Hiding the past

OK, I already know that school adminstrators are detached from reality. But this week I read something that would be hilarious if it didn't illustrate the insanity at the heart of political correctness.

One of the most powerful books on Southern small-town racism is To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, which was made into a powerful movie with a screenplay by Horton Foote. The story basically only has one plot device: a young girl (based on Lee herself) and two boys (one based on her real-life childhood friend Truman Capote) learn how to empathize with others, in particular Southern blacks (during a time of pervasive racism) and the mentally ill (during a time of prejudice). One of the main plot lines includes the girl's father, the unforgettable Atticus Finch, defending a black man accused of attempted rape of a white woman. As Atticus clearly proves during the trial, the rape charges were concocted, because the woman was beaten by her father after he saw her flirting with a black man; nevertheless, the black man is convicted by an all-white jury and then murdered "trying to escape" before he can appeal.

By focusing on the horrors of one case, the book (and the subsequent movie) made a memorable statement about racism in the rural South before the civil-rights movement. Apparently this is a subject that some Southerners would rather forget, because this story depicts the efforts of a South Carolina school principal to block a high school production of the play. The only interesting part of this story is the evidence that people like this principal are growing smarter about how to attack unflattering material without ending up skewered in the national media. In this case, the principal's argument is that the play should be cancelled for reasons of political correctness: because the bigots in the story utter bigoted lines that might offend blacks when taken out of context.

You've gotta love the brilliance of this argument. If it works, I picture neo-Nazis arguing that there can't be any more depictions of the Holocaust because the Jewish might be offended by lines and actions taken out of context; Chinese arguing that there can't be any more depictions of Mao's Great Leap Forward because intellectuals might be offended; etc.

Heck, before it's over, I expect Democrats to argue that there shouldn't be any more depictions of the Jimmy Carter presidency because everyone who was alive at the time and not a member of the Carter family might be offended.