Hollywood Half-truths Rule the Day

My husband and I recently attended a local screening of the five Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Short Film. As expected they were woke as hell, since Hollywood wants nothing more than to be seen as committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. A mix of preachy films touching on the plight of poor blacks trapped in poverty, the tough road traveled by gays in America and the lives of two very old Chinese women, the most egregious was called The ABCs of Book Banning that had me doing a slow burn in my seat. Not a documentary, it was a 27-minute commercial for a political point of view.

First off, let's be clear: there are no books BANNED in America --at least not in this century! You can still find any book you want to read, online or in a bookstore or library somewhere. Secondly, no books have been BURNED in this century either. Yet this film blithely shows scores of book jackets and dramatically stamps them as BANNED or RESTRICTED or CHALLENGED! One person says "Banning books is burning books." (Uh, no it isn't.) 

Missing are a few important details, like why, where and when they were kept from the public, and exactly what "public" was impacted. While the "banned books" were removed from school library shelves in Martin County, Florida -- damn that Ron DeSantis! --  they were all still available and in print. Quotes shown from the targeted books were cherry-picked to make them sound perfectly wonderful and innocent, leaving out any offensive parts that had deemed them inappropriate for young children.

Elementary school students were restricted from reading Maus, the award-winning opus by Art Spiegelman, not to hide the atrocities of the Holocaust but because of nudity and language. But if their parents had an edition of Maus at home they could read it under the watchful eyes of Mom and Dad. Similarly, the film's snarky narration that accompanied book jackets flashed on-screen lacked any explanation of why, and what age groups were affected.

Also BANNED was Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Doing some digging when I got home, I learned that "the moral issues explored are extremely mature and include incest, rape, sexual dysfunction, racism and prostitution." How nice for the tots. And hey -- don't parents have some authority over what their young ones are exposed to? 

This film, boring from start to finish, is an embarrassing display of manipulative, exaggerated over-reach and groupthink by the rabid leftists -- so what else is new? My money is on it winning the Oscar.