some thoughts about banning Maus
As Americans we like simple morality in our stories and want to jam marginalized experience into that. MLK, lovable rounded preacher with a dream (no anger or womanizing) dies after making the US equal (Stokely who?), Love Wins when Gays are permitted marriage, and antisemitism ends everywhere forever after wholesome (non Jewish) GIs liberate the camps from atheist Germans. It’s a bad fit for reality, on a collision course with right wing money-making …
some thoughts about banning Maus
With Americans everything happy is supposed to be whiteness or commercialism. So a Jew isn’t just a problem by being neither black or white (like East Indians and Asians earlier in history), but by not converting, voting Republican and buying an F150 with a house in the suburbs, which should fix everything right? So Maus isn’t just a reminder of people we want assimilated and made invisible, it’s *artistically* opposed to what right wingers like.
some thoughts about banning Maus
This isn’t coming out right but you get what I’m saying? Not only is Maus about a minority right wingers would like to vanish, but how it presents a story which isn’t a simple morality play with the “right” ending (parallel to how Jews ourselves don’t do the “right” thing) is truly upsetting, and *then* we get to the stuff they can say openly, about how nudity and cursing is baaad.