Goodbye to Texas?

 

There’s a song called, “Leavin’ Old Texas.” The cowboy/singer laments that they’ve roped and fenced the cattle range, “and the people there are all so strange.” Well, it’s true—the open range is fenced, the mythic days of the cowboy are gone, and some of the people in Texas are purely strange now.

But when a writer friend posted on Facebook that she didn’t understand why anyone would live in Texas and not leave, let alone move there, I jumped to our state’s defense. Possibly she was referring to the strict abortion restrictions, so much in the news with the Kate Cox case recently. Or maybe she meant the absence of gun control—no training, no screening, no license. Want to carry a concealed gun? Be our guest. Or perhaps it’s the troubles at the border with record number of illegal immigrants last month. Maybe it’s the restrictions on what can be taught in classrooms, from kindergarten through college—don’t even think of mentioning DEI, which is now outlawed. (How you can outlaw an abstract concept is beyond me, but Gov. Greg Abbott has managed it.) Maybe she meant book bans—we lead the nation in the number of titles marked for “consideration” or actually banned. There are many reasons to leave Texas for states, even countries, where there is more personal freedom and you are not forced to accept the state doctrine. (Does that echo of Nazi days? The state doctrine? Yes, it does).

I haven’t seen statistics on how many people leave Texas because of our extreme right-wing politics, but I know from personal experience—friends who have thrown their hands up in the air and said, “I’m through. I’m leaving.” Often they are couples of child-bearing age. And new corporations? Again, I don’t know statistics, but I have heard of companies that refuse to relocate here—despite our attractive tax laws and other incentives—because employees with families would not follow along.

I credit Texas’ disastrous reputation to Governor Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and Attorney General Ken Paxton. I’m not sure what fascination these men hold for Texans, except perhaps the habit of voting Republican and a blind, inbred of fear of Democrats that makes it hard to pull any lever, mark any ballot except the red one. Why would you ever vote for a man who puts razor wire in a river to injure and kill people? Or who sent poorly dressed, hungry migrants by bus across the country to a northern city where no provisions have been made for their unannounced arrival? If you live in a small town or rural area, why vote for a man who desperately wants to close the school that is the center of your community? It makes no sense.

But I digress. When I read that post, angry as I am at our state government, I immediately felt defensive, compelled to leap to the defense of Texas. I am not a native Texan, but I have lived here almost sixty years, and my two careers—as an author and as a publisher—have relied heavily on the history and literataure of this state. I feel invested in it, and I’ll be darned if a mean little man like Abbott is going to ruin Texas for me and my family.

There’s so much to treasure about our state, politics aside. We have, I suspect, the most varied landscape in the 50 states. In Texas, you can go from beach to mountains, from the stark, spare country of South Texas to the lush high plains. We have forests and pastures and rolling hills and vast expanses of empty land. Texans value their history—okay, we now pretty much agree much of the Alamo legend is in large part myth, but there’s still valuable history in the basic story. And in Sam Houston’s Runaway Scape and defeat of Santa Anna’s troops at San Jacinto. There’s history in the early cattle drives and the gradual shift from an agrarian to an urban economy in too much of the state. We have a proud and strong literary tradition, with writers who chronicled Texas history and wrote their own versions of it, from J. Frank Dobie and his pals to Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and Elmer Kelton. Women writers too—Sarah Bird and Sandra Cisneros come to mind. Dr. Ron Tyler has given us several books documenting important artists of our state. Texas food, once mocked as brown food, can compete with upscale servings across the country. We have James Beard award-winning chefs and upscale restaurants with offerings for the sophisticated palate. We also have Tex-Mex, chili, barbecue, and down-home food.

Enough singing the praises of the state I love. My point is Texas is too wonderful to abandon to the narrow minds of right-wing politics. I am not leaving. Greg Abbott was not always governor and will not always be. I will stay to fight his inhumane policies, joining such groups as Mothers Against Greg Abbot, the Texas Democratic Party, and Beto O’Rourke’s Power to the People and speaking out whenever I feel the need. Texas needs to regain its proud reputation, and I want to help. How about you?                               

 

What books did you read as a child?

 

Author Susan Witting Albert, writing on her post, “Place & Thyme” in Substack, recalled how she got to be Carolyn Keene, author the Nancy Drew books, for a while. Carolyn Keene was a house name—an imaginary author created by a publisher who then hired various authors to write books anonymously. For Susan, being Carolyn Keene was a dream come true. She recalled a childhood devoted to reading which prepared her for that opportunity, and 143 readers in turn commented on their memories of the books they read as children. Nancy Drew was the clear winner as to be expected.

