The Man Behind the Curtain

As you may know, I have lately been spending some time taking breaks from The Unpleasantness in my garden. While gardening certainly keeps my hands too busy to doom scroll, The Unpleasantness is never completely out of my mind. I grow flowers for their beauty, sure, but also to feed the pollinators that our literal existence depends upon. I grow fruits and vegetables because they taste better than the ones you get in the store, sure, but with tariffs and inflation and an impending recession, I’m also growing them to make sure my family can eat in uncertain times.

Like gardening, books and films and television can also provide an escape, but it’s hard for me to avoid The Unpleasantness there, too. Like the folks over at Taking It Down, I, too, have been consumed by Severance. 

I saw a TikTok recently where someone was asking to be severed for the next four years. While I can relate to that instinct, I think that runs counter to the whole point of the show. We can try to separate ourselves from The Unpleasantness, but it’s still going to be there.

I once took an interim summer class with the legendary Phil Beidler called “The American Classic and The New Hollywood.” We read a lot of classics—The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” The Last of the Mohicans—and watched the film adaptations. I wrote a paper for that class about how The Wizard of Oz was nationalist propaganda in the buildup to World War II in 1939. After reading L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with my daughter a year ago, I maintain this position.

We read the book because my daughter was performing a number from the film for her musical theatre class, and I realized I had never shown her the movie. The movie is one of my mom’s favorites, and I remember watching it with her when I was little, hiding under a red and white afghan any time the witch came on screen (but peeking through the holes of the afghan so I wouldn’t miss anything).

I never understood why Dorothy wanted to go back to sepia-toned Kansas when she could be in Oz, which was much more exciting. I always felt a sense of disappointment that it was all a dream from being bonked on the head during a tornado.

In Baum’s original, Oz is real, and Dorothy does go back in subsequent books. But the Emerald City is not what it appears—the Wizard forces everyone in the city to wear colored glasses to give the city its green hue. I can’t help but think about another coward behind a curtain who some people think is a wizard. That nerd is just as invested in controlling what people see and may or may not have acquired his wealth and power due to emeralds. Maybe Baum himself was a wizard who could see the future?

While The Wonderful Wizard of Oz hasn’t yet caught the ire of the Heifers for Liberty, it does have a history of being banned and challenged. In 1983, a group called Concerned Women for America attacked the book for “occultism, secular humanism, evolution, disobedience to parents, pacifism, and feminism.” The Concerned Heifers for America’s lead heifer was Beverly LaHaye, who was married to Tim LaHaye -- yes, THAT Tim LaHaye, the one who traumatized millennial youths with the damn Left Behind series.

I can see why Bev was mad, though. The Witch of the North told Dorothy, “In the civilized countries I believe there are no witches left, nor wizards, nor sorceresses, nor magicians. But, you see, the Land of Oz has never been civilized, for we are cut off from all the rest of the world. Therefore we still have witches and wizards amongst us.” When I read that, I thought about Huck Finn and the racist heifers who wanted to “sivilize” him, to teach him to behave like the caste he was born into by virtue of his skin color.

I’ve been thinking about caste a lot lately, too, specifically Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. 

I read the young adult adaptation for my graduate program, and I’d love to go back and read the original, but the YA version pulled no punches. Wilkerson draws comparisons between American white supremacy, Nazi Germany, and India’s caste system. I also watched Ava DuVernay’s film adaptation of the book, The Origin, which you can stream on Hulu.

DuVernay’s film adaptation does a remarkable job of depicting Wilkerson’s personal struggles, her research, and the vignettes she includes in Caste.

Wilkerson’s text cites the work of Ian Haney López, a legal scholar who writes about actual Critical Race Theory, not whatever they’re trying to tell you CRT is. 

I read White By Law last semester, and while I wouldn’t teach it myself because (1) I like my job and want to keep it and (2) I teach in a high school, not a law school or graduate school, I do understand why white supremacists really don’t want people getting ahold of this stuff. CRT pulls back the curtain. It compels you to take off the green glasses and see things for how they really are. 

Some people think ignoring white supremacy will make it go away, but it operates most efficiently in the shadows, in laws and court cases and executive orders that no one bothers to read, that many of us aren’t equipped to read because our education system doesn’t feel the need to prepare us for that type of literacy, especially right now.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Read just enough to get into college or to get a job. Why read a book when you can read a tweet? Better yet, don’t read at all. Here, put on these green glasses. Don’t they make everything great again?