F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” begins with narrator Nick Carraway telling the reader,

“In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

I thought about this when I read that the Mat-Su School Board, taking time off from a pandemic, voted 5-2 to ban “The Great Gatsby” and four other works of fiction from high school courses. The book was cited for language and sexual references. Apparently the censors were not disturbed that Gatsby, near the end of the novel, is murdered.

But I am not going to criticize the school board. I have had an advantage they have not had. While they were working, raising their families, I was off reading books. By now, thousands of them. This has given me a perspective on what makes a good book, a bad book and has destroyed any nascent interest I had in censorship. If you watch thousands of Major League Baseball games, you will have a deeper understanding of the game than the average fan. The school board members are, at best, average fans.

I can’t get too upset because I know that some students, ever resourceful and imaginative, will buy or borrow “The Great Gatsby,” or Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.” These students, it’s a pretty safe guess, will be mystified by the ban. Some of the boys will look for, as we said at Lathrop High School in Fairbanks, “the good parts” — and find few. Besides, students protected from Gatsby use social media and can easily access such film classics such as “High School Harlots” and “On Golden Blonde.”

The urge to censor must be as basic as the urge to write. The Mat-Su school board looks ridiculous to people who read, but American censors have looked ridiculous for a long time.

Thomas Beer (1889-1940) wrote a history of American culture in the 1890s — his childhood. He especially singled out magazines for self-censoring to escape Victorian censure. Beer notes that the great magazines like Harper’s, which reached the entire country, had stories about every creature under the sun except one: “a horizontal woman.”

This anecdote is a bit of hyperbole, as Beer later explains that the magazines would write about infidelity — in a moral tract disguised as a story. A married man could take up with his neighbor’s wife — no moving parts, please — as long as the next morning the couple was tormented by guilt, terrified of what was to come, and committed suicide, “preferably by drowning.”

But then this was an era when the local head of the Daughters of the American Revolution, stereotypically a big, large-bosomed woman under a gigantic hat, would go to the sheriff to complain about the village atheist. The sheriff, perplexed, would wonder, “Well, ma’am, what is he doing?” Sputtering with frustration, the voice of morality would pour out, “What’s he doing? What’s he doing? What’s he doing? Why, everything.”

Writers look at the world through their imagination and allow their imagination to wander into complex human situations. That’s “everything,” to those threatened by books.

Tim O’Brien, on the censors’ list, wrote about a lieutenant in a foxhole in Vietnam thinking about a girl. The lieutenant wasn’t real, the girl wasn’t real — O’Brien invented them — but they were too real for a majority of the Mat-Su school board.

Michael Carey is an Anchorage Daily News columnist.