For me, talking about a reading childhood was a real trip back in time. The summer when I was—oh, probably ten or eleven, around there—I would ride my bike every morning to the Blackstone branch of the Chicago Pubic Library and come home with a stack of six or eight books. It was probably a bike ride of about six blocks, and when I think of it now, I am amazed my parents let me go alone. But that was then, a totally different time.

Once home with my books, I spent the day on the screened-in front porch reading, ignoring the cries of neighbor children who wanted me to come out and play. I was too busy in my fantasy worlds. It was about then that I wrote my first short story, but that’s a tale to be told another day.

But I remember books long before I was able to ride to the library, a few even before I could read. I know my mom read The Wind in the Willows to me, and I remember the Lil Colonel Stories by Annie Fellows Johnson, written around the turn of the century (not this one, the last one). And then there were the tales of Uncle Remus, African American folk tales written by Joel Chandler Harris during Reconstruction. And, of course, there were the Bobbsey Twins, a series of seventy-two books published from 1904 through 1979. These, like the Nancy Drew books, were published by the Stratemeyer syndicate under the house name of Laura Lee Hope.

Another book I loved was Little Black Sambo, also written at the turn of the century, this by a Scottish woman. Sambo was an Indian boy living in the jungle, and the story revolves around his encounter with tigers in the jungle. At first, author Helen Bannerman was hailed for presenting the first black hero, but by the 1950s the books was considered racist. Poet Langston Hughes judged that the illustrations were offensive, done in a “pickaninny style.” Today, many versions of the book, all sanitized I’m sure, are available. Little Black Sambo was so popular at my house that my mom hooked a rug with a tiger on it for one of my children.

My reading tastes moved on, of course, to the Nancy Drew books, although unlike many of Nancy’s fans, I never was equally interested in the Hardy Boys books. But I devoured the tales of Cherry Ames, nurse, and Sue Barton, another nurse. Trixie Belden wasn’t nearly as fascinating as Nancy Drew, but I still read her adventures. And I have fond memories of Alfred Payson Terhune’s books about collies—I desperately wanted a collie, and somewhere in my high school years my parents got me a collie puppy. They did not, however, get me a horse despite my equal fascination with Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty books.

The last series I remember from my school years were the New Orleans novels of Frances Parkinson Keyes. After that, there is a great gap in my memory, due no doubt to years of undergraduate and college work with heavy required reading lists. The wonders of literature that I discovered during those years are too numerous to mention, except I can’t omit Emily Dickinson who was the subject of my master’s thesis. By the time I wrote a dissertation, I was hooked on literature of the American West—the writers and the artists. Those loves have stayed with me through a long lifetime of writing, often about the American West. But I do remember that when I first felt the urge to write a mystery, I sketched out one so baldly derived from Nancy Drew that it was an embarrassment. And it’s no accident that today I write, or have most recently written, cozy mysteries.

As I look back at my reading history, I realize what a rich heritage is available to our children, and then I am angry, sad, you name it, that petty minds are keeping so many American classics from the school and libraries. Classics like To Kill a Mockingbird or The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Catcher in the Rye by Salinger, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and so many more. If children are kept from these books through twelfth grade, they will never again pick them up, and they will miss the wonderful world that waits for them in those pages. They are not likely to be truly educated adults with good reasoning skills, and they surely will miss a lot of cultural references. In some cocktail conversations, they’ll be hopelessly lost.

What is being done to reading curricula is a travesty, and to make it worse, it is done by a few determined, bigoted, narrow-minded people. If they censor their own children, that’s sad but their privilege. But nobody, from the extreme evangelist next door to Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, has the right to tell me what my grands can read.

So what books shaped your childhood?

For a list of banned classics, go here: What American classic books have been banned fromschools - Search (bing.com)

 

Everybody’s an expert these days

 

Friend Sandi Kennedy is an expert at picking lilies. 
She brought this to me when the blooms were tight buds, 
so that I could watch them open.
Isn't the plant spectacular?

You hear a lot about “leveling the playing field” which essentially means giving everybody an equal chance—levelling the playing field in politics, in education, in business opportunities. But it seems to me there’s one way that we’ve leveled the playing field with dismal consequences. No experts stand out today—everybody’s an expert or feels as empowered as the experts. I may not be saying what I mean clearly, but let me give you some examples.

