...let's put literary analysis aside. How about this: don't fuck with works of art. Don't cover the tits or dicks on statues. Don't put out DVDs with the naughty bits cut out of a film. If you can't handle it or are offended by it, move on. The Rude Pundit can't abide intense violence against women in movies, so there's a few allegedly great flicks he's missed. But he wouldn't ask to see Irreversible with the notorious rape scene cut out.
You can't take the word "nigger"? Then, sorry, you don't get to enjoy the rest of Twain's satire of human degradation and idiocy (and you should probably avoid Pudd'nhead Wilson, too). You don't get to watch Pulp Fiction. You don't get to watch unedited episodes of The Jeffersons and Sanford and Son. You don't get to hear Archie Bunker explain about how he got his ass kicked when he was a kid by a black boy because he used the word: "That's what all them people was called in them days. I mean everybody we knew called them people 'niggers.' That's all my old man ever called them, there." No, we're just not that mature anymore. (Yeah, yeah, you can say we've gotten more "sensitive" or some such shit. All that's happened is that we've made the word more powerful by its false invisibility.)
This is ain't about people in places of business or public officials using "nigger." It's about art. Art pisses people off. You think it's ludicrous when dumbass members of Congress get offended by ants crawling on a cross in a video by a gay artist at the Smithsonian? Well, welcome to the other side of the coin.
The name of the game is resale. Biznessmen want to cash in on Twain the way they always have. The N-word doesn't sell anymore.
But there's more to it than that. Read a lot of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and you come up with the inescapable conclusion the man was a liberal progressive even by modern terms. His popular works changed minds and laid a lot of foundation work for the universal suffrage that developed in the late 19th and early 20th century.
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