Missouri School District UNANIMOUSLY bans Slaughterhouse Five
- Thread starter Barrett2
- Start date
- Status
lawblob said:
I read Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood for the first time by picking it off a list of acceptable books to write reports on in high school. Compared to O'Connor, Vonnegut's work is shiny, happy, and puritan.
What I find strangest about these cases is that none of the people making the decisions seem to know anything about the books that are being taught. There's nothing in Slaughterhouse-Five that approaches some of the casual horrors you'll find in the Southern Gothic writers, which used to be heavily taught down here.
If they had any idea what they were actually allowing, they'd beg kids to read Slaughterhouse-Five.
UltimaPooh
Member
Missouri people quit embarrassing me!
.Parallax Scroll
Banned
how dare they use their condoms
Why would they consider 20 Boy Summer in the first place for their curriculum, it sounds terrible and without literary merit compared to something like Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse 5 is absurd as well, hell the cursing is mild compared to what our vocabularies were at the time we read it.
But I suppose reading the book before deciding on banning it makes too much sense.
But I suppose reading the book before deciding on banning it makes too much sense.
SciencePilot
Member
Wait... what exactly is wrong with Slaughterhouse Five? I read that in high school and it was totally fine. I... I am outraged, but I don't have anything to else to say. They are terrible people, those who ban books.
besada said:
I think that's what is most infuriating, the laziness of a governing body like this deciding wholesale what is acceptable and not, without any context of what they are doing, because none of them could even be bothered to read through a short book like Slaughterhouse to divine any deeper meaning than some bullet point summary probably produced by some evangelical church and posted on the internet, if I had to guess...
SciencePilot said:
There are some sexy scenes in the book. Nothing crazy or drawn out. Also there is the firebombing of Dresden which set the whole city ablaze. That particular aspect of WWII doesn't really paint the Allies in the best possible light.
Revisionist history at work, maybe. Like what happened in 1984.
The Lamonster
Member
Everyone knows you shouldn't use your condoms. Just keep them in your drawer and don't take them out.
lawblob said:
And I promise that I could stroll through their library and pick out a dozen books they'd find more offensive if they read them. The Western Canon is full of books with really troubling themes and scenes (as it should be) and yet Vonnegut, in part because he's so readable and popular with young people, gets an enormous share of these attacks on literature.
As Chichikov upthread pointed out, if you want really heinous scenes of murder, rape, and incest, you can always rely on the Bible. Just once I'd like to see a school district ban it.
HammerOfThor
Member
Within reason. How day the boys use the condoms for sex. They should be making balloon-animals out of them!
Devolution
Member
Fuck that one was actually interesting. Can someone just get around to banning the melodramatic piece of shit that is Ethan Frome. That made me want to put novels down for a long time.
Snowman Prophet of Doom
Member
That's not even the raciest Kurt Vonnegut book, not by a long shot; let's find out if Slapstick is still in there and tell them about the neanderthal incest (or something like that, been a long time since I read it).
Funky Papa
FUNK-Y-PPA-4
No reason to go that far, the Good Old Bible is a stupendous compedium of savagery, incest, enslavery, genocide and rape.dave is ok said:
Edit: Either I'm one unoriginal fuck or it is true that great minds think alike. I prefer the latter.
ElRenoRaven
Member
SmokyDave said:
Yes yes damn it. I want some common sense back in the world. It's so goddamn rare now that it should be a fucking superpower.
Devolution
Member
besada said:
I forgot about that but you're right. Ugh. Just another reason to get rid of that piece of shit. Never have I felt so offended by a novel, I swear. Get it in school, considered a classic, read it and I'm just like "what the fuck is this?"
BarrenMind
Member
Snowman Prophet of Doom said:
Or Galapagos, which has hand-delivered semen transfer from an old uterus to very young ones.
Oh, and evolution. Lots and lots of evolution.
Devolution said:
For me it was Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy. I finished it and realized I'd been tricked into reading a shitty soap opera. I didn't discover until years later that the happy ending had been tacked on to appease readers, which didn't improve my opinion of Hardy.
HephalumpsAndWoozles
Banned
Ignorance perpetuating from the highest levels down to the lowest. Trickle down theory in action right here folks.
evilromero
Member
They should be happy that these kids are just reading the damn books.
As someone who grew up in St Louis, it's always depressing to see the shitheel rural morons make the state a laughingstock. But the head of the school board hilariously raises the bar for stupid comments when discussing the case. He first said: We very clearly stayed out of discussion about moral issues. Our discussions from the get-go were age-appropriateness, followed a little later by I just dont think its a good book. I dont think its consistent with these standards and the kind of message that we want to send, he said.
If the book had ended on a different note, I might have thought differently. Yes, clearly you stayed out of moral issue territory, fucktard.
Kuro Madoushi
Unconfirmed Member
Romeo and Juliet has underaged premarital unprotected sex though! D:
ThisWreckage
Banned
A person shouldn't even be allowed to vote unless they've read the novels in question. Public education is fucking garbage in this country.
FantasticMrFoxdie
Mumber
Wow.
Would someone please think of the children!? They will be missing out on an American classic.
Would someone please think of the children!? They will be missing out on an American classic.
- Status