Tag: Mark Twain

Happy New Year

“Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”
— Benjamin Franklin
(1706-1790) US Founding Father

“Alcohol didn’t cause the high crime rates of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today’s alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does…. Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was.”
— Judge James Paine
U.S. District Court
Source: address to the Florida Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991

“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
— Mark Twain
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)

Innocence at home?

Cover of "The Adventures of Huckleberry F...
To be cleaned up

Huckleberry Finn is to be bowdlerized for various pragmatic reasons, no need to go into them here.

But de-niggerizing Huckleberry Finn doesn’t necessarily inoculate teachers from the danger of teaching that 19th century text in an offensive way. If anything, it might just give us all an inflated sense of protection from the most dishonorable aspects of our nation’s history.

Is this what we mean by post-racial? If so, it is a good example of the difference between repression and transcendence.

Thus John L. Jackson Jr. in The Chronicle of Higher Education.