America's Wiener Strikes Again

This one hits a little too close to home.

The reason Flagler Palm Coast [Fl] High School students won't be performing "To Kill A Mockingbird" boils down to one ugly word.

"I think it's the 'n-word,' " said Ed Koczergo, the school's theater director. "It's in there 23 times and it scares people."

He said the word can't be removed from the script because of copyright laws.

A school committee recommended canceling the production because members didn't want students to be in the middle of a controversy, according to Jacob Oliva, the high school's principal. He said he started hearing concerns from parents, students and other community members about the offensive language in the play when the students were in the third week of rehearsals.

"Nigger" is a despicable word. Its infusion of condescension, dehumanization, and provocation is intentional and malicious. It is a word used exclusively (contemporarily) by bigots and ignorami. And no one in the history of American art has depicted that as clearly as Harper Lee, the greatest author ever to publish only one book.

Atticus Finch is a hero whose time has come again. These Florida hand-wringers do a great disservice to their children and to the cause of liberty by muzzling him.

Rockets' Red Glare

Sunburn crept down my unprotected scalp, its progress imperceptible save for the stinging pain left behind every time I wiped the sweat from my forehead. Shaving my head was a dumb idea this time of year; forgetting the sunscreen was even dumber. Just ahead of me, a man in full woodland camouflage struggled to walk -- likely a symptom of the enormous cantaloupe-sized growth protruding from his ilium. A combat shotgun hung taut on a strap across the cripple's back, and I absently fingered the .38 special on my belt. It felt strange to be envious of him.

Sharp, overlapping machine-gun blasts vibrated in my foam earplugs with regularity, but no one in this area was paying any attention. They were here to buy. A hand-drawn tag Scotch-taped to the leviathan rifle in front of me read simply "$56,000" and was set directly behind an upturned Nazi SS helmet overflowing with brass knuckles: "$6 each". A rack of silk-screened t-shirts caught my eye -- the classic Che Guevara design re-imagined with President Obama in relief and letters added to spell "douCHEbag". Noticing my line of sight, the vendor piped up, grinning with half his mouth as he drew me in.

"A colored fella' looked at that one earlier. He said he loved it! Said he hated liberals!"

I've no reason to believe the t-shirt and brass-knuckle salesman was in any way representative of the hundreds of friendly, freakishly-knowledgeable vendors hawking their hawk-wares at the Knob Creek (KY) Machine Gun Shoot last Saturday. In fact, beyond the anachronistic (and innocuous) use of the term "colored", there was nothing terribly offensive about his observation or his shirts. And while crazies were out in force -- I can't shake the image of a man enthusiastically greeting an eight-year-old boy to his booth with a crisp Hitlergruß -- in aggregate the event was more Paula Dean than Anarchist Cookbook.

Firearms unquestionably outnumbered attendees by a factor of ten, both for sale and in personal possession, and I'm fairly certain I've never felt so safe in all my life. Vendors routinely turned their backs on unsecured items worth tens of thousands of dollars; after all, who would try to rob these people? Even US Senate candidate Rand Paul made an early appearance, pressing the flesh with hobbyists and kooks alike with no visible security entourage of any kind.

Had MSNBC been on the scene (like the New Zealand Herald?), it would have been easy to cherry-pick a ratings-grabbing hodgepodge of militants and racists, but the reality is that Knob Creek was ideal family fare. Between rich historical displays, a live band, "feel-free-to-touch!" meteorites, a light-and-sound show that puts fireworks to shame, and a swiftboatload of genuine experts teaching respect for and healthy caution toward weapons, the Machine Gun Shoot is exactly the kind of event Washington, Adams, and Jefferson would have enjoyed.

At eighty-seven degrees, less parking than your average Hawaiian Shave Ice hut, and no beer for sale, 8000 people certainly didn't come all this way just to whisper about "colored" people.

Decimating Diversity

As a member of a cushy ethno-socioeconomic majority, my capacity to empathize with the deep, victorious feeling of pride that Barack Obama's election must have elicited among many blacks is limited. Given the tumultuous year that followed, though, how is this possible:



Over the time period covered by the poll, Obama's approval is down among Republicans (unsurprisingly) by 24 percentage points. Among Independents, his approval is down 18 points. Among young people: down 13. The elderly, females, Midwesterners, college graduates, married people -- Obama's approval is down at least 16 percentage points in each group. In fact, the President's approval rating is down in every single category Gallup looked at, including liberals and Democrats.

Except among blacks. Though it is within the poll's margin of error, Obama's approval actually increased among blacks between February and November, maintaining an average of 93% approval for the year.

In the entire scope of politics, religion, philosophy -- or toothpaste preference for that matter -- where would anyone expect concurrence exceeding nine out of ten? In a separate poll about abortion by the same polling company, only 52% of respondents categorized themselves as "pro-life" when the question was asked exclusively to Catholics. To put it in another context, the percentage of blacks who disapprove of Obama as President is identical to the percentage of people who ranked car salesmen as "very high/high" in honesty and ethics, and the same percentage of self-identified Christians who say they don't believe in God.

A generations-long (and continuing) struggle for equal opportunity has got to make it difficult to admit you backed a turkey, but blindly supporting a President because he looks like you is every bit as dangerous as blindly opposing him just because he doesn't. Not all of Obama's support is blind, obviously, but approval approaching unanimity in one group simultaneous with near-universal disappointment outside that group displays a disturbing lack of ideological diversity.