FFS. We need to talk about obscenity.
In which a 1998 movie puts the present day in sharp relief.
For the dumbest thing imaginable, once again we return to Texas. Emma Straub tried to, in fact. The New York Times-bestselling novelist and mother of two was back out on a book tour to support her latest children’s book Very Good Hats. It’s a book about hats, see, and how very good they were. The publicity materials call it a “silly read aloud,” which lends itself to the kind of events her publisher had arranged on her tour: readings at cute, independent bookstores and visits to classrooms where she’d speak to young children.
Now, these school visits didn’t include those cynical third graders, mind you, much less those neo-hormonal fifth graders. Can you imagine? No, Emma was talking to first graders and kindergartners, the kinds of kids who’d ask the really hard questions like, “I have seven dogs,” and “Do you like my hair?” Emma said yes to the latter, for the record, which elicited the news that the child in question was getting a haircut. A tour in support of a children’s book can be a surreal, if fundamentally adorable experience.
“It turns out that doing school visits is just doing stand up comedy for small children. I can tell you how many pets every single one of these kids has, because they all told me,” wrote Emma, who added, “There is A LOT of heckling.”
But after hitting Doylestown, Brooklyn, Baltimore, Mount Airy, and Decatur, the tour took Emma to Katy, Texas, whereupon Texas Texassed all over its Texas with its pants down. People in Texas like to say, “God bless Texas,” but what people don’t get is that it’s an apologetic plea with the “and please hurry” left unsaid. But I’m getting ahead of the story, which is not the sort of thing that happens in Very Good Hats.
Katy is a suburban city just west of Houston known for its high school football team (Andy Dalton played there. Don’t worry. He’s not important.), the very many fishing and hunting superstores you can see from the freeway, and the lake stocked with fish in Mary Jo Peckham Park. Also, the schools are great, and parents are super involved.
It was one such parent who lodged a complaint the day before Emma’s scheduled appearance about Emma’s use of profanity on social media. The school district collapsed like a piece of IKEA furniture after a crosstown move. Emma was promptly, if at the last minute, disinvited.
“It has been brought to our attention that this author has regularly used inappropriate and foul language on her social media platforms — specifically repeated use of the “F” word,” explained the district in a note from the principal. “This type of language, as you know, does not align with our school and community’s values.”
As someone who has had his own experience with a canceled book event at an elementary school, I feel that I can speak with some credibility in saying that this principal was caught between a rock and the right place, bless his or her heart.
And to the parent who complained: Fuck you.
I feel I should elaborate:
There are many reasons why complaining about Emma talking to kids about Very Good Hats is an embarrassment for everyone involved — except, of course, for Emma, whose book is probably selling very well right now.
Probably very few first graders and kindergartners in Katy are doomscrolling Twitter. Kids would never have known even if Emma had an OnlyFans or a Fetlife account. What we’re dealing with here are adult baby bunny feelings getting ruffled, or more likely one adult’s baby bunny fee fees. This act of censorship prioritizes adults over kids, which is a strange way to go for an event involving kids who are learning to add with coins.
But worse than the perversion of who schools are supposed to serve — It ain’t you, Karen. Bájale a tu pedo. — is the insinuation of the author’s perversion, specifically that this in some way put children in moral peril or violated community standards. This wasn’t a picture book-version of Dan Savage’s podcast. To reiterate, the book is about hats, namely the extremely great quality of same. “Hats” is not some code word or talisman. Emma wanted to talk to kids about a funny book she wrote about — and let’s underline this here — lots and lots of hats.
I spent a little time looking over her G-rated Twitter feed. She likes celebrating other authors’ when their books are published. She likes the Backstreet Boys. She asks existential questions about Taylor Swift.
“I know I’m late to this, but if all the songs on Midnights are about what happens in the middle of the night, where is the song about searching WebMD and convincing yourself you have a terminal illness?” asks Emma.
