Posted on 01/26/2011 9:46:43 AM PST by jim byrd
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is being censored; since censorship is a concept and weapon of the Left to enforce political correctness upon the masses, Mark Twain is involved in 21st century politics; when advocating or opposing the censoring of "Huck Finn," one has taken a political stance But the Right has a storied history of ceremoniously burning books that they believe are evil with celebrated bonfires. Both the political Left and Right have ink-stained hands.
(Excerpt) Read more at jimbyrd.com ...
The ‘’Right’’ burned books? Where? When? If this idiot means the Nazis then he is what I just said, an idiot. The Nazis were Leftists. They’ll all about banning books, and burning them.
Right on, brother! That was the National SOCIALIST Party.
Is there some particular reason you felt a need to post this same blog post twice this morning?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2663567/posts
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Mr. Byrd, you would have much more credibility here on Free Republic if you would interact with the replies when you post your writings and post a substantially long excerpt OR the whole article if it isn’t several pages long.
A link to the original article would help also.
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We require bloggers to post a substantial excerpt or the whole article, not just one paragraph.
Please follow these directives in the future, or we will pull your posts with an admonishment to do so.
Thank you. And where the left burned books, they then burned people.
Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben prepares a new version of Huckleberry Finn, which removes the N-word among others. To me this result raises the barriers attacked by Twain.
When I read The Life and Times of Fredrick Douglas, one passage always stayed with me. After speaking to an abolitionist audience, Douglas considered the evening a great success, because he concluded his talk believing these people were convinced he was equally human with them. Those who saw the TV show Roots can remember the president of the black college being asked to sing by his benefactor to convince the woman she was with about how precious these people were because of their wonderful voices. Even the strongest supporters of blacks questioned whether they were as fully human as themselves.
Now comes Mark Twain in 1876, just a few years after the decline of the KKK, saying that even “poor white trash” like Huck Finn can figure out that “Nigger Jim” is just like him. Twain uses a precise choice of words to wash away the entire pretense built up from etiquette, education, wealth, etc., which people acquire to form opinions of themselves and others. Because of Twain’s extraordinary word picture what remains on that raft is two people who can look directly into each others’ eyes.
In his final indictment Twain speaking through Huck Finn tells the reader that the accoutrements of civilization prevent one from being human and recognizing the humanity in others. I find that lesson timeless.
You touch on a good point, one I don’t think has ever been addressed . That is how poor Southern Whites felt about slavery, not so much from the moral position but how did they feel seeing blacks, for better or worse, being kept feed and working, albeit as slaves but certainly their lot was slightly better than poor whites if simply because sick and hungry slaves do little work. Dead ones don’t do any at all. For all intents and purposes no one gave a damn what happened to poor white Southerners.
We could start with the pamphlet by William Pynchon in 1650, which was ordered burned by the Massachusetts General Council in the Market Place at Boston.
To this day, with the crazy church working the media for exposure by threatening a public burning of the Koran. When I mention the Right, it is usually the extreme that we try and distance ourselves from.
Don’t get me wrong about bringing up the Right in this, I am as far Right as one can be. My article is entirely about the Left and their political correct agenda.
I was told that there was not a link by an administrator, and said I would re-post. There is not a function for me to delete the first post.
Can you imagine if Twain was alive today and wanted to do authentic dialogue like he did in Huck Finn? He would be skewered and his work would never see the light of day. Twain was revered world wide.
Shibumi,
Explain to me how am I pimping my blog since it has no counter or advertisements?
I try to follow the format of some postings on here that have links to the articles. Sometimes posting the entire article here changes the formatting. It seems you are more concerned about petty issues rather than the content.
I had not thought about how the poor whites could regard slavery. It is so true that slavery was a dying institution when the Constitution was ratified, mainly because of all the useless mouths the plantation owner had to take care of. One unexamined fact is that the cotton gin was invented after the Constitution was ratified. The passage where a slave was counted as 60% of a person was contradicted by everything else found in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. The compromise becomes much more reasonable once you understand slavery was economically doomed. Eli Whitney made slavery pay. Therefore, the best strategy for owners in the border states who couldn’t grow cotton would be to take the vigorous slaves and “sell them down the river”,and with “an out pouring of compassion” free the remainder. I don’t remember anyone adopting that dual strategy, but I remember many stories about owners choosing one or the other.
Teachable moment: that's pretty much exactly how you don't want to start a blog post: by assuming there's some massive, monolithic thing called "the Right" or "the Left."
You want people to read beyond the first paragraph before they start attacking you, so concentrate on specifics, not on gigantic generalizations.
The irony of all this is that in a lot of ways Mark Twain was on the left in his own time. Or was he? Mises.org has an article claiming he was a (radical) classical liberal. It's not the worst thing they've ever put on the Internet.
Twain probably wouldn't cotton to being taken over by Lew Rockwell's gang, but that's not as much of a stretch as some of the things they've said.
If you have no counter or ads, then there is no reason you cannot post your whole, original content here, is there?
If you have problems with formatting, linking or other technical issues, your friends here will be glad to help you out. You just need to ask.
Just like what happened with another blogger and yours truly on this thread, today -
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2663561/posts?page=9#9
I posted the link for him, and them sent him (through PM) detailed instructions on how to post his links with and without HTML, for which he thanked me. Good feelings all around.
You say I am being more concerned about “petty issues rather than content.” In fact, it’s the content I’m concerned with. I took issue with your content on the first thread you posted ~and~ with the fact that you excerpted the article. You have chosen to ignore the substantive challenge I made to one of the assertions in your excerpt, choosing instead to focus on the other “petty issue” I raised
Post your work in full, and then we’ll discuss it - in full - without the petty issues you have raised by excerpting it.
Liberalism with its geometrically increasing reliance on federal administrative laws and regulations is a gradual encroachment of slavery. Thinking of the healthcare bill, once again politicians offered enchanting material security, while obscuring subservience to rules vastly increasing their power. That legislation attacks our Bill of Rights by confiscating speech and religious freedoms, personal life without access to courts and trial, and Ninth Amendment personal freedoms guaranteed, but not enumerated by our Constitution.
To me pursuit of happiness has always meant spiritual prosperity within the hazards and uncertainties of personal freedoms. However, I can certainly see how slavery could be an attractive tradeoff for someone unmotivated spiritually, and persuaded to see only material poverty. They would not perceive the enormity of human poverty associated with having to beg an elected official or bureaucrat for relief from a law.
Right here, easy to see:
(Excerpt) Read more at jimbyrd.com ...
Why excerpt?
There was a Republican Party in 1650?
I’ve always pointed out to people that after the Communists shot their way into power in 1918 in Russia they consolidated that power by creating a health care system where none had existed previously. This way they could determine who got it and who didn’t, in addition to having an enormous data base on everyone. These are the same people Saul Alinsky and all the other Marxists in America have admired and studied. So has Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. This is what the Marxist/Socialist Democrats are trying to do here.
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