Taking my daughter’s school reading list as inspiration, I recently remedied a long-standing omission on my own by picking up Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.  Apart from being an especially enjoyable read, for a classic, it’s a timely one, given recent events.

Given my own vocation, though, what struck me most was my sense of self-identification with Atticus Finch and the likelihood that race-obsessed progressives would think me absurd.  After all, I’m a conservative, which Everybody Knows™ means I’m animated by fundamental bigotry and closed-mindedness, and Atticus put himself and his family on the line in order to assert the integrity of the courtroom and the humanity of the black folks in his community.

That actually points to a literary thread that I picked up in Mockingbird.  During a scene set amidst one of Aunt Alexandra’s “missionary circles” (chapter 24), Mrs. Grace Merriweather (“a faithful Methodist under duress”) laments the state of the “those poor Mrunas” in Africa, with all of their “sin and squalor.”  When it comes to people of the darker race in her own town, naturally, she’s exposed as a thoroughly ignorant racist, who complains that the wife of Tom Robinson should be sullen after he’d become a clear-cut example of injustice in the service of racism.

There’s an echo, here, of Charles Dickens’s Blithe House, in which Mrs. Jellyby neglects her family and ignores the sin and squalor to be found even down the street from her in London while devoting herself to a “Borrioboola-Gha venture” in Africa — again, trying to civilize the savages.

But most relevant to my thoughts, right now, is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.  It also has a scene of racist Southerners being shown to be fools by the ridiculous conclusions they draw from inexplicable actions of Jim… which, the reader knows, were almost entirely the imaginative machinations of Tom Sawyer.  In an essay on the book that probably did its share in keeping me out of graduate school, I theorized that this pointed to Twain’s message.

It’s a common complaint that the story is a compelling tale of a white boy befriending a black man until the moment that Tom Sawyer makes his appearance and turns the book into a racist stage show that proceeds to mock Jim’s dehumanizing predicament.  I think Twain set a trap for what I called “fashionable ‘bourgeois’ post-emancipation abolitionists.”  Like Tom Sawyer, they wanted Twain to rescue Jim from his predicament, but they wanted it to be done in the correct way — with the proper adventure and symbolism.  As with Merriweather and Jellyby, they like supporting a mostly abstract minority group in a way that they find entertaining and morally rewarding, but without any real risk.

I don’t think a modern Atticus Finch would be challenged to stand against backwoods bigots.  The mockingbird has changed its tune, and the self-righteous progressives are busily hunting it down, all while taking comfort in the received opinion of their peers that what they don’t understand is nonsense.