Thursday, January 6, 2011

Editing of Huckleberry Finn is just politically correct censorship crap

I am an avid reader.  I'll read almost anything that can hold my attention past the first chapter.  However, I've always enjoyed the classics.  I've read Gone With The Wind so many times that I'm actually on my third copy.  To Kill A Mockingbird still makes me cry.  The Grapes of Wrath could have been written about my own family who drove to California from Oklahoma with every possession they owned piled on their trucks, hoping to escape the drought of the Dust Bowl and find hope in the Golden State.  I think that's why I am taking it so personally that they want to sanitize the language of Huckleberry Finn.

True, Huckleberry Finn does use the N-word a lot.  This, of course, has led to the book being banned in school districts by supposedly educated paranoid intellectuals.  Is it really so painful for children, usually teenagers, to read that word in print, especially if it is used as a point of discussion within the class?  Just because we have a black president, do we have to sanitize historical literature so we will not be able to find any derogatory speech that someone might find offensive?  What does this accomplish, other than to hide our country's past in a cloud of PC bullshit?  Yes, I said PC bullshit.  I've always found political correctness to be complete bullshit and this is taking it a step too far.

By destroying classic American literature to clean up the language, we are destroying an important part of our nation's history: the bad part.  The use of the N-Word in books like Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Gone With The Wind and To Kill A Mockingbird is representative of where we were in the past and how far we've come from that time.  Of course there is still racism in this country but attempting to scrub it from our history will not make it go away.  Banning books has never resulted in anything positive.  Sanitizing history will never make up for any atrocities or prevent them from happening again.  I wish these so called intellectuals would remember the most important lesson we learned in school.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

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