Over on Wonkette, Rebecca Schoenkopf writes a brilliant post asking Why Is Barack Obama Injecting Race Into Classic Children’s Tale ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’?
Known race-hustler B. Hussein NOobAma will introduce USA network’s 50th anniversary broadcast of the film version of the charming children’s story of a simpler, less complicated time in American life, To Kill A Mockingbird. Why is Obama injecting race into and making himself the focus of this classic tale of postracial America?
“I’m deeply honored that President Obama will be celebrating the 50th Anniversary of To Kill A Mockingbird by introducing it to a national audience,” Pulitzer prize winner and famously media-shy Lee says. “I believe it remains the best translation of a book to film ever made and I’m proud to know that Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch lives on — in a world that needs him now more than ever.”
Harper Lee is a known associate of negros and homosexuals. To Kill A Mockingbird airs on USA Saturday at 8 p.m. [THR, via Wonkette operative “chascates”]
Now if you are so out of the loop on current events you do not get the point of Ms. Schoenkopf’s satire, you just need to know that President Obama remarked that the young black teenager shot to death by an armed private citizen acting supposedly as a neighborhood watchmen down in Florida might have looked like his son, if he had one. Obama has been accused of injecting racism into the incident by saying the following:
President Obama said today the nation needs to do some “soul searching” over the shooting death of unarmed African-American teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida.
“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Obama said at the White House.
I was in high school in Birmingham, AL, when the book “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published. The library of the school refused to add the book to the collection. It was deemed “too controversial”.
Later that decade, The Birmingham News newspaper refused to carry the comic strip Pogo the week that it ran one of its most classic bits of satire during the presidential campaign when George Wallace and Curtis LeMay were running as a ticket. The comic strip portrayed them as little chicken hawks, riding around as a motorcycle gang in black leather, only they were riding tricycles. Again, just to durn controversial.
If any of you have not seen the film of “To Kill a Mockingbird” with Gregory Peck, you have not seen what I personally rank as one of the top 10 films of all time, ever. You must see it. Besides, how can you not want to see Robert Duvall’s first film appearance, as Boo Radley? Aside form the finest acting Gregory Peck ever produced. And it is in beautiful living black and white film. Everything was black and white then. I don’t think the film would have been as good in color. It focuses the viewer on the film’s characters and messages very profoundly, I think, a brilliant decision by the filmmakers.
And if you think the scene with the mad dog is staged, well, you did not grow up in the South. I saw that scene in real life, only it was my father with his pistol shooting the dog that came into our back yard when I was a mere child.
Someone once remarked that Harper Lee must not have been a very good writer, she never wrote another novel. To which the response was, if you write something like “To Kill a Mockingbird”, you don’t have to.
I rank this book write up there with Mark Twain’s “Adventure’s of Huckleberry Finn”, if you want to start a list of the Great American Novels.
