Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Week’s Most Conspicuous, Ubiquitous, and Ridiculous Headlines

TO KILL A FINCH
For decades, true believers in the holy cause of anti-racism have venerated the unrealistically saintly Atticus Finch, the heroic white lawyer from To Kill a Mockingbird who valiantly attempts to defend an innocent black man from false rape charges. (We will note that progressives only believe that false rape accusations exist when it’s a black man being accused of it.)

Well, those same true believers are pooping their diapers at the revelation in Harper Lee’s “new” book”€”technically, it was written before To Kill a Mockingbird but wasn’t released until last week”€”that in his dotage, Mr. Finch became a crusty Southern bigot just like all those other white male jerkasaurii who roam the South stomping on the oppressed like hate-filled dinosaurs.

In Go Set a Watchman“€”which is set twenty years after Mockingbird“€”Finch’s daughter Scout returns from the bustling and reputedly sophisticated climes of New York City only to discover to her horror that the small Alabama town in which she was whelped is a festering scum pit of racism and bigotry teeming with racist bigots and bigoted racists.

Chief among them is her dad, Ol’ Atticus, who is depicted criticizing the NAACP and attending a Klan meeting. The backsliding bigot spews the following hatenuggets:

The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people….Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?

In an embarrassingly premenstrual outburst, The New York Times panicked about Finch’s “abhorrent” and “evil” views, which it described as “disgustingly grotesque…hate speech.” Calm the hell down, Gray Lady, and take a Midol!

The Guardian, that unintentionally hilarious bastion of sheltered white guilt and well-financed liberal lunacy, hurriedly slapped together a panel of nonwhite commentators to address this literary emergency. Some black dude whose first name is “Kiese” lamented that Watchman “is set in a world where all the women are white, all the men are black, [and] all the niggers are niggers….” Mister Kiese apparently did not feel that the book sufficiently took “the horrifying, meandering spectacle of American whiteness” to task. Another black panelist sniffed at the very notion that a Southern cracker could ever be humane: “the idea that a white southerner of that era could be ‘gentleman’ enough to be above racism was always ludicrous to me.”

What becomes clear when considering both of Harper Lee’s books as one unit is that Harper Lee, not Atticus Finch, has always been the hero”€”channeling her own confused soul through the character of Scout, these books paint the idea that a reclusive female misfit who flees from Alabama to New York is more innately righteous than all those hateful, stinking redneck reptiles who slither around down South amid the humid swamps and parched red clay. In this book, Harper Lee outs herself as the Stanley Ann Dunham of American fiction.

By the way, regarding the idea of black men being falsely accused of rape”€”FBI statistics suggest that interracial rape is almost exclusively a black-on-white thing these days. Chew on that, Scout.

LUCHA LIBRE: THE DONALD v. EL CHAPO
Love him or hate him, Donald Trump still appears to be the only Republican presidential candidate who may not actually be a wax figure. His latest media debacle involves a Twitter war with recently escaped Mexican cartel kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera.

The Donald capitalized on Chapo’s escape by tweeting:

The joke around town is that I freed El Chapo from the Mexican prison because the timing was so good w/ my statements on border security.

On a Twitter account reportedly managed by Chapo’s son, the cartel leader barked back:

If you keep pissing me off I”€™m going to make you eat your words you fucking white milk-shitter.

The word translated as “white” there was also translated as “blond” in other reports. The original Spanish word that Chapo used”€”guero“€”is a common Mexican anti-white slur, as any white person who’s lived in California and tried to order a burrito from a food truck knows.

And the term “milk-shitter” is a common Mexican anti-gay slur. You’ll have to figure out why for yourself”€”it’s too revolting to explain.

But here you have a Mexican criminal”€”Donald Trump has endured weeks of media howling merely for suggesting that such a species exists”€”using racial and anti-gay slurs. But most of the people who normally get upset about such things are cheering El Chapo on, because Donald Trump is a white male and everyone knows they’re the only ones capable of bigotry, so shut up and I hope you choke to death on your magical invisible white privilege.