With my dear old friend and confidant Mlle Jenny, I recounted how badly I loathed “To kill a Mockingbird”. Jenny expressed some surprise, in that she’d never heard anyone have that opinion of the book; for me, it was a cast of cardboard caricatures of evil white trash and evil white people in general oppressing a poor innocent black man who never did a bad thing in his life. In fact the only “good” white people are the people willing and able to game the system to “Save” the innocent black man, but the evil white men win in the end, and oh isn’t it tragic how much power those evil white people have and shouldn’t those white trash morons be all killed?

maybe it’s just politically incorrect not to love this book, or the movie- in fact we got to this point with my confession how much I despised Gregory Peck- a fine actor, but a commie sonofabitch, and maybe that movie is what cemented my dislike of him.

Am I the only one who feels like this? This story (Among many)is one of the commandments that we were all to be trained to hate ourselves and ignore the transgressions of the “oppressed”, couched in feelgood language and metaphor. It seems to have worked just fine.