A judge in Texas has just ruled against mifepristone, the most extensively used abortion pill in America. It has been approved by the FDA for twenty-three years and used without apparent bad effects. Yet this judge, with no medical background, ruled it out, talking about such vagaries as emotional damage to women. Never mind that his arguments were specious, the point is that he didn’t listen to the experts.

In states across the nation, politicians are assuming the role that until recently doctors filled—they have become experts on health concerns. They ignore doctors’ findings about abortion as health care in many cases and pass Draconian measures which force women into possibly fatal situations. Why can they cancel out medical training and research for the sake of votes? They will tell you it’s moral concerns, which are none of their business anyway, but I think it’s to win votes (which is not happening)

In Texas, Governor Abbott has promised to pardon a convicted murderer, judged guilty by a unanimous vote of twelve of his peers. That’s how the system is supposed to work. The convicted criminal is entitled to appeal the verdict, a process that might take years. But according to our laws, he is not entitled to an almost instant pardon from the governor. Abbott is tossing aside the jury’s verdict for his own benefit. As a lawyer and former prosecutor, he knows better. He knows he should respect the law, but he has put himself above it (not the first time).

And then there are school boards and the thorny question of book banning. Again, this levelling of the playing field is something we are seeing in many states. Parents object to a book or a lesson plan, and school boards ignore the training and expertise of teachers, school librarians, and administrators. The result is one person can complain, and lists of books—over 800 in Texas—are banned, many of them classics. If a person doesn’t want their child to read a specific book, they should quietly make arrangements with the teacher or librarian. But more and more today we see books banned from an entire school district because one person complained. No one seems to recognize that trained educators and librarians have shaped each school’s acquisitions list.

The same is true of curriculum. Over-sensitive parents are whining about the teaching of CRT in elementary schools—which is so totally false that it is almost laughable. And they accuse teachers of “grooming” young children. The line about corrupting young children that makes me want to holler “Yes!” is that teachers in the first three or so grades are grateful if they can produce students who can read on grade level, write their names in cursive, and do some basic math. They have no time for CRT or grooming. And yet parents are shaping curricula with their complaints and fears.

In eighth grade, I had a math teacher that did not like me She was one of those maiden lady schoolteachers with a big chest and a prominent derriere (shaped rather like a pigeon) who wore flowered dresses and “sensible” shoes. I have no idea what I did to offend her, but it was so clear that even my mom recognized it and talked to me about it. But she would never have gone to the teacher or to the PTA or to the school board. She reasoned it was a good lesson for me to learn to deal with that pretentious woman.

In Texas, there is now a bill being proposed to the legislature called the “Parent Empowerment Act.” The very words give me the shakes. What we need is parents empowered with enough common sense to listen to teachers and other trained personnel.

Even in medicine, some patients are inclined to disagree with the doctors and dictate their care. Cheers for the physicians who holds fast to his expertise and does not let himself be bullied.

I have an advanced degree in English with a special interest in literature of the American West. That does not mean that I can tell teachers how and what to teach every teen in my local grandson’s class. Nor does it mean I can do more than suggest books to him. I would never decree that he should not read a book he shows interest in. I am much more likely to suggest something that I think he might like to read (I was devastated when one grand several years ago read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school and said she found it boring!)

I  guess what I’m trying to say is the country would be better off if people would stay in their own lane and not try to “own” the experts. We educate doctors and lawyers and teachers so they can fill in the gaps of what we don’t know. We don’t need empowerment—we need cooperation.

 

Who says woke?

This illustration has absolutely nothing to do with tonight's post, 
but it is another chance for me to show off my forthcoming mystery. 
And who could find a picture of woke?

Pardon my absence from blogging—I’ve been consumed with proofing, one more time, the manuscript for Irene Deep in Texas Trouble, before I send it to the formatter. But now that’s off my desk and sort of off my mind. What’s still on my mind are some current terms that we hear all the time—terms that are new to our culture in the last few years.

You may guess that “woke” is first I’m thinking about. Gov. Ronald DeSantis gave a speech recently in which he talked about the woke invasion. Everything was in aggressive military terms which struck me immediately. As he drew a verbal picture of an invading army, I couldn’t help think how wrong that was—whatever woke is, it is not tangible and to cast it as an army is ridiculous.

