Collection

It is rare, if not unprecedented, for me to contemplate the phrase "everybody's talking about it!" without scoffing, pinching salt, or otherwise having no patience with the entire concept. But Harper Lee has brought us as close as I've ever seen, with the Go Set a Watchman epochal event publication. Mostly discussion seems to center on the disconcerting combination of darn-near-prurient curiosity about the manipulations involved in making public a draft work, and a general condemnation of the work as "should've been only a scholarly curiosity, really isn't a saleable novel, hey I'm only reporting the facts, and isn't it terrible they've done this (so I can buy in and then blog about it)?" There is a lot that's ghastly. So it was even more quease-inducing to read this. Apparently, Atticus - the great American symbol of moral rectitude and crusadership - turns out to be a big old bigot.

Sigh.

So let's look at racism in a different way. Nyki Blatchley provides a truly EXCELLENT post on the Aryan fallacy and all its little malformed fallacious babies. A linguistic/historical/cultural must-read, because it's incisive and important on multiple levels. It's good storytelling, it's good teaching, it touches on varied aspects of those ways we seem to love to come to wrong-thinking, and it's *sourced*, which is more than I ever do for y'all. So go. Now.