![To_Kill_a_Mockingbird[1]](/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/To_Kill_a_Mockingbird1.jpg)
Nellie Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird, has died at the age of 89. She wrote a famous, heavily promoted, and somewhat mendacious book, which was made into an equally famous, promoted, and mendacious movie with Gregory Peck.
Kathy Shaidle recently wrote in TakiMag that "Harper Lee is the Rachel Carson of American fiction", meaning that Lee's book has been as damaging to American society in its basic falsity as Carson's Silent Spring was to the environment.
Shaidle wrote (before Lee's death) that
I don’t remember watching the movie, mind you, but I must have. Or else To Kill a Mockingbird has permeated the cultural water table so thoroughly—let’s face it, the book and film are secular scripture—that I’ve somehow absorbed the story through my skin.And that permeation has been a disaster for the United States.
I don’t just mean how every fifth American movie or TV show apparently has to include a scene set in a steamy Southern courtroom, complete with slowly turning ceiling fans and lawyers in sweaty white shirts and suspenders, thundering about creationism, the Klan, or President Kennedy.
In real life, over the past five decades, how many thousands upon thousands of idiots went to law school because they wanted to be Atticus Finch? They give themselves goose bumps, repeating “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’” to themselves like it’s the Jesus Prayer. One day, they’re sure of it, someone will say that about them…
But because Atticus Finch is a fictional character, said idiots inevitably became the kinds of lawyers (and social workers and journalists and “activists” and politicians and their backroom operatives) who’ve transformed your city or town into a tangle of bike lanes, weekly ethnic festivals, dueling genocide museums, gluten-free day cares, free heroin-injection sites, ill-conceived “social housing” developments, “nuclear-free zones,” and Nelson Mandela memorials.
To Kill a Mockingbird taught generations of white people that black people are, if not quite “Magic Negros,” then certainly noble but timid angels incapable of sin. How many liberal judges, juries, and parole boards have freed (or ignored) African-Americans guilty of black-on-white crime because they had a sentence or two of Harper Lee’s stuck in their heads?
How many of those black criminals went on to rape and kill again? Hence my comparison of Lee to Rachel Carson: another liberal female hero whose own book—this time, about the “dangers” of DDT—has quite possibly killed more blacks than slavery.
The real villains, according to the Mockingbird worldview (as Charles Murray has documented), are white trash, who, having finally gotten the message (those morons!), are duly killing themselves in disgust.
And when real white villains can’t readily be found, one of those Atticus Finch wannabes will happily conjure some up. (I’m willing to bet $10,000 that you’d easily find an old copy of Mockingbird in Mike Nifong’s house, and maybe even a treasured first edition…)
I made a similar point in The Dominique Strauss-Kahn Scandal: Overkilling The Mockingbird, In The Heat Of The Night, By The Green Mile--people see these movies (including police officers, who should know better) and they assume that the rich white guys are evil rapists, and that accused blacks are innocent, while accused whites are guilty, guilty, guilty!
As a result, Miss Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. Rest in peace—but don't think that they've buried the South with her.
See previously on VDARE.com
