I Didn't Check with Hank the Cowdog - weekly column, 4.10.2022

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

I Didn’t Check with Hank the Cowdog

 

Imagine a children’s book in which, in the first five pages, a teenager:

 

1. Shoots an animal dead simply to win a bet

2. Is threatened with torture and death by fifteen men, most of them drunk

3. Is attacked with a deadly weapon

4. Shoots his attacker dead and becomes a career criminal

 

Who would make such a violent book available to young, impressionable children?

 

My parents. At Christmas.

 

These violent scenes begin The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown, in Nottinghamshire, by Howard Pyle.

 

Whitman Publishing now prints specialty books for coin and stamp collectors, but for most of the 20^th century sold children’s books of all sorts. They were printed on the cheapest sort of paper and featured simple, two-tone illustrations and were bound in full-color laminated covers.

 

Whitman books were a childhood staple for generations, and I still have Robin Hood, Roy Rogers King of the Cowboys, Gene Autry and the Golden Ladder Gang, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Assignment in Space with Rip Foster, and The Last Trail.

 

And they are violent. Assignment in Space could be subtitled Killing Communists in Space.

 

The spouse-person still has some of her childhood books, including some Annette stories and Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. One does not imagine Annette blasting Commies with ray guns, but a young Annette now could become a fighter pilot and do so.

 

This leads us to the recent national yellings – hardly debates – on what books are appropriate for children. In the past, when more moms and dads were readers and made sure their children were too, the shared experience and a common culture heritage kept things steady. Children tended to read the same books their parents did when they were young.

 

When my parents gave me Robin Hood they weren’t handing me some sort of cultic anti-government propaganda and encouraging violence. The episodic tales – Robin and Little John, Robin and Friar Tuck, Robin and Will Scarlett, Robin and Marian – are good adventure tales which build on and reinforce themes of good citizenship, responsible government, the duties people owe each other, and faith in a complex, hierarchical society.

 

I just don’t think Captain Underpants gets that done.

 

Good parenting is not censorship. Good parents know what their children are reading and know when to step in gently and say, “we need to talk about that.”

 

Censorship occurs when any government, local, state, or federal, determines what books a rational adult may or may not read. In some limited instances, yes, a government quite reasonably forbids adults of questionable intellect to access, say, manuals on bomb-making. This butts up against the First Amendment and rebounds on the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, and on such matters good citizens and proper magistrates work these matters out in intelligent discussions.

 

Pitching scripted hissy-fits definitely doesn’t get that done.

 

And the matter of care in what people read is ironic anyway since few people read anymore.  Vetting a book that the kid isn’t reading means nothing, and even less than nothing when feral viewer choices are flickering across the giant Orwellian telescreen in the living room and across the tiny Orwellian telescreen apparently superglued to most hands.

 

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