I Know It's Crazy

I Know It's Crazy
Goddam school administrators are trying to expel "The Catcher in the Rye."
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, January 18, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is what everyone's saying about me, and why this time I'm really being kicked out of school. I'm not going to tell you the whole story of how Western culture is going to hell. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that's been happening to me lately, and what it might mean for a couple of other famous literary characters.

If you ever read "The Catcher in the Rye," maybe you're guessing already that I'm Holden Caulfield, the guy who got expelled from prep school and had a nervous breakdown in the story by J.D. Salinger, published 50 years ago. For a long time I was unpopular with the right because I cursed a lot and set a goddam bad example.

Now I'm even more unpopular with the left. They want me to get the hell out of their school reading lists, that's what the Washington Post was saying this week. They don't seem to care anymore that I curse and keep flunking my classes. The problem now is that I'm not multicultural enough. I'm a privileged white guy who keeps getting sent to prep schools. That's why they want to give me the ax.

The other reason is that they think I'm out of date. I've been around since 1951. There's not a computer or an Internet startup anywhere in my whole life story. Like, I say "swell" instead of "cool." So they think kids can't understand anything I'm talking about, and shouldn't try.

It's a funny thing, though. Kids still seem to like me. "Catcher" was one of the top 60 best-selling books on the Barnes & Noble fiction list last year. Most people who think of themselves as molders of schools don't care about that, though. Not anymore. If you're not politically correct, then even if you have something true to say, you're supposed to shut up and commit suicide or something.

Anyway, you see where this goes. It's pretty crumby for other famous characters, too. These people in charge of schools are finally noticing that all this classic stuff kids have been reading for years is completely different from how you'd want the world to be, sort of. They're getting quite touchy about things like that. So we're all scared around here, all us incorrect literary heroes. The girls are pretty nervous too.

First it was "Huckleberry Finn," a guy I felt I could have really talked with about being young and wanting to run away and all. Mark Twain, who wrote the book, was some kind of genius and told a good story. But now they've decided he didn't talk the right way about Jim, a black man. I thought Jim was a decent type. And with Jim and Huck together on a raft, it was at least multicultural. That didn't save them. Whatever it was all about, Huck and Jim were asked to leave most schools and not come back.

And I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope for "Moby Dick." There's that all-male ship's crew. Not a woman in sight. Not very multicultural, either, except for Queequeg, the cannibal harpooneer, who's enough to doom the book all by himself, because Herman Melville describes him as a "savage." Also, all these men keep trying to do something you're not supposed to do anymore: kill a whale. Even the whale itself could give kids unbalanced ideas about the world. It's a white male whale.

Shakespeare doesn't have a chance, either. "The Merchant of Venice" has all that stuff about a vengeful Jew. "Othello" shows a black man killing his wife. "Hamlet" is full of violence. So is "Macbeth." Anyway, Hamlet and Macbeth both live in castles, and kids these days almost never do that. So why expect them to read all this old stuff?

Then there's that high school classic, "Lord of the Flies." It's kind of like TV's "Survivor," with all those crazy guys on an island, so maybe it deserves a break. But again, you've got that nonmulticultural all-white all-male problem. Apart from the island business, you might as well be talking about another prep school. Which reminds me, say good-bye to all those prep school guys in "A Separate Peace."

You get trouble at the other extreme with all those little orphan girls in that classic for younger children, "Madeline." I mean, 12 girls and no boys. Maybe this could all be saved if they integrated the "Madeline" girls with the "Lord of the Flies" guys. Though I guess that could give you a whole new kind of mess.

"Little House on the Prairie" is just lousy with stereotypes. The women churn the butter and where it gets even worse is the men clean the guns. Laura, go home.

Sherlock Holmes is another hero who will have to go. He's a white overachieving male who's been around even longer than I have. Maybe it's not so bad that he uses drugs, but he also smokes.

"Robinson Crusoe" might have been safe from the out-of-date problem, now that Tom Hanks, playing a Federal Express worker in the movie "Cast Away" has updated the idea. But Crusoe already got himself into the same mess I'm in. He's another white male. Then he's shipwrecked and for most of the story he is alone on an island, and, there is nothing multicultural about it. He does finally get a black companion, when Friday shows up. But by then, you're two-thirds of the way through the book, and the mono-cultural damage has already been done.

Anyway, you see where I'm going, and it looks like soon I'll be gone. I guess it's supposed to make the world a better place. But I wonder, once I'm really gone, who will be around to tell the kids something J.D. Salinger actually had me say, in "The Catcher in the Rye," and it's turning out to be pretty important: "You can't trust anyone in a goddam school."

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."