%title [no subject]
%date 2004-08-15 00:36:16
:diary:livejournal:fossils:

Once upon a time, when the Young Wizards series was just getting started and the books were still at Delacorte, I did a story called "Uptown Local" for a Dell-published anthology of teen fiction called Sixteen. (This is the story with the first line, "My father had the flu that week, so I was the one who had to go down to the subway and feed the unicorns.") The anthology did very well, and various of its stories, including mine, were selected for publication in numerous US textbooks.

Something interesting happened at that point. One of the young characters tells the other that a parent is concerned about the way they've been behaving, and suspects that one or both of them might be on drugs. The other character, knowing that both of them (but especially the first one) are completely innocent of this kind of thing, snorts and says, "You kidding? You wouldn't know which side of your nose to put the marijuana up." Seems positive enough, huh? Two "clean" kids dealing realistically with fallout from a fantastic situation. Well, imagine my bemusement when the first textbook publisher to want to use the story demanded that the drugs reference be excised.

I remember being annoyed at the time, but thinking that the issue wasn't worth making a big deal over; I chopped the line and let the story go through otherwise unchanged. Now I'm beginning to wish I'd dug in my heels, for I find I was at the thin edge of a problem which has become much, much worse.

The Language Police goes into truly scary detail about how pressure groups from both the right and the left are insisting that any content that might possibly upset or challenge any student anywhere should be removed from their textbooks. A quote from the Washington Post review:

    So much for the old truism that no maiden was ever ravished by a book. The ideologues of right and left have, apparently, bottomless faith in the power of the written word to shape not just the minds of the young but to determine the course of their lives. They believe that to describe something is to endorse it, so they insist that what they do not endorse cannot be described. The spineless textbook publishers and testing companies capitulate with not a peep of protest, indeed with a smile, for the paycheck is very large. "What's left," [author Diane] Ravitch asks, "after the language police and the thought police from the left and right have done their work?" Her answer deserves to be quoted at length:

    "Stories that have no geographical location. . . . Stories in which all conflicts are insignificant. Stories in which men are fearful and women are brave. Stories in which older people are never ill. Stories in which children are obedient, never disrespectful, never get into dangerous situations, never confront problems that cannot be easily solved. Stories in which blind people and people with physical disabilities need no assistance from anyone because their handicaps are not handicaps. Stories in which fantasy and magic are banned. Stories about the past in which historical accuracy is ignored. Stories about science that leave out any reference to evolution or prehistoric times. Stories in which everyone is happy almost all the time."

    In a word: Fantasyland, a place so wildly disconnected from reality that it makes Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom seem by contrast a painting by Pieter Bruegel or Edvard Munch. 


Grrrrrr.

No more excisions. One disservice to my younger readers, however minor, has been enough. I will never cave again.