Have you ever noticed that the only people who talk about woke are right-wing conservatives. If the rest of us use the term, it is in defense. DeSantis would tell you that it is an acronym that stands for the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop WOKE) Act—they really had to stretch to get a title which would make an acronym. But the real origin is so ironic as to bring forth laughter from progressives—and no doubt from the Black community. The word came into use among progressive Black Americans in the nineties—one essay I read refers to it as Black slang. It meant to be informed, educated, and socially aware, particularly of injustice and racial inequality. Exactly the opposite of the meaning conservatives have attached to the word. To them, in their incorrect use, it denotes anything they don’t approve of, which turns out to be anyone who is not white, straight, male, and Christian, or any idea that displeases that narrow segment of the population. It is quite possibly the most ridiculous misappropriation of a word that I can remember. Yet hundreds of Americans bitterly decry the woke invasion. Ask them to explain what it means, and nine out of ten are stymied. What a way to fight a war.

Another term that has been bothering me is cancel culture, and I’ve only recently gotten a glimmer of what it means. With current moves to ban classic books like some of Mark Twain or To Kill a Mockingbird and rewrite such classics as Roald Dahl’s children’s literature, I always assumed that the phrase meant the right is out to cancel our historic culture until we end up like an Orwellian society with no past. Not so! It means we are becoming (or already are) a culture that cancels out that which doesn’t fit our ideal vision. Wait! What I mean is that Republicans cancel out (marginalize is a big word these days) whatever doesn’t fit their ideal of America, from LGBTQ citizens to the history of slavery. Makes you a bit uncomfortable? We’ll just cancel it, write a law against it, silence those who disagree with us. The result is we are in danger of raising an entire generation with no accurate knowledge of history, no understanding of anyone who differs from them, no grasp of the great literary traditions in world literature and American literature. Ron DeSantis is not, I suppose, a stupid man—he has degrees from Yale and Harvard (I used to hear that I relation to the second Bush and I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy I now). Yet DeSantis seems to overlook the maxim that he who doesn’t know history is doomed to repeat its mistakes.

And therein is a dilemma: is DeSantis truly ignoring history or is he using that as a political tactic to play to the amorphous group called “the base” and skyrocket his political aspirations. Does he really believe what he says or is he simply saying whatever he thinks will boost him?

These terms, woke and cancel culture, are matters of language, and it is the uneducated who are easily swayed by this manipulation of our language. And that is exactly where DeSantis would have America headed—by taking over public college curricula, banning books, fining those who speak out, DeSantis is dumbing down if not America yet, at lest his own corner of the country. And he has ambitions to move beyond that. It is a frightening prospect, truly frightening.

Please note that if a law being considered in Florida now passes and if I lived and wrote in Florida, I would probably be under fire for having blogged about the governor. The only saving grace for me would be that I am not paid for blogging. IF I were paid, I would be subject to a $2500 fine. Trust me, few bloggers make that kind of money.

PS Just tonight I read Heather Cox Richardson’s Letter from an American about President Biden’s significant visit to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the voting protest march from Selma to Montgomery. (read it here: March 5, 2023 (Sunday) - by Heather Cox Richardson (substack.com) This is exactly the kind of history DeSantis and his ilk would suppress—brutality against people of color. We must not let them succeed.

 

 

Bringing terror to education

 

Yesterday online I saw a news photo of a sheriff, standing in front of a jail, announcing new, hardcore school discipline policies in his Floriday district. He was big, burly, overweight, and standing as though braced for a fight. Behind him, standing in what look like parade rest stances, were a uniformed officer, the school board chair (a man, naturally) and an elderly woman whose role I couldn’t figure out. But they were all scowling. Take a minute and let this register: A sheriff, in front of a jail, was announcing school policy. Why not the school board chair announcing it in a school setting? Talk about intimidation much?

My mind went immediately to a quote I’d seen online earlier that day: “Christianity should sound like, ‘I am deeply committed to deepening my love for others and seeking their best,’ not ‘I am obsessed with how others are not conforming to my personal beliefs, and I must make them do so by any means necessary.”—Rev. Benjamin Cremer. Reverend Cremer is a pastor at a Nazarene church in Colorado.

