Saturday, January 8, 2011

Tweaking Twain and Outrageous Claims

"Outrageous"....That seems to be my most often said word this week. And it's been just about a full week with that word sprinkled liberally across the top of it all...with any number of rude expletive's following those many outbursts of 'Outrageous' exclamations.

It seems while we were all sleeping our way through life, yet another foolish soul has come along. This one has decided that Mark Twain's classic rendering of the fictional tale 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' is actually quite a poor product and needs to be 'fixed'. This foolish man thinks that one word in the story, 'Nigger' is wrong. It shouldn't be there and it needs to be struck out in every instance where it is used. He also thinks it would be a far better product and more widely accepted by the world at large, with the word 'Slave' were inserted in place of every 'Nigger' word deletion instead.

This foolish man thinks that the use of the word 'Nigger' is insulting, debasing, and politically non-correct. which it is. But, it's use mainly casts the worst light on the user of the word, and gives us a rough idea of the users callous and rude nature rather than the one it is directed at. I'm guessing that this foolish man doesn't know many other people out there in the work-a-day-world and hasn't come to realize lately the only people who seem to use the word 'Nigger' now-a-days are most often black themselves...(Its use looks to have fallen out of favor in most other groups for some strange reason). Within the black community the word 'Nigger is tossed about with proliferate abandon, imagine that... The last real stronghold of its spoken use is actually within the VERY GROUP of people themselves, who are first in line to call it what it is, an insult, a derogatory term or degrading name.

Now you'd think this foolish mans name would spring 'lightning quick' to your fore brain (likely it wont), and lips just as fast and easily as Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain. After all, he MUST be at LEAST as good and prolific a writer as Twain himself to think he knows how to 'FIX' whats wrong and surely that's been the root cause of what's been hanging up the popularity and acceptance of Twain's work. Goodness knows once he (so clearly and obviously the better writer of the two), straightens out this little 'glitch' and puts it right....That poor old devil Twain might FINALLY have a slim chance at getting his book on the New York Times best sellers list...Then Twain can REALLY start making a name for himself....

You'll notice I do not endeavour to produce this foolish man's name for you, nor put it into print here (or anywhere else). I think he's already gotten far more exposure than he deserves and web crawling search engines would latch on to any reference to his actual name that I might use...if I did...and keep the foolish man in the ill gained literary spotlight and wielding what little influence he has, in the public eye even longer.

The worst and most ironic part of the entire tale is that he...'The Foolish Man' is somehow responsible for the conservatory of Twain's literature...This smacks a bit of letting the fox conserve the hen house with this newest development. He says replacing the word Nigger with Slave 'Will facilitate the story being more widely read and accepted'...Now all we have to do is to 're-write' it...
Well, why don't we slap a 'Speedo' on the statue of David...then more people might feel better about looking at it. Hey, lets update the Mona Lisa while we're at it, with some red lips, paler skin and maybe a dab or two of blue eye shadow...Then surely more people will want to take a peek at her less homely visage.

No, I don't believe it is wise to perpetuate foolishness and further dumbing down of the world at large under the guise and often misused banner of 'political correctness', when we start to feel we have the 'right' to do so.....is exactly the moment in time that we start to loose our right to free speech and self expression.
Keeping the original work.....original and as intended? Why, why....That's outrageous!

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