David Buchell and mocking the mockingbird's defence of rednecks ...

Whenever I read David Burchell, I get a faint dizzy vertiginous feeling, as if perched on the top of a cliff.

Why am I here, what does it all mean, and why are his columns written in such a stupefying manner?

Is it better to jump off the cliff or plunge in to the read? Who knows, but the rocks at the bottom of the cliff look sharp, so hey ho, in we go to Mocking the Mockingbird belittles great message.

Up front, I should say that I'm one with Samuel Goldwyn. If a writer wants to send me a great message, why not use the telegram? And make it pithy. Or perhaps a tweet would do these days, as twits are wont to do ...

Never mind, Burchell seems to think that people have only just started to ravage Harper Lee's novel, proving he knows as little about literary criticism as politics.

Nobody (least of all author Harper Lee) ever pretended that Mockingbird was great literature in a technical sense. It is not especially well-written or tightly plotted, and the characters are drawn somewhat hazily, as if to sketch out character traits rather than to detail the quirks of lived personalities. And yet for literally tens of millions of young people it has served as the pre-eminent equivalent of a moral primer, or of the novels of Dickens or Thackeray a century before it: it demonstrates why it is important to try to do the right thing by everyone you meet, and why taking care of others in need should not require a histrionic exercise in self-justification and self-aggrandisement - contrary to the posturing of some of our would-be moral heroes.

And yet, in the manner of the age, we have commemorated this significant date by belittling Mockingbird, damning it with faint praise, and declaring it juvenile and naive - since, after all, we best display our own sophistication by diminishing that of our ancestors.

Hang on, people were ready for a dust up with Harper Lee why back when:

Late in 1960, in commenting on the book’s success, Flannery O’Connor declared, “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book.”

And that strand of implicit disdain has continued for a long time, most evocatively a few years ago in Thomas Mallon's review of a Harper Lee biography in The New Yorker, Big Bird:

... if it’s true that by 1988 the book “was taught in 74 percent of the nation’s public schools”—a statistic issued by the National Council of Teachers of English, who are apparently uninclined to make an old-fashioned fuss over the book’s dangling modifiers—it is less because the novel was likely to stimulate students toward protest than because it acted as a kind of moral Ritalin, an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious. “How can you be an Atticus?” asks one piece of curricular material to be found posted on the Web. Shields is able to cite a scholar, Claudia Durst Johnson, “who has published extensively” on this single book, which “readers in surveys rank as the most influential in their lives after the Bible.” For all that, readers returning to the book after many years may find themselves echoing the film Capote’s boozed-up muttering about “To Kill a Mockingbird”: “I frankly don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

If there's a dose of moral Ritalin doing the rounds, it seems that Burchell is in line, ready for a hit:

The book's exemplary character, the austere, gentle-tempered lawyer Atticus Finch, whose defence of a black man falsely accused of rape echoes the plight of the real-life Scottsboro Boys, has been variously accused of being too cloyingly noble, too mild-mannered, too much the southern patriarch, too optimistically liberal. And Lee's style is mocked as clumsy and mawkish, which seems odd in an era where school texts are chosen more on account of their author's ethno-cultural identity than the luminance of their prose.

How's that for dextrous? Bashing people for bashing Harper Lee while bashing authors for their ethno-cultural identity? Could it be that only whites are able to write about the moral dilemmas confronting the world, especially the superfine dilemmas confronting southern patriarchs, because others are reliant on their ethno-cultural identity? Bugger off, James Baldwin, too much anger there ...

Never mind, why, you might wonder, in this secular age, would you want to sacralise texts, as if they contain moral truths worthy of the bible, and be worshipped accordingly?

Why, you might wonder, in an age when racist talk has become the new blasphemy, and where identity politics has become a veritable holy catechism, would we wish to de-sacralise a book that has taught 50 cohorts of high-school children not to blanch at defending the weak simply because it is unpopular to do so, not to be fearful of people simply because their behaviour confounds, and always to attempt to put yourself in the other person's shoes?

Ah, the white man's burden, what a heavy load to bear. Why Burchell manages to catch the sanctimonious tone of the book quite perfectly, its mix of empathy and forbearance:

In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” empathy is Atticus’s chief and much repeated prescription for all that ails us morally. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” he tells his daughter, Scout. That goes for her teacher, Miss Caroline Fisher; for the head of a lynch mob; and for the man who eventually tries to kill Scout and her brother. Atticus’s speech can be as stiff as his rectitude (“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience”), and in conversation with his children he tends toward the stagey and the sententious. The novel sometimes makes up for dramatic shortcomings by squeezing yet another puff of rhetoric from its adult protagonist, who fishes for compliments (“Sometimes I think I’m a total failure as a parent”) and has a way of making forbearance itself insufferable.

