January 04, 2011

Mr Parsons is helping print other peoples books now and he's making them all better.

"Parsons was Winston's fellow employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the thought police, the stability of the Party depended." George Orwell 1984

Well the  oh-so-open minded types tried to do this over a decade ago and failed. Now it seems they have succeeded in getting rewrites on classic literature in order to ensure that students are not exposed to ideas not vetted for political correctness or the notion that the way we look at the world has progressed in many ways over the centuries.

Yes they are censoring Huck Finn
.

Twain himself defined a "classic" as "a book which people praise and don't read." Rather than see Twain's most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word (as well as the "in" word, "Injun") by replacing it with the word "slave."


Even ignoring the fact that this is just plain wrong in principal, this person is a lit teacher who should understand this particular evil is wrong from a literary sense.

One of the points of the novel is the injustice of bigotry, not specifically, slavery but bigotry. Slavery was banned, except in certain prison situations, by the 14th amendment, yet bigotry based on race, and ethnicity is still with us. Jim's problem was far deeper than just being a slave. It was that even posing as a freeman he was of African extraction. That societal problem could not be escaped, even after 1865. I would be with him where ever he went.
Slave, therefore, is not synonymous with N*##&r in the context of this novel.

I'm sure they'll get references to "Easterlings" out of LOTR eventually.

In case memories are short, Remember that the PC-left tried to pull this off on a rather grander scale (with this same book) back in the '90s. In fact, one newly elected small town mayor called in the town librarian about the time of that controversy and asked point blank if the librarian would remove certain offensive books if asked. The librarian said she would not, and would resign if necessary. The mayor told her that was not necessary and in fact she had passed a test and could stay on as librarian.

The media takeaway was the mayor, (later Governor Palin) tried to ban books.

Remember this sort of thing is only acceptable if it's double plus good.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 04:56 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 See also this.

Posted by: Don at Tue Jan 4 18:21:41 2011 (utUGf)

2 Don.
That hurt.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Jan 4 18:26:11 2011 (EJaOX)

3 Presumably the characters in Tom Sawyer will now include Native American Joe.

Posted by: EdwardM at Thu Jan 6 23:55:36 2011 (JiliV)

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