Post by bob quarteroni on Aug 27, 2013 10:06:36 GMT -5
It occurs to me that I'm older than almost anyone here so I know the Ali quote but many of you perhaps don't:
He said:
‘I got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me a ‘nigger’.’
Which reminds me of the incredibly stupid PC decision to pull "Huckleberry Finn," perhaps the greatest American novel
(no less than Ernest Hemingway said: "American fictions begins with Huckleberry Finn") from school libraries and classes because Mark Twain calls the soul of the book "Nigger Jim."
The irony, of course, is that "Nigger Jim" is the moral compass of the book, guiding Huck by example and living an
exemplary life as they travel the physical and metaphysical highway of the Mississippi to Cairo, not an accicdental choice of destinations.
This is Orwellian and scary. In "1984," Orwell constructs a world where"doublethink" is possible.
Doublethink, as one critic notes, is
... the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.
This is what is happening. We see the perpetrators of the crime but, because of doublethink, we don't see them as perpetrators of the crime.
Problem solved.
He said:
‘I got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me a ‘nigger’.’
Which reminds me of the incredibly stupid PC decision to pull "Huckleberry Finn," perhaps the greatest American novel
(no less than Ernest Hemingway said: "American fictions begins with Huckleberry Finn") from school libraries and classes because Mark Twain calls the soul of the book "Nigger Jim."
The irony, of course, is that "Nigger Jim" is the moral compass of the book, guiding Huck by example and living an
exemplary life as they travel the physical and metaphysical highway of the Mississippi to Cairo, not an accicdental choice of destinations.
This is Orwellian and scary. In "1984," Orwell constructs a world where"doublethink" is possible.
Doublethink, as one critic notes, is
... the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.
This is what is happening. We see the perpetrators of the crime but, because of doublethink, we don't see them as perpetrators of the crime.
Problem solved.
