opinion

"lest our unexamined moral assumptions turn out to be as faulty as theirs.". No, they are. The "real message" is that the majority of people in most towns are fools.

Didn't Hitler burn all the books that didn't fit his model? The Russians rewrote history, too. This is the Liberal mantra.

What many people don't understand is that Huck Finn makes people look within themselves as to how they view others, as opposed to a typical "Disney-style" book that approaches racism in the simplistic way of: 1) book begins with a person victimized by racism 2) person struggles to overcome acts of racism 3) justice occurs 4) everyone is friends.

Books should be sacrosanct, pure and simple. Leave Mark Twain's writings alone!

See my post on last Friday's Strib Community Voices: "Censoring Twain, or Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before." Link: http://bit.ly/fQjWtg

Mr. Tice. You are wrong. You may stand tall with your newsroom pals,, but you are still WRONG.

I have my original version and he can rewrite anything he wants anyway he wants. Mark Twain is not to be sanitized in my house.

Then again, there is no completely trusted code of morality in our own times. Apparently everything is open to contention nowadays - including, it seems, whether we revise the language of a classic novel to render it palatable to contemporary social tastes. But simply because it appears - and I emphasize appearance, because we labor at it so mightily - that everything is debatable, mutable, up for grabs, doesn't make it necessarily so. A simple proposition: we understand ontologically, for example, slavery is morally unacceptable and that we can never return to such a system. But still, you'll find christian fundamentalists these days who'll tell you slavery wasn't so terribly wrong or morally bad because, after all, it was practiced in the Bible. The point? Yes, the sensibility of our own time is certainly divisive, but so much of it is foolishly divisive - or just plain foolish: that science is under attack; that dumb social bigotries that were of the fashion in the middle ages still find acceptance; that demagoguery passes for debate; that we ludicrously continue to talk of gun right while episodes of mass slaughter by firearm (not to mention the casualty rate) escalate; that we continue to kick back to the richest though it certainly does nothing to enrich, much less sustain, the general welfare the country, that flushing billions of corporate dollars into our political system will not make us a more free or better nation, but likely the opposite. I could go on, but it's enough to say that we are not completely awash in moral confusion; quite the opposite. Often, we know all to well what to do. The moral attribute of our age is not confusion, but the failure to act on our moral courage and make the necessary change.

Leave Twain alone. I can only imagine what some well-meaning person would do to Innocents Abroad or the Mysterious Stranger. Write your own Huckleberry Finn, if you can.

What in h____ does this discussion have to do with the tiresome tug of war between political extremists of one kind or another? This is a discussion about what a great book did to make us see ourselves as we were then and are now. To bring in the often childish politicizing of everything but how we pick our noses is exactly what's fueling entirely too much of too much these days.