By HASSO HERING
Commentary | Posted: Sunday, October 26, 2008 12:00 am
Our story last Sunday on "Bunny Suicides" and the school library at Central Linn High School brings up lots of questions. But once the questions have been raised and answered, the conclusion is that none of them matter very much, for black humor among kids does no more damage than, say, TV, and probably less.
The book, if you missed the story by our Jennifer Moody and the media frenzy that followed, is about a picture book. More accurately it's a book with primitive drawings showing all kinds of ways in which inventive but suicidal rabbits might off themselves.
There are no words, which raises question number one: Why would a school library spend money for a book that no one can read?
Well, it might do so as an inducement to struggling middle and high schoolers to pick up a book they will find funny but don't have to puzzle their way through. "And from that," you can picture educators theorizing, "we can get them interested in books that actually have words."
A Halsey mother thought the book wrong and was not going to return it, though she relented when the media storm broke. Her complaint is one in an endless line of challenges to school books and library books in general, which have led to one court case after another.
The Supreme Court at one point ruled, narrowly, that schools don't have the authority to withdraw books board members find unsuitable. But it didn't rule on whether such books have to be bought in the first place. Since then, the courts have split fairly evenly, upholding the removal of books in some cases, and ruling against the book challengers in many others.
In some of these discussions, Hitler's "Main Kampf" becomes the favorite example. Should school libraries contain books that sow the seeds for genocide? Should they contain books that may be useful in the study of history even if written by objectionable characters?
In other cases, objectors have sought to rid schools of Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and stories by William Faulkner because they refer to racial stereotypes and contain words no longer allowed.
As for comic books about suicide, there's a lesson to be learned from "Max and Moritz." As a boy, I remember, I was delighted by Wilhelm Busch's 19th century illustrated stories about two young troublemakers introduced thus:
Ah, how oft we read or hear of/Boys we almost stand in fear of!
For example, take these stories/Of two youths, named Max and Moritz,
Who, instead of early turning/their young minds to useful learning,
Often leered with horrid features/At their lessons and their teachers.
Talk about gruesome. These two play nasty tricks on people and animals, a series of misdeeds that ends when they perpetrate one too many and are ground up in a grist mill and fed to some ducks. The stories made me sorry for the boys' victims; the drawings made me laugh, and neither, as far as I can tell, did me any harm growing up. (hh)