Maybe now someone will bother to actually read it.

Angry parents in Cumberland, R.I., convinced officials there to ban an essay originally assigned in a high school class. The essay, "How to Kill a Boy That Nobody Likes," was written by author Will Clarke and is featured in the anthology When I Was a Loser, edited by John McNally.

The mother of a 14-year-old girl who had received the assignment led the charge. She claimed that Clarke's essay was pornographic, and said that it wasn't enough that the teacher quickly agreed that her daughter could complete the assignment by reading something else. She thus appointed herself the school district's morality police.

"I'm not willing to lower my morals to prove a point," she told the Pawtucket Times. "I feel it is my duty to ensure that not just my child is never handed this kind of vulgar material, but (that) your children never receive it as well."

I wonder if she or any of the other detractors has actually bothered to read the essay. Probably not, since most keep referring to it as a "story" as opposed to an essay, and never seem to mention details beyond the satiric title and a few key juicy bits. Thing is, the piece, in which Clarke tells of his early school days as someone mercilessly picked on before he applied a lesson about subliminal advertising and used it to win a life-changing student body office, is just the kind of thing high school students should be reading.

McNally has risen to the defense of his book and Clarke, pointing out that many classic literary works -- including those by Shakespeare, Chaucer and Salinger -- contain bawdy language and questionable passages that can be taken out of context to prove a similar point. Here's hoping that argument doesn't backfire with this populace that seems unable to understand irony, satire or literary allusion, driving them to move to ban the work of those and others right along with Clarke. The hope of course, is that just as with everything else people ban "for the good of the children," it will spur those kids to seek it out all the more.

Labels: books, criticism, Idiocracy