Kathleen Parker is getting a much undeserved reputation of being a "moderate" conservative ONLY because she has fingered Sarah Palin as an Airhead. Don’t be fooled.
Her most recent column is the ultimate in what is called "the straw man" argument. One obscure civil rights activist writing for the New Yorker has suggested that Harper Lee was lacking in her book "To Kill a Mockingbird" by presenting Atticus Finch for doing the right thing but failing to change the apartheid culture of depression era Mississippi. She finds another example from half a century old incident of leftist George Orwell for criticizing Charles Dickens for writing about poverty but doing nothing about it.
So there you have the tone of today’s over the top liberal literary thought! I asked my friend Bubba if he had read that book. "Book! I only use them to shoot bullets into to check the penetrating power of my armory of guns and ammo. Which Mr. Jite, I will be taking to the Rockets games next season."
I write this piece to get to the last paragraph from Ms Parker which I find so compelling I could not leave it alone. Wrong issue, right words.
My own recollection of the book, which I first read as a child, was that it was full of hard and ugly truths. The story, because it was revealed through the eyes of another child, caused me to understand injustice as no textbook or lecture ever could. Such is the power and mystery of literature.
To kill a mockingbird is a sin, Finch told his children, because it brings no harm to others. "They don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us," a neighbor further explained." Don’t judge Atticus Finch by today’s standards
There it is, the perfectly description of the issue of Gay Rights, which I am sure Ms Parker completely missed.
Let me take this opportunity to jot down my list of PERFECT humans in literature.
Samwise Gamgee
Horatio Hornblower
Atticus Finch
Virgin Mary
Billy Pilgrim
And not to forget my most controversial choice… Holden Caufield. Can anyone come up with something bad Holden did? Reading it recently I noticed how feminist it was for its time, and a correlation to the story of Christ. Good deeds result in bad ends. 🙂