“The rich are careless. They break things”
– from “The Great Gatsby”
CHEYENNE - I’m almost too late to recognize that April this year marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of the novel “The Great Gatsby.”
Known as author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, the book survived all these years and continues to be assigned to11th grade students in public schools in Cheyenne and elsewhere.
However, there have been and continue to be efforts to keep Gatsby out of Wyoming public school libraries.
It would be a shame to deprive students of the opportunity to delve into an example of good literature with a rich narrative.
I like the opt-out system in Cheyenne public schools, which involves sending a teacher’s note home with students, announcing this is the book they have been assigned to read. If the parent objects, the teacher will assign that student a different book.
Problem solved.
Gatsby, meanwhile is not a happy story. It is an American story about a poor boy, a soldier, who falls in love with a rich girl named Daisy in the tumultuous years during and following World War I.
He is rejected and goes on to become a rich boy himself. He returns to buy a mansion near one owned and occupied by Daisy and her husband in a posh community. He is ostentatious in his wealth. He throws lavish parties.
But he isn’t equal, because he obtained his money as a bootlegger or some illegal operation in that raucous period in history.
In recent weeks, several pundits on television and other media have picked Gatsby’s obsession with the rich to demonstrate the similarities between Fitzgerald’s world in the 1920s and the national turmoil today in Washington D.C.
We do have wealthy people—billionaires— in charge of hollowing out the federal government, ostensibly to save money.
But Fitzgerald didn’t write about the political climate of the 1920s. His focus was on the people and the levels of society from his time.
And that is the core of the novel; the inequities between the rich and the poor. That imbalance continues today.
Another book that has been mentioned as a target for removal from school libraries is “Slaughterhouse Five,” by author Kurt Vonnegut.
Vonnegut was an American prisoner of war held in the basement of a building in Dresden Germany when the city was nearly demolished in a February 1945 raid American and British bombers.
The book in part is about that disaster.
Gov. Stan Hathaway, in an interview, said that mission was a horror. He knew because he was a teen-age crew member on one of the American bombers.
The targets were legitimate military operations. but there were so many planes and so many bombs that it created a firestorm the swept through the city.
Anyway. Back to now: The Legislature is gearing up for interim topic time. The Joint Judiciary Committee meets next month. Its top priority is a study of Wyoming obscenity laws and to consider whether changes are needed to limit access.
Up to now the access issue has been the subject of nasty little school board spats in certain school districts and counties and a couple of lawsuits.
The question is whether the state will intervene and pass a law to encompass all school libraries and school districts.
Rep. Art Washut, R-Casper, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee told Wyofile last week;
“It is wide open at this point, but there was strong support to rein in the idea that open access of all materials to kids is appropriate.”
I hope the committee treads cautiously.
High school kids should be encouraged to read books like Gatsby and a long list of others that will enrich their lives.
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Contact Joan Barron at 3072-632-2534 or jmbarron@bresnan.net