And then there is the tweet from May 24, 2022:
“Fuck guns, fuck people who care more about controlling women’s bodies than protecting all of us from people with guns, fuck! It’s too much. So heartbroken.”
Granted, Emma does repeatedly use the “F” word there, but do you remember what happened that day? Nineteen children and two adults were killed in a shooting on May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School. This school shooting, the worst since Sandy Hook, was so bad it is known by the name of the county where it occurred: Uvalde.
Emma writes for children the same age as those who were killed. Those kids were killed because many politicians in Texas have misplaced their moral compasses. And these politicians, who have controlled the state since well before those first graders and kindergartners in Katy were born, have prioritized the safety of an unconscious collection of cells over that of the children at Robb Elementary. These politicians have chosen not to do anything about controlling access to firearms.
Contemplating all the little bodies, the political misalignment of priorities, and the bungled law enforcement response, proved “too much” for Emma, who was, quite logically and understandably, “heartbroken,” so she used a word to express the same incoherent rage and pain we all feel when we stub our toe. She used an explicative three times, which is seven times less than the number of children and teachers murdered that day because adults couldn’t, wouldn’t, or just plain didn’t do their jobs.
I was working in a different school district almost three hours away from Uvalde when it happened. After we got over the shock, the pain, and the rage, we had to get to work. We had to catalogue everything we had done to make our schools safe and then figure out everything we needed to do. We changed a bond package to get millions upon millions to retrofit our schools with better locks and safer entryways. We trained our staff over and over again not to let people into schools without an ID badge.
Why? First, a school shooting is the worst thing that can happen when you’re in charge of schools, and Uvalde was close enough to make us all feel sick. Second, parents demanded it. In meeting after meeting, email after email, parents wanted to know what we were doing to keep their kids safe.
No one complained that any of us were using profanity online, and believe me, a lot of us were. Heck, some of the parents were, as in, “What the fuck are you doing to keep our kids safe?”
The Karen in Katy who complained about Emma’s profligate use of profanity corrupts the idea of obscenity in a way that reminds me of Warren Beatty’s character in Bulworth, the 1998 movie about a senator named James Bulworth who loses his mind and starts telling the truth. He also starts rapping and swearing a lot, something a TV reporter challenges him on.
“Senator, why this new campaign style? Why this new manner of dress and speech … your ethnic manner of speech, your clothes, the use of obscenity…?
“Obscenity?” says Bulworth, snapping into rhythm. “The rich is getting richer and richer and richer while the middle class is getting more poor / Making billions and billions and billions of bucks / well, my friend, if you weren't already rich at the start, well, that situation just sucks / 'cause the richest motherfuckers in five of us is getting ninety-fucking-eight percent of it / and every other motherfucker in the world is left to wonder where the fuck we went with it. Obscenity?”
Then he goes off on an arrhythmic yet slightly rhyming rant about the influence of wealth on politics while infant mortality rises, public schools go underfunded, and guns proliferate.
“What we used to call America? That’s going down the drain. How’s a young man gonna meet his financial responsibilities working in a motherfucking Burger King? He ain’t!” says Bulworth. “Obscenity?”
It’s a classic scene that sadly has only gained power since the Clinton administration. All the problems Beatty’s fictional character went off about have only gotten worse here in the real world. The minimum wage has lost $1.65 an hour in real value. Income inequality has ballooned. The federal assault weapons ban expired six years after Bulworth came out, and today’s gun rights hysteria makes the late ‘90s look like the good old days.
Our ability to deal with the inevitable emotional outbursts resulting from the inability of adults to deal with the problems that impact children has also gotten worse. In fact, it’s gotten to a point where a children’s author can’t have a normal, adult response without other adults leaping to defend the children from something they never would have known about.
People have been asking me what my next book will be, and I have some ideas. But what happened to Emma gives me a new idea. It’s a book about the fragility of American adults who are confusing the reaction to and protest of obscenity for the real thing. I even have a title all picked out. It’ll be called Very Good Fucks.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
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Fucking irritating