Sugarcoating and Sanitizing

A new edition of Mark Twain’s classic, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” will be out next month from NewSouth Books. It will not use the N-word. All 219 times it was used by the author, it is being replaced by “runaway slave.” Political correctness, just like with this past week’s reading of the Constitution, is being extended into the past.

How distressing. As if we can’t admit that we were what we once were.

Is it because we can’t admit what we now are?

There are all kinds of reasons, to me, for finding this distressing, some of them literary. But my main response to this is a feeling of shock and disbelief. Where will this sort of trend take us? What happens when you sugarcoat and sanitize? What are you trying to hide? Is it an avoidance of taking the time needed to place situations in their correct context? An avoidance of understanding? Is it a disavowal that we’re smart enough to read Mark Twain for what he said rather than the words he used?

I don’t know. It just gets to me.

In the literary sense, I can tell you that from the small amount of publishing I’ve done, I have desired at times to reach back and make changes that would grant me to seem less obtuse or more kindly than I was feeling at the time.

When The Given Self came out, one of my friends wrote me that he took the first chapters like the “ding ding ding” at the start of a boxing match. He thought I was picking a fight. Well, hell, sometimes you can’t point things out that are concerning you without placing them in context.

Are there some things you wish you might feel free to change as an author? Sure. Would you want anyone else sanitizing your words? Certainly not. It smacks of sinister stuff to me, no matter how well intentioned, and of the generally dumbing-down of the American public.

And again it strikes me as leaving out those things that we see, perhaps, as mistakes of the past, our fear of the imperfection of human beings. Of wanting to take the good without the bad. Of believing that we can protect the children rather than educate them. Of believing that we can whitewash the American way, or maybe even our souls.