While Governor DeSantis didn’t actually craft these new disciplinary guidelines, he was certainly behind them. He openly supported the alt-right candidates who have now taken over school boards in many Florida districts. And we all know he supports bullying techniques. The sheriff was not specific about the disciplinary measures, although he promised students it would be their worst nightmare. Good one, buddy--how to encourage learning. Ss to be expected much revolved around bathroom issues and who uses what bathroom. I’m suddenly envisioning scores of kids with urinary tract infections and gastrointestinal problems because they were afraid to go to the bathroom when they needed to. Or even kids who, forced to wait, have classroom accidents. Can you imagine the humiliation?

Several years ago I worked on a writing project about a school for troubled children—it had once been a storied orphanage but had evolved over the years. I was in the superintendent’s office one day when he looked out the window at a group of kids, turned to me and said, “You know what’s wrong with these kids? Nobody every told them they’re okay.” I’ve thought about that a lot—we all need to be told from time to time that we’re okay. And we need to hear it as a message delivered with love.

What schoolkids in Florida are hearing is a message that they are not okay; they are deviant, unworthy, and the message is being delivered with anger and hate. For too many kids, school is going to become a place of terror. There will be dropouts and failures and probably psychological problems. With the current pace of “discipline” and book banning and teacher censorship, Florida will raise at least one generation of undereducated children, many of whom will fail at life.

I did hear today that a judge came down hard on Florida’s attempt to pass the Stop Woke Act forbidding college faculty from teaching about institutionalized racism or any history that might make students feel guilt or anguish over racial matters. The act was tied to faculty review for tenure, which made it clearly a threat. Calling the act dystopian and referring to George Orwell, the judge said that it gave faculty academic freedom only if they expressed the views of the state and did not allow for a robust exchange of views and ideas.

Cheers for that judge, but I fear as long as DeSantis is in power, the judge is a lone voice crying in the wilderness of Florida. Living in Texas, I can’t say much, for I see the same hardline alt-right policies destroying much that I love about the state where I’ve lived for over fifty-five years.

It comes down to who is in charge of education—parents or teachers? I come down hard on the side of trained professionals who understand the long-range effects of education. It’s not about this book or that—it’s about learning to make your own decisions, to read and study wisely and decide what makes sense to you and what doesn’t—and not blindly accepting what someone tells you. And, yes, young minds are malleable and fragile, and we need to encourage them, not stifle with fear. In Florida, however, those ultra-conservative school boards are firing “noncomplicit” teachers and superintendents.

Most days I feel pretty optimistic about our world and our country, but there are days when I despair that common sense will win. The Florida sheriff gives me the willies. Thank what he does to kids!

A strange weekend

A spatch-cocked chicken with vegetables
The vegetables cook in chicken grease and are delectable

North Texas was at its absolute best tonight. A lovely evening, with just enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes away and make you forget the temperature was in the high ‘80s. The breeze ruffled the trees, the garden is beginning to grow, the pentas are showing first blooms. Neighbors Greg and Jaimie Smith came for happy hour, and we all forgot about itme—spent two hours having such a good visit.

Greg once was my lawn and garden guru, and he gave me hints tonight—like deadhead the coleus and mow those ornamental grasses that aren’t at all ornamental. We talked of kids and grandkids and college and fear, of schoolrooms (Jaimie is a retired teacher and was consulting in a small-town district this week—a hard week, she said). We talked of aging, though they are almost a generation younger than me, and we talked of dogs and cats because we are all animal lovers. I relish evenings like this. I gave them crab canapes from the freezer.

Usually I cook a lot on weekends, but this has been a strange weekend. The Charles Schwab Invitational PGA tournament is in town at Colonial Country Club—our end of town. Jordan and Christian and Jacob have been there all day for three or four days, so I filled my social calendar with others. Jordan was home Thursday, and on Friday Jean came to eat chicken salad and fresh green beans with me.

I had cooked a terrific sheet pan chicken for the family Thursday night. I am in love with this recipe. I thought I had written about it on my Gourmet on a Hot Plate blog, but tonight I couldn’t find it, so it will be up online Thursday this coming week. But let me just say that I am a huge fan of sweet onion sauteed—in butter, in chicken drippings, in whatever. I’d probably love them cooked in water. Watch for that recipe because it’s too good to miss.

Last night I made chicken salad out of what was left of the spatch-cocked chicken. It was traditional, simple chicken salad—chicken, green onions, celery, salt and pepper, lemon juice, and mayonnaise. Jean enjoyed it, and I have to say it was delicious. I am not a fan of grapes and nuts in chicken salad. And there’s just enough left for me to have some tonight.

