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F. Scott Fitzgeralds novel The Great Gatsby begins with narrator Nick Carraway telling the reader,

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that Ive been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world havent had the advantages that youve had.

I thought about this when I read that the Mat-Su School Board, taking time off from a pandemic, voted 5-2 to ban The Great Gatsby and four other works of fiction from high school courses. The book was cited for language and sexual references. Apparently the censors were not disturbed that Gatsby, near the end of the novel, is murdered.

But I am not going to criticize the school board. I have had an advantage they have not had. While they were working, raising their families, I was off reading books. By now, thousands of them. This has given me a perspective on what makes a good book, a bad book and has destroyed any nascent interest I had in censorship. If you watch thousands of Major League Baseball games, you will have a deeper understanding of the game than the average fan. The school board members are, at best, average fans.

I cant get too upset because I know that some students, ever resourceful and imaginative, will buy or borrow The Great Gatsby, or Tim OBriens The Things They Carried, Joseph Hellers Catch-22, Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man and Maya Angelous I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. These students, its a pretty safe guess, will be mystified by the ban. Some of the boys will look for, as we said at Lathrop High School in Fairbanks, the good parts and find few. Besides, students protected from Gatsby use social media and can easily access such film classics such as High School Harlots and On Golden Blonde.

The urge to censor must be as basic as the urge to write. The Mat-Su school board looks ridiculous to people who read, but American censors have looked ridiculous for a long time.

Thomas Beer (1889-1940) wrote a history of American culture in the 1890s his childhood. He especially singled out magazines for self-censoring to escape Victorian censure. Beer notes that the great magazines like Harpers, which reached the entire country, had stories about every creature under the sun except one: a horizontal woman.

This anecdote is a bit of hyperbole, as Beer later explains that the magazines would write about infidelity in a moral tract disguised as a story. A married man could take up with his neighbors wife no moving parts, please as long as the next morning the couple was tormented by guilt, terrified of what was to come, and committed suicide, preferably by drowning.

But then this was an era when the local head of the Daughters of the American Revolution, stereotypically a big, large-bosomed woman under a gigantic hat, would go to the sheriff to complain about the village atheist. The sheriff, perplexed, would wonder, Well, maam, what is he doing? Sputtering with frustration, the voice of morality would pour out, Whats he doing? Whats he doing? Whats he doing? Why, everything.

Writers look at the world through their imagination and allow their imagination to wander into complex human situations. Thats everything, to those threatened by books.

Tim OBrien, on the censors list, wrote about a lieutenant in a foxhole in Vietnam thinking about a girl. The lieutenant wasnt real, the girl wasnt real OBrien invented them but they were too real for a majority of the Mat-Su school board.

Michael Carey is an Anchorage Daily News columnist.

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The Mat-Su school board and the urge to censor - Anchorage Daily News