There goes Texas literature—and a fond farewell to a good man

 

Despite Larry McMurtry’s complaint that agrarian Texas never produced any great literature, Texas has produced some classics, ranging from John Graves, Goodbye to a River to Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind. Arguably, the most revered of our books, at least in contemporary times, is McMurtry’s own Lonesome Dove, a saga of western life in which he does everything he says great Texas literature should not do—cattle drives, saloon girls, the Old West come to life.

Now a Texas state legislator, Republic Jared Patterson of Frisco, wants to ban from school libraries any book with sexually explicit material. When a fellow legislator challenged him, Patterson stepped into his own trap. Asked if Lonesome Dove would be banned, Patterson admitted he’d never read it—one wonders if he and other book banners read anything—but he went on to say that if it contained sexually explicit terminology, yes it would be banned. Them’s fightin’ words, pardner!

But to make the whole thing more hilarious, an ally of Patterson, Christin Bentley, chimed in to say that she had done a word search of the book—when you can’t read the whole book, do a word search! Marvelous way to judge literature. She searched for twenty-first-century sexual terms—the F-bomb, pussy, sex, vagina—and reported that Lonesome Dove passed her stringent test with flying colors. There is, she concluded, no sexually explicit material in the book.

That line alone left those of us who have read the book in tears of hysterical laughter. I remember a born-again acquaintance of mine complaining way back in the eighties that he thought his wife was offended when Gus asked Lorena to give him a poke. (Note that the guy wouldn’t admit offense but laid it off on his wife—always got to protect women and children). Representatively Bentley, with her earnest good intentions, had searched for twenty-first century terms in a book set in the 1880s and written in 1985. The mind boggles.

Apparently Patterson got a lot of ridicule from both sides of the aisle. Maybe enough to quash his bill.

And it gets worse—we’ve all heard that a principal in a Florida school that prides itself on a classic education was fired because she showed a picture of Michaelangelo’s David to sixth graders. And the inevitable has happened—a couple in Utah is clamoring for banning the Bible because of all the offensive material in it. And, indeed, if you are easily offended, you’ll find something to object to in the Bible.

A letter to the editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram pointed out that legislators are busily passing laws to protect our children from smut, sexually explicit images, trans kids in the bathroom and the like, while ignoring that most deaths of teens and even younger children are caused by guns and drugs. When will Texans wake up and stop voting for people who want to legislate morality but not life-saving measures. Spare me the Second Amendment arguments or the passing of blame to Mexican cartels for importing drugs.

Yesterday incensed by Rep. Patterson’s idiocy, I shared his thoughts on a small, private listserv and was rewarded by a colleague who pointed out that you can get banned book stickers on Amazon. I thought it a great idea, approached a neighbor who has a little free library, but she said she wasn’t interested. She just wants the books to be fun. That kind of thinking makes me growl. Give us another generation, and reading will no longer be fun. We will have a generation of students without world knowledge and with narrow horizons, no opening of the mind. Besides, if children don’t read about sex, hetero-, homo- and trans-, in books, they will learn about it on TV and their cell phones. Better they should read literary treatment of those subjects.

On a different but sad note, I learned today that I lost a friend of fifty-plus years yesterday. Bill Benge was a one-of-a-kind good man. He and Sharon had children a little older than mine fifty years ago when we all lived in the Park Hill neighborhood. We have remained friends ever since, entertaining each other in our homes, keeping up with the kids, all the things that friends do. Bill and Sharon were always so good about including me in events, theater trips, and the like. In recent years, Bill would call every now and again just to check on how I was doing, and I returned the favor, though not as often as he would have liked. His health took a turn for the worse so suddenly that I didn’t have a chance to tell him how much his friendship and kindness have meant to me over the years. Now I hope his family realizes that and I send prayers to Sharon, their children and grandchildren.

My mom was right when, in her eighties, she said to me the hardest part of growing old was seeing all her friends die. This has been a heck of a difficult year so far.