I am trying hard to blog about something other than the Uvalde massacre—and that last word fits what it is. That tragedy has occupied my thoughts this past week, and it’s hard for me to think beyond all the things I want to say. I am both grieved and furious, but I figure I can’t wear readers out with that. I know my own anger—at the needless loss of life, the law enforcement failure, the doublespeak of Governor Abbott will not go away soon, nor do I want it to. I want to keep my anger up—and yours—and that of all reasonable people of voting age, because I desperately want the Democratic Party to score a lot of victories in the mid-terms. Conventional wisdom is that Republicans will triumph—in light of the abortion wars and the Uvalde school shooting, it’s time to throw conventional wisdom to the winds.

Meantime, here are a couple of literary diversions. I guess this is still political, but it’s such a delicious story. In a collaboration between author Margaret Atwood and Penguin Randon House publishers, there is now a flameproof copy of The Handmaid’s Tale. A wonderful picture shows Atwood aiming a flame thrower at the book which remains untouched. So much for the rabid book banners and book burners who infest our culture. The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a dystopian future where the seventeenth-century Puritanical restrictions on society pale in comparison. It is where we are headed with abortion bans, likely to be followed by bans on contraception, interracial marriage, trans marriage, etc. All those personal freedoms, gone.

On a somewhat lighter note, although murder is never a lighthearted subject: a romance novelist has been convicted of murdering her husband. The kicker? She wrote a column several years ago on “How to Murder Your Husband.” It’s a case of fiction becoming reality, but in her case, the dry run didn’t work out. Will the wacky world never cease to provide us with bizarre humor?

Peace to all. This is a difficult time, but I am still sure we will get through it, and democracy will triumph.

 

The cost of reading—or not reading

 

Supply and demand has been on my mind lately—and I’m not thinking of gas prices. I just paid what I think is an outrageously high price for a digital book. Normally I would not consider such, but this is the latest addition to a series that I really enjoy. I got to wondering why it was so high. The author has a good following. You might even call her a bestseller. And probably she’s won awards along the way for the long-running series. But we’re not talking Danielle Steele or Sandra Brown popular here (thank goodness!).

The demand for books can’t be high enough and the supply sparse enough to cause this. Banning books, the current right-wing attack on culture, surely hasn’t been that effective, although in some cases it has caused a jump in sales of the offending book. Take, for instance, last year’s title, Forget the Alamo! When Dan Patrick cancelled a program by the book’s authors at the Bullock museum, sales shot up. More recently, a decades-old book about the Holocaust, Maus by Art Spiegelman, became an instant bestseller after it was banned by a Tennessee school board. Another banned book doing well is the young-adult title, Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe.

Book banning is not new. Public libraries have received over 11,000 requests to ban books since 1982. But these days right-wing conservatives have carried it to a fever pitch. Their targets are almost exclusively books that deal with racism or sexual orientation and their victims are either trans kids or young people of color, both vulnerable populations who desperately need the education and depth of knowledge that can come from reading a widely.

No surprise that, under Greg Abbott, Texas has been a leader in this disgraceful  movement. Of 850 books on a suspect list submitted by Representative Matt Krause of Fort Worth (please vote blue!), 62% dealt with sexual issues. Do you suppose Krause read all of them? Any of them? In Oklahoma, a new law restricts approved reading lists to books by white male authors. Shall we just go back to the days before Gutenberg invented printing and hire some monks to hand-copy? How ridiculous is to ban books by women, especially in this day and age. The law is being appealed in the courts.

The rationale given for these archaic measures is that books about sex and race (and the history of those subjects in America) might upset students, even high school students who are usually reading books intended for the general adult audience. But who ever said life is going to be comfortable? How can young people learn empathy, a leadership skill sadly lacking in some of our leaders, if they don’t read (and please don’t tell me church—there are churches, and there are churches). How can they learn to be critical thinkers? And therein lies the rub.

Abbott, Patrick, and others don’t want critical thinkers. They want a population who will believe outrageous disinformation and vote accordingly, keeping them in office. Simultaneously they have launched an all-out attack on public education, a bulwark of the American system since the days of Thomas Jefferson. With an eye toward privatizing schools (charter schools, for instance, which are for profit), they are preaching the low standards and dangers of public schools, at the same time treating teachers so badly they are fleeing the classroom. No wonder there’s a quality problem.

