The Holocaust happened. And it was undeniably the most twisted, sickening crime committed against humanity to date. Regardless, we have an obligation to carry those horrors despite our temporal (or social) distance from them; it’d be completely ignorant to do otherwise. So you might understand my frustration at the McMinn County school board in Tennessee, which unanimously voted to ban Maus from its 8th-grade curriculum just a month ago. To be perfectly honest, I’d never read Maus prior to hearing about these shenanigans down South. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was getting myself into when I volunteered to write this piece. But what is the point of a winter break if not to engage in some light reading? After all, it’s a graphic novel.

“Light,” as I found out incredibly fast, is the worst way to describe the layers of emotion enveloped by each page. Though it’s printed in black-and-white, the narrative Maus tells is anything but. We follow the autobiographical story of Art Spiegelman, a young artist who aims to capture the traumatic experiences of his father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor. The distinguishing feature of Maus is its use of animals in the place of humans; Jews are represented as mice, Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs. Art is a natural storyteller, and, given his characterization of his father, that ability is probably hereditary. You’re right there next to Art, listening to Vladek relate his incredible life while he peddles away on a stationary bike. Weirdly enough, Maus shines in humanizing the Holocaust in a way that other media just doesn’t. At least for me, and that’s all that matters. I think it’s that father-son relationship that sells it— each up is elevated by the quippy, lighthearted dynamic unique to a parent and a child, while each down is intensified by the distinctively obvious generational divide between the two.

To sum up, go read it. Maus is great. Be glad that it’s not banned at Scarsdale. But, remember Mason, this isn’t a review. So why did The McMinn County school board ban Maus, again? Oh, of course. There were 8 curse words. Ok. And an instance of female nudity. No, it makes sense.

That’s actually sarcasm.

Profanity is a funny thing. If Maus used the s-word just to use the s-word, I could probably understand thinking twice about shelving it in the library. But when it’s used to lament something as complex as Art’s frustrations with his father during his youth, I don’t think there’s a real reason to get worked up. I hate to break it to you, McMinn County school board, but Art Spiegelman didn’t corrupt your children. Let me remind everyone: this is 8th grade. Stumbling upon a swear word here or there in Maus would hardly have been their first encounter with profanity. Nor would it have been their last, for that matter. It’s incredible how out of touch you’d have to be with your students to ban such a richly educational work just because it has a few potty words.

But it wasn’t just profanity. No, there was nudity. That’s true. Yeah, there’s about a third of a panel that shows a partially-exposed woman out of all 159 pages of the graphic novel. Take a look, can you find it? This vivid stretch of suffering is from Art’s own comic strip, “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” which depicts his mental and emotional states in the wake of his mother’s suicide. The nudity here contributes to the disturbing reactions Art intended to evoke with his artwork. A school board should be afraid of nudity used in a sexual context, but there’s none of that in Maus. I’m sure all those board members knew all of this before they banned it, though.

The icing on this dumpster fire of a cake is that they, in fact, did not. One member literally admitted to not having “seen…[or] read the whole book.” Actually, he’d only “read the reviews.” 

So why do I care so much? Well, for the same reasons you should. Is it up to the school to choose what you can read? What you can learn? I guess there’s an argument to be made for the latter. Still, this is a clear overstep on the part of the McMinn County school board. Especially when the justifications for the ban are this flimsy. The content of Maus is hard to digest; profanity and nudity aren’t necessary to tell you that the Holocaust was a shitshow. I think Art himself said it the best in an interview with The New York Times: “This is disturbing imagery…But you know what? It’s disturbing history.”

Then shouldn’t we be given the opportunity to learn from it?