* Eh, call me unsurprised.
I consider myself a close reader of TKAM, re-reading it every few years from age 12 to 48. It’s one of my favorite novels, and reading it is like visiting old friends with their familiar stories.
Am I shocked that Atticus would attend a klan meeting? Only because it would be beneath him for reasons of class. Atticus is commonly portrayed as against the system, but Harper Lee is at pains me to present him as the embodiment of the system. In that era, that included the klan.
His supposed anti-racism that everyone remembers now is again, more of a class signifier. In the book, Atticus was completely respectful of the virulent racist Mrs. Dubose. This is not an insignificant detail – the whole Mrs. Dubose chapter was a break in the narrative of the story in TKAM. For Harper Lee to include it meant that she was important in her childhood, racism and all.
So, no, the Atticus that we think we all know may not be quite the same as the one in Haroer Lee’s imagination.
* There’s a well known story that on one of the FBI tapes of one of MLK’s frequent hotel orgies, he can be be heard shouting to fellow activist Ralph Abernathy “”Come on over here, you big black mother****er, and let me suck your d***.”
IIRC, one of his pals or biographers corroborated the story, but said King was “just joking around.” But there have long been rumors that King swung both ways. The infamous Ron Paul Report accused him of it, for one. (I think RPR even accused him of statutory rape of both girls and boys.)
If it’s true, I wonder if that’s one of the main reasons the files/tapes are sealed until 2027, and if so, will they allow them to be unsealed early, since in today’s environment, being bisexual would only add to King’s luster. Of course, if the underage stuff is true, there’s no way they’ll be released early, as that’s still a no-no.
* There is something cosmically fitting about the fact that the day the SJW bullies and their mainstream liberal media leash-holders finally got the Stars & Bars removed from the grounds of the South Carolina capital, it turns out that one of the most gilded, mythical Saints of Phony White Guilt literature – Atticus Finch – is unmasked as a man who would have been proud to Take His Stand underneath that very banner in the To Kill a Mockingbird sequel. And apparently (I, of course, haven’t read it yet; just going by the agonized Lefty reviews), does.
The SJW meltdown on Twitter is palpable as raw, scrolling rage and agonized bewilderment – “but, but, but…I named my child ‘Atticus’! WTF!?!”
As a longtime admirer – like, since 1978 or so, as a kid – of the story and prose found in To Kill a Mockingbird, I have never doubted the lyricism of the novel, and do not now. It’s a great book – I endorse reading it, one & all. It is also the most powerful Phony White Guilt fiction text of the 20th century: sort of like “Job” meets the tale of Potiphar’s Wife in early Twentieth Century America, with Atticus Finch playing the role of a judicious, wise Solomon, ultimately thwarted by indifferent (Roman; Pontius Pilate) powers beyond his control. The book’s Biblical themes are palpable.
Thus the current SJW befuddlement and rage: it is as if a devout Christian (such as myself) was told that the Psalms – a constant source of comfort and reassurance – had a recently uncovered sequel, and in it Saul’s Ghost – in SJW terms: Bob Ewell’s Shade – was given Divine Voice to repudiate the Sacred text that had come before.
Harper Lee never wanted this sequel published: we now know why. Harper Lee’s declining health and mental capacity has likely led to a situation where she has been, for all practical purposes, removed from the Decision Loop regarding a novel she never wanted to see the light of day in her younger, more cognizant years.
* Atticus Finch was a member of the Alabama state legislature (this is mentioned towards the beginning of the novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird” – I think the movie skipped over that detail), a Southern Democrat. The mere fact he didn’t believe an innocent [Black] man should go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit, doesn’t remotely contradict the fact that, had he been a real person in the 1930s as he was portrayed, that is is quite likely he would have remained a segregationist during the 1960s. I find this a refreshingly realistic portrayal. Hell, I might even read it.
* The trouble is that readers have turned Finch into a god, when Lee simply meant to portray him as a man. He was a professional lawyer who defended a client (who happened to be innocent). He also believed in separate but equal. The two are not incompatible.
* I was a student on a 20% Jewish American campus when the film [The Passion] came out, and that was the year I became really “identitarian” with respect to my race and religion. Before that I had never quite experienced what it was like for Christianity to be attacked qua Christianity and to be condescendingly told that my religion as I understood it was unfit for the civic sphere. Since that time and with a very few but notable exceptions I have sought out, almost exclusively, other white Christians/Catholics for friendship.
* To Kill a Mockingbird was very heavily fictionalized account of Harper Lee’s real lawyer and journalist father. It was written and rewritten to suit the left-wing New York literary tastes of the times.
In reality Harper Lee’s lawyer father was assigned the defense a black father and son who were tried, found guilty and executed(hanged) by the state of Alabama for the murder of a store owner. I could not find evidence of a lynching but there was the possibility of post execution mutilation of the bodies. This caused a great strain on the Lee family with Harper Lee’s mother having mental health problems for the rest of her life. She died when Harper Lee was 25.
Harper Lee’s father left the law and became a small time Journalist. In the later matter of a rape case, where the evidence was conflicted, and both the black rapist , an ex-con, and the white victim were believed to have serious mental health and cognitive issues, Mr Lee argued that capital punishment was too harsh a penalty for the crime. His argument carried the day. There was no serious threat of lynching.
Harper Lee had a interesting and at times courageous father. He was not a saint or a staunch champion of southern blacks. He seems to have been a realist and not a Hollywood left-wing icon by any means.
* Of course Atticus Finch would have held racist views in the 1950s and 60s. He was a white Southern man who was the product of his era. There is nothing inconsistent with such a man standing firmly for the rule of law and against deranged mob justice.
This is what is so infuriating about the SJW crusade: it reduces human beings to a one-dimensional series of political views. I was going to ignore this book, but I might actually read it now because it sounds like the reason Harper Lee kept it under wraps was not that she thought it was bad — it’s because she feared, correctly, that a lot of people wouldn’t be able to handle the cognitive dissonance of seeing Atticus as a realistic, three-dimensional human being with the normal human complement of great gifts and great flaws.
The liberal meltdown over a racist Atticus Finch sounds like a society-wide version of the internal crisis that every bright, sensitive young white Southerner goes through when they are finally introduced to a more complete history of their region, and they learn how many very good and honorable people were also guilty of saying and doing some very bad things — in fact, it sounds like this book is about Scout undergoing this very process. This new Atticus Finch actually sounds a lot like my grandfather, who had much the same mixture of great warmth, sage wisdom, earnest liberalism, and retrograde racial views. For years, I have found it impossible to communicate to non-Southerners how it was conceivable that all of these qualities might exist in the same person. Maybe now they’ll get it.
* This is pretty significant for a couple of reasons.
1) Atticus Finch is basically the Jesus of SJW. All those old Hollywood race movies were sermons with a SWP (shiny white person) as the hero vs the SFRs (sweaty fat racists).
(Watch the movies the bad people are always sweating and the SWP is always lit like they have a halo.)
It’s not the book that’s a big deal it’s the movie with Gregory Peck playing the archetypal shiny white person.
Half the SJWs in the world were converted to SJWism while watching that movie / sermon.
2) Allowing the Jesus/Buddha/Mohamed of SJWism to be torn down like this is an example of the argument over that google doodle. PC first mandated that non-white cannot be associated with anything negative but is now moving into the phase of mandating that nothing positive can be associated with whiteness.
No more shiny white people allowed.