Oh sorry, that was the evil vicious Mallon, tramping on all we hold dear, and where Burchell echoes the standard echo about Mockingbird echoing the plight of the real-life Scottsboro Boys, Mallon manages to evoke the hum drum tedium of scholarship:

The novel’s courtroom drama doesn’t derive, as has often been assumed, from the nineteen-thirties case of the Scottsboro Boys. Late in the nineteen-nineties, Lee revealed to a biographer of Richard Wright that she had based the trial of Tom Robinson on the experience of Walter Lett, a Negro whose arrest for raping a white woman was reported in the Monroe Journal on November 9, 1933. Whatever the source, the novel requires Tom Robinson’s conviction as surely as the town itself does. Without it, the reader will not have the chance, like the Negroes in the courthouse balcony, to stand up and salute Atticus’s nobly futile defense.

The book never persists in ambiguity. Mr. Underwood, a man who “despises Negroes” but protects Atticus with a shotgun, is glimpsed a couple of times and then dropped. The author prefers returning to the feel-good and the improbable, such as the Ku Klux Klan story that Atticus tells his children: “They paraded by Mr. Sam Levy’s house one night, but Sam just stood on his porch and told ’em things had come to a pretty pass, he’d sold ’em the very sheets on their backs. Sam made ’em so ashamed of themselves they went away.” If it were this easy, Atticus would have won Tom Robinson’s acquittal. By the time the novel nears its conclusion and a classmate of Scout’s gives a report on how bad Hitler is, the book has begun to cherish its own goodness.

Hey this is fun. It's like throwing mud at a saint, or at least someone dressed all in white.

Burchell, meanwhile, has wandered off in search of a chance to breach Godwin's Law and lay into the Edwardians, along with his standard target, the Edwardians close allies, the militant students of the 1960s (and let's not go into any Freudian analysis of his relationship to the 1960s, since clearly he never managed to get to Woodstock, and still suffers from the slight or the loss or whatever, and why he never seems to have it in for the 1920's jazz and flappers age, or the immorality of the war years, or the fifties when rebels rioted without a cause and Marlon Brando took to motorbikes or the eighties when boys did strange things to their hair and synths):

The most urgent need of every era's avant-garde is to erase unworthy memories of their cultural ancestors. Thus the Edwardian aesthetes took revenge on their parents' complex if flawed moral sensibilities by turning them into arch Victorian caricatures; while the militant students of the 1960s burlesqued their parents' liberal internationalism by chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" like Brownshirts in a Munich beer-hall.

In each case some tincture of the previous era's morality was spirited onwards in disguise - either as modish moral pessimism, or as starry-eyed Third Worldism. And yet on each occasion something was lost.

Something was lost? And perchance something was gained? And perhaps all things considered, it's the business of each generation to do things differently, but do we have to resort to bland banal statements of the obvious to produce a defence of To Kill a Mockingbird?

So it seems:

Atticus Finch, that earnest New Testament figure brimful of unexceptionable homilies, is bound to act as a similar kind of irritant for our own avant-garde. His creed - that you should pursue justice for the powerless while maintaining civilised, respectful relations with your fellow citizens, without belittling any other group of people in the process ...

Uh huh. Like the rich and the powerful, and lawyers and judges, and a justice system designed to skewer the helpless?

And except, of course, people opposed to the Vietnam war, and Edwardians who took a dim view of Victorian hypocrisy, and perhaps critics of Ghengis Khan, who took a dim view of his territorial ethos, and Romans tortured by the destruction of Carthage, and of course minorities reliant on their ethno-cultural identity.

But where's this all heading? Surely there must be a moral to this column? A sanctimonious righteous bit of claptrap that fits in with all the worse elements of Lee's novel, and doesn't bother to worry about the other bits?

- seems quaintly amusing in the light of our rancorous, uncivil debates over asylum-seekers and border protection, when the first instinct of partisans is to treat their opponents as liars and cheats, and where personal vituperation has become an easy substitute for a political creed.

Ah yes, it's actually all a bit of covert dog whistling about asylum seekers and boat people. Time for a dash of leavening Christianity?

Dickens once admitted that the purpose of his equally simple and well-loved story A Christmas Carol was to preserve the elemental Christian message - as if it were travelling incognito for a post-religious future.

In this he met the spirit of an age when religion had come to be regarded both as morally indispensable and intellectually incredible. In a similar fashion, Harper Lee caught the spirit of an era when the very best of the civil rights movement, from Martin Luther King Jr downwards, still employed the New Testament ethic, both as political weapon and personal self-discipline - but where the idea of literary exemplars had gone thoroughly out of fashion.

Oh dear, enough already with the Christian claptrap, though I suppose it's fair to pick out one of Dickens' weakest, most sentimental tales, as an example of the exceedingly obvious, banal and sentimental taste of the columnist. What next, Little