It is snowing in Madison on April 1 (not an April fools joke), so I’m already in a bad mood. It took me virtually no time to stumble across a news article that deepened my despair. It seldom does.

A school principal in Jacksonville Florida recently prohibited his student’s from viewing a 1495 painting titled ‘The Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist and St. Mary Magdalene.’ He felt this masterpiece by the great Renaissance painter Bartolomeo was ‘an assault on family values’ and showed a ‘lack of enthusiasm for motherhood’ and (horrors) was ‘a partisan attack on the pro-life movement.’ Yeah, right! As if a 15th century Italian artist put brush to canvas while thinking, “how can I advance the woke liberal agenda in the 21st century.’ On cue, the genius heading Florida’s state government, Ron Desantis, appluaded the school prinicpal’s alertness and courage. Real education must be stamped out.

This is just the latest in a long line of valiant efforts by conservative stalwarts to protect our young from becoming literate and educated. For example, we have the case in Pinellas County (Florida) where the showing of a documentary of Ruby Bridges (the 6 year old black girl who first desegregated Lousianna’a schools) was suspended. This had been shown during Black History month for years but was yanked after a couple of parents complained pending firther review. Then there was the Wisconsin case of a song by Dolly Parton and Cyrus Miley being banned from a school performance presumably because it fostered acceptance of others. Heaven forbid that a song reflect the core teachings of Jesus. And we have the instance where students were not permitted to view Michelangelo’s classic sculpture of David, a Biblical hero, since it displayed his marble penis. Right, as if science (and our kids) had yet to discover that males have genitals. Just shoot me.

Censorship is becoming big business and book banning remains the favored flavor of this exercise in contemporary Fascism. Between July 2021 and June 2022, some 1,648 titles by 1,261 authors were banned or restricted somewhere in the U.S. A Texas Republican legislator has proffered a list of some 850 books to be ‘investigated,’ primarily on suspicion that they teach Critical Race Theory or what the rest of us call American history. Besides our children being driven further into ‘the New Illiteracy’ as Harvey Graff calls it, many household names in literature have come under attack over time …. Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Shakespeare, and God. These and more have seen their clasiscs attacked as vile and pernicious (though in truth the Bible was written by at least 40 ancient authors presumably under God’s direction). Over the past half century plus, J. D, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved; Ashley Hope Perez’s Out of Darkness have been banned. The classic most often removed from our shelves is George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984, a work that influences us even today.

Book burning is not new of course. In 212 BCE, Chinese Emperor Shih Huang Ti burned all the books in his land and had some 460 Confucius Scholars murdered. At least our Republicans have yet to institute a death penalty for those perusing classic literature or art, not yet at least. Literary purges, of course, have been evidenced thoughout time with the years of the Counter Reformation being a particularly active period as Protestants and Catholics vied for the control of minds and hearts. Not just religious books were suspect. King James the 1st banned Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World in 1614. Perhaps even then, it was realized that those who write history control the future. The Victorian Age was famous for exercising control over the public’s tastes while the U.S. postal service was vigilant in the first half of the 20th century while searching for prurient literature like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer published in 1934. Banished in Boston became a shorthand expression for government’s zeal in shaping public morality.

Today’s Republican orthodoxy, however, brings censorship back to the front burner in a frightening way. It is not just that public officials are taking advantage of our slide toward authoritarianism and totalitarianism for political advancement. They are being aided by gullible citizens and parents who routinely attack teachers, librarians, and all others who labor to educate the next generation. These are underpaid and ill respected professionals. I recently conversed with several former teachers of my acquaintance (one of whom I found out via a phone call passed away as I was writing this). They either retired early or stated they never would enter that profession these days because the environment is so hostile and crippling. The image of Nazi’s throwing books on to huge conflagrations is recent enough to be be recalled by many of us. We know where that led, an ending that should NEVER be repeated.

In all this doom and gloom I can find one ray of hope. I came of age during the 1950s. I had McCarthyism, Catholic orthodoxy including the ‘Legion of Decency’ telling me which movies I could watch, sitcoms where words like pregnancy were not used and married couples could only be shown sleeping in twin beds with a night table separating them, and the list goes on. And yet, I grew into a debauched adult who marched against the Vietnam war and spent his life endorsing secular and progressive ideals. When I taught policy courses at the University level, I tried very hard not to tell stdents what to believe, and the few conservatives in my courses went out of there way to thank me for that. I thought my mission was to provide an environment within which they could learn how to think critically, though that did not always work of course. I think it did often enough to make it all worthwhile.

Those who seek to control others will fail in the end. That is my fervent wish, at least. I just hope it turns out to be true.