John Krull: The fight for America goes on

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It continues to amaze me that so many Americans seem to think the American Revolution was a mistake. Perhaps it shouldn’t.

Every year or so, researchers play the same trick on Americans. They survey a group of us and ask us if we would support the principles set forth in the Bill of Rights without identifying them as part of the U.S. Constitution.

Sometimes, they dress up their questions in modern language. Other times, they just offer their queries in the Constitution’s original language.

It doesn’t matter. The result is almost always the same.

Inevitably, an appallingly large portion of those polled — sometimes, as many as two-thirds or even three-quarters — say they couldn’t possibly approve of something so radical.

Freedom of thought, freedom of conscience and freedom of expression seem particularly to terrify many of us. The notion of allowing people to encounter ideas and then just be able to make up their own minds about those ideas appears to scare many Americans right down to their stocking feet.

We’re seeing evidence of that now with the burgeoning epidemic of book banning across the country.

The one that has drawn the most attention, of course, has been the decision by the McMinn County School Board in eastern Tennessee to ban “Maus,” a Pulitzer-Prize-winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman. The novel tells the story of Spiegelman’s parents’ internment in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz during World War II. It portrays the imprisoned Jews as mice and their Nazi tormenters as cats.

The school board voted, 10-0, to prevent eighth-graders from reading the tale.

That decision provoked an intense reaction. Bookstores in Tennessee and from places as far away from the state as California made plans and launched campaigns to provide every young person in the county with a free copy of Spiegelman’s book.

The author himself also weighed in.

“This is not about left versus right,” Spiegelman told The Nashville Tennessean. “This is about a culture war that’s gotten totally out of control.”

He’s got a point.

These days, it does seem like Americans at every point on the ideological compass have grown increasingly testy about dealing with ideas and expressions with which they do not agree.

The “Maus” debate shows that. It used to be that one of the few things Americans could agree upon was that we believed Nazis were bad. Just about any story that featured a fascist as the villain was bound to be OK.

But it’s not just Nazis we can’t agree on now.

In other places around the country, school boards and parent groups have demanded that books dealing with LGBTQ issues be suppressed. Still others try to bar people from reading books with anti-war themes, such as “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Indiana’s own Kurt Vonnegut.

There even have been attempts to ban what may be the most beloved novel in American literature, Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Critics on one side of the divide argue that Lee’s book is too mean to racists and bigots. Critics on the other contend that it shows insufficient regard to the Black characters within its pages.

The one thing these would-be censors all seem to agree upon is that they have the right to make up not only their own minds about the novel, but everyone else’s as well.

That’s not the way it is supposed to work.

A large part of the reason we have that First Amendment that seems to scare so many Americans is that our founders wanted people to decide for themselves whether they liked an idea or a work of art. The rationale for our public school system was that the schools were supposed to prepare young people to bear the responsibilities of citizenship — one of which is weighing and sorting through principles and expressions to determine their worthiness.

If we shelter students from “dangerous” ideas, we defeat that Jeffersonian purpose. We also waste the students’ time and a lot of our money.

More to the point, we attack the idea of America itself. If America stands for anything, it stands for freedom. We are supposed to believe that people not only can think for themselves but that they have the right to think for themselves.

That was the point of the American Revolution. Some of us still think the revolution was a good idea.

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