Oct 12 2007
Reading and Freedom
Today, I checked out an e-book of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by the infamous Mark Twain, or Samuel Clemens, as it were. It is difficult to express the pure delight I gain in reading this book. I’ve likely read it for classes two or three times, but it’s a book I come back to, probably once a year or so. It’s good, solid reading.
Mark Twain has this absolutely divine way of making you laugh and making you think – without being direct or preach-y about it. It’s a skill very few people have, and one that it’s often difficult to find in a writer.
That being said, I never understood the hullabaloo about the book being taught in public schools. Okay, so he says some words that socially-conscious people don’t say anymore. It’s just funny to me that people can miss the point so entirely. He writes those words into his characters’ mouths, while at the same time decrying the words – in a softly prodding way. I guess the point is people who want to ban literature generally don’t read it. Or they’re too stupid to figure out what it means, or to even want to figure out what it means. Which is ridiculous, because when we read we should consider intent as well as content.
When I was in high school, my parents came back from a back to school night angry. Some group had left a flyer on their car about literature that should be banned from our schools. My father took extreme exception to the fact that every author on the list was a minority – either African American or Hispanic. His reaction was to go online and purchase every book on the list. He read them all. I read them all. We sat down and we talked about them.
The weird thing was – most of those books were banned for language or violence inflicted on the characters. For example – Maya Angelou describes a rape she suffered as a young child in detail in the autobiographical, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It seemed to me then that a society which inflicts violence and discrimination against people which it later regrets, but then attempts to stifle the expression of victims of that violence and discrimination, is not a society that actually cares about what those people have suffered. It’s a society that is not willing to look at the pain which is constantly present in their society. That’s true of all the pain people suffer from, whether it be due to ethnicity or economic status. And that is the most damning thing society can suffer from.
We can realize – as a culture, as a society – that we will always have people who will suffer for their differences. We can try to do our best to account for those differences.
I don’t mean after the fact by paying people some money. I mean, change our policies now to give people as much equal footing as possible. Like, say, by providing people with universal health coverage. Or paying for everyone to attend college or a technical school. Because anyone who is stupid enough to believe that two parents, both high school educated and working full-time, have time to take their children to a doctor or to save money for college when they have to pay for health insurance and child care – needs to get with the times. That is not America anymore, that’s not how most of us live. and when the unhappy minority slowly becomes the majority – there should be crazy revolution.
But, back to my reading. Before they start burning books.
K.
The contents of this blog entry may not reflect the views of the Webmaster of Doom, Michael.