more. Based on Eric Carle’s recollection of his grandmother’s way of drawing a star (directions included), this seemingly simple story also provides insights into an artist’s private world of creativity. An inspiring book.
And guess what that makes the artist reminiscent of? No, not Harold! God! Yes, a children’s book about the transcendent power of artistic creativity is objectionable because it makes creators too much like the Creator. Small children might start believing that they have superhuman abilities. Like drawing!
Saddest of all:
Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451” came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence.
I believe him completely.