In this age of political correctness, something is wrong and I think it is me. Or maybe, just maybe it is not me but rather jongleurs like Gary Black, a Georgia Republican who serves as agricultural commissioner and Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery.Strange it seems that as me, they are men born and bred in the deep and dirty south. Although we claim as home the same region of this great nation, I remain proud while the aforementioned churls appear to have a similar collective unconscious, to use a phrase coined by Jung to suggest embarrassment and cowardice. Yes my ancestors were the descendants of slaves and the original people who populated these shores prior to illegal aliens from Europe arrival to our nation, murdering them and providing them with blankets infected with small pox courtesy of General Amherst.
Obvious Black and Gribben have a katzenjammer and are ashamed and rightly so of their collective historical reality, and like a child, they want to hide it as if they were placing their hands over their eyes in a false effort not to be seen. Black, a former agribusiness lobbyist and good ole boy pal to Gov. Sonny Perdue and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagal, wants to remove murals of slaves harvesting sugarcane on a Georgia Plantation and picking cotton removed from the state building where his office is located. Why, because he doesn’t like them. I guess in his myopia slaves were never in Georgia let alone used to pick cotton in his home of Commerce, Georgia. I find this strange since Black openly voiced support for the stars and bars to remain of the Georgia state flag and protested vehemently against Martin Luther King’s Holiday just as loud as Nathan Deal and former Governor Roy Barnes.
Gribben likewise, seems to be of the same fabric, since he has unilaterally decided to reword or better yet re-write historical fiction by replacing the n-word, half breed and injun Joe with slave, half blood and Indian Joe in mark Twain’s historical Masterpiece Huck Finn. This to me hides the historical truths of the 1840’s Mississippi Valley reality of Missouri. Why not native American Joe? American slavery was based on race and slave singularly doesn’t show the actual perceptions of the time period.
But who am I as a writer and scholar to question these men? I would say a proud American, who would question Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour when he said the civil rights era was not that bad and that the White Citizens Council did good – when it was formed ex post facto Brown Versus Board of Topeka for its segregation ruling.
I have seen pictures of lynchings and burnings of black men in front of crowds of whites, it is history and essential. Unfortunately, if autocratic hustlers of History the likes of Barbour, Black and Gribben had their way, we would have know knowledge of such for wuss-like sensationalism is more important than fact or truth. Orwell was correct when he wrote “in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
