Well that couldn't happen here...

In the film Donnie Darko, an English Literature teacher is hounded out of her job for teaching Graham Greene's "The Destructors", a pivotal scene of which the eponymous anti-hero is accused of copying. When I originally saw the movie, my first thought was, "Well that's not realistic nowadays".
My second thought was, "Well maybe in America, in the Bible Belt. There are some educators with some very narrow minded ideas."
My third thought was a smug and rather self-satisfied, "Well it certainly couldn't happen here. This is England."

It seems that such smugness, as such smugness usually is, was misplaced. A work by poet Carol Ann Duffy has been removed from the syllabus because of its content and because of complaints by people who have so clearly missed the point that it seems remarkable that they can claim to have read it at all. The poem is called Education For Leisure and begins "Today I am going to kill something. Anything." Its detractors seem to be entirely unaware that far from a glorification of knife crime, it is a bleak polemic about the need for education as a kind of antidote to the narrator's utterly hopeless and nihilistic point of view.
The poet's response was to pen another poem, Mrs Schofield's GCSE, which points out, in the form of a series of exam questions, just how much knife crime there is in Shakespeare. Mrs Schofield was one of the people complaining about the poem and crowing triumphally when it was removed from the syllabus.

I sincerely hope that the response to the response isn't a call for Shakespeare to be removed from the syllabus on the same grounds.

(Incidentally my favourite Shakespeare play is one that sometimes has its authorship disputed: Titus Andronicus. It features rape, mutilation, insanity and murder. Not to mention cannibalism. Good wholesome stuff.)

Reviewing the reviewers: addendum

I’d like to show how easy it is. Here’s a description of a film.

The opening scene shows a man describing the murder of his father, brutally gunned down by a laughing killer, dying attempting to shield his son who had been callously shot in the lung by the same crazy maniac and left for dead. The narrative is interrupted by the arrival of a third man who immediately dies in agony from drinking poison.

Other scenes in the movie include a man and a small boy being dragged behind a speeding vehicle, a young man beating up an older man until he can no longer stand – watched by a crowd of jeering onlookers including the child, and the same man shooting someone in the hand and then beating him, chasing him until he drops and beating him some more before he’s pushed into the line of fire from four gun wielding hoodlums and dies riddled with bullets.

Sounds pretty violent to me.

The film? West of the Divide starring John Wayne and made in 1934. And, just as in the Dark Knight review, nothing I’ve said is exactly a lie and everything I’ve said is completely misleading. I think it's about time we banned entertainment altogether. That or reviews.