|
|
|
|
|
|
by hrbf
1524 days ago
|
|
|
> (e.g. taxpayer-funded BBC removed an old episode of Fawlty Towers, itself a taxpayer-funded BBC production, from their streaming platform for being racist after the George Floyd incident [1]) Just read up on that and am shaking my head in disbelief about the fragility of, well, everything really. Technology, emotions, interpretations, a general sense of having to pre-emptively react to anything and everything. Even at the time of creation, Basil Fawlty was a caricature of a deeply despicable man and other characters equally so. Best leave it to John Cleese himself to sum it up: > Cleese spoke against the removal of the episode due to the Major's use of racial slurs: "The Major was an old fossil left over from decades before. We were not supporting his views, we were making fun of them. If they can't see that, if people are too stupid to see that, what can one say?" |
|
|
Yet throughout the story Huck runs into all sorts of people who are mostly acting like great people on the outside, yet invariably turn out to be horrible people on the inside (even including Huck himself). The one exception is Jim who actually ends up being a selfless and good person, inside out, from the start to the end.
The whole story is a reminder that what people pretend to be, and what they are - often have a rather strong disconnect. That many schools have successfully banned the book from the classroom because of the pejorative used, is perhaps one of the clearest reflections of the state of contemporary education. It'd be like if Germany had chosen to ban Schindler's List because the lead character is a Nazi.