Killing a Mockingbird

Image Source Front cover art for the book To Kill a Mockingbird

“Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’”That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.”‘Your father’s right,’ she said. ‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.”

—Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

“Take me to a place without no name.”

– Michael Jackson, “A Place With No Name”

Harper Lee’s book To Kill A Mockingbird continues to get reproduced. It is read across the country in school. Now the book is going to Broadway. We should all breathe a sigh of relief that Hamilton no longer center stage. What was with that play anyways? Could anyone figure that out? Wasn’t American history class nauseating and unbelievable for more people? If there was a national poll on Hamilton one would guess it would do no better than the 1% who actually saw it.

Hamilton and To Kill A Mockingbird are the same story, more or less. It’s a fairy type of heroic rich white men in a history that produced none of these characters. To dull the sins of the present moment these stories are repeated. History is told inaccurately not for history’s sake, but for the sake of the present. If there were heroes in the past, why couldn’t there be heroes now?

To Kill A Mockingbird isn’t about a black guy (Tom Robinson) getting accused of rape….

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