Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), «Odyssevs og Navsikaa» (ca. 1655), Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Foto: Wikimedia.

Lawrence High School i Massachusetts har fjernet det antikke greske heltediktet «Odysseen» av Homer fra pensum, melder Wall Street Journal.

The demands for censorship appear to be getting results. “Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),” tweeted Shea Martin in June. “Hahaha,” replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” When I contacted Ms. Levine to confirm this, she replied that she found the inquiry “invasive.”

Med en slik woke-jihad mot et av vestlig litteraturhistories første og største udødelige verker setter skolen en ny standard for cancel-kulturens lavmål.

Det handler ikke om noe isolert fenomen, men en del av en kampanje:

A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss.

Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.”

Fenomenet er beslektet med inkvisisjonens liste over forbudte bøker.

For noen handler det om intet mindre enn å sensurere fortiden:

Outsiders got a glimpse of the intensity of the #DisruptTexts campaign recently when self-described “antiracist teacher” Lorena Germán complained that many classics were written more than 70 years ago: “Think of US society before then & the values that shaped this nation afterwards. THAT is what is in those books.”

Jo flere slike anti-intellektuelle lærere det er i omløp, desto mer hjelpeløs og tettere i pappen blir den oppvoksende generasjon.

Som historiske og litterære analfabeter er man helt uten referansepunkter til å orientere seg i en samtid som er gått fra vettet.

Kjøp Alexander Graus «Hypermoral» fra Document Forlag her!