‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is the ‘Silent Spring’ of American fiction: My NEW Taki’s column

How can the comments possibly be “JOOOOOO!!!!!”-y this week? Let’s wait and see!

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. (…)

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…)

Oh, and here’s that “one-minute movie” I mentioned…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RLEE0ENHoI