I was appalled to read a thread on Facebook recently where people wrote “anything to keep kids out of public school” and “public schools do nothing but indoctrinate” (Wow! They have that shoe on the wrong foot!) At the risk of being an education snob, I guess that most who accept Abbott’s authoritarian stances and condemn public education are themselves poorly educated. They are the ones who see socialism, that big bugaboo, lurking in every Democratic heart. To object, they cry “Communism,” or “Fascism” with no idea what they are talking about. They have swallowed the disinformation. Someone should ask them to write papers defining socialism, communism, and fascism.

What can we do to counter these trends? Examine each candidate’s platform on education, including books; quiz them; study their public pronouncements. Support your local library and its reading programs, especially for young people. Read widely yourself, keep up on issues—and learn to recognize disinformation. Support Texans for the Right to Read, a coalition formed by the Texas Library Association. Here’s a link: Texas Library Association Forms Coalition to Battle Book Bans (publishersweekly.com)

I’ll step off my soapbox now.

Books, bonfires, and what are your children reading?

 

The American Library Association just held its annual meeting, virtual this time because of omicron. During the sessions, they recognized some outstanding books  for children and young adults. The 2022 John Newbery Medal went to The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera (Levine Querido); the Randolph Caldecott Medal was given to Watercress, illustrated by Jason Chin and written by Andrea Wang (Neal Porter Books/Holiday House); and Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley (Holt) won the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Boulley is a registered member of the Chippewa tribe who writes about her Ojibwe community in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Notice anything about these titles? They are all about and/or written and illustrated by marginalized members of our society. Yep, people of color and LGBTQ. Exactly the kind of books that Texas Representative Matt Krause (unfortunately, Fort Worth has to claim him) wants examined for inappropriate content and removed from school libraries. So far, he has 850 titles on his list (suppose he’s read every one of them?).

The list includes books on human rights, sex education, and, of course, any books having to do with LGBTQ people. You’ve probably never heard of most of them, but there are a few classics in there, like A Clockwork Orange, The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Kite Runner, Lolita (of course! Maybe he just didn’t know about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which caused a censorship fuss when I was young). If you’re interested, you can skim the entire list here: Inappropriate Book List - School Libraries (substack.com)

Some titles Krause somehow missed come to mind. A new book that has received high praise, Gender Queer, a memoir by Maia Kobabe charts a journey to self-identity and will surely lead many lists; a novel titled No Filter and Other Lies by Chrystal Maldonado is about “a fat, Puerto Rican girl” (made me laugh out loud) who steals another girl’s identity and creates a whole new online life for herself. There’s a lot of soul-searching, thought-provoking stuff being written for kids and young adults.

An editorial today caught my eye: The writer the fuss about censorship today is all diversion. Conservatives don’t want us thinking about Republicans who support Russia’s intrusion into Ukraine, abortion rights, voter suppression, gun control—those big issues that have so much impact on our daily lives and on democracy. So let’s give folks something they can really get in a fuss about while ignoring what’s going on behind the scenes. I admit I fell for it, full of outrage at the idea of burning books, let alone banning them.

Despite diversion, I find censorship just as worth fighting as racism. If a kid is ready to read a book, let him or her have it. If they have questions, they can take them to a parent or a teacher (that assumes a lot of good about the people in a child’s life). And that’s the other part of this: there’s much hue and cry about parental rights. To hear Guv Abbott talk, you’d think he invented the idea. Truth is that parents have always had access to their children’s teachers and the curricula. Through parent/teacher organizations, parents are encouraged to be part of their children’s education. These days, however, parents who ignored the open house and never met the teacher suddenly feel empowered, with the governor’s blessing, to dictate not only what their children can read but what an entire school district can read. They are suddenly more knowledgeable than the teachers and librarians who trained for years to be able to educate kids and turn them into good, productive citizens. It’s wild and crazy—and a great menace to raising a new generation of educated folks capable of critical thinking. (That’s another whole topic.)

I didn’t mean to ramble about all this. What I meant to do was praise the quality and diversity of today’s literature for children. The Newbery is awarded annually for distinguished contribution to children’s literature; the Caldecott goes to the artist of the most distinguished picture book. These are not lightweight awards but are coveted through the world of children’s literature.

And as if to buttress the importance of these books, the publishers are putting a lot of money and effort into the covers. See the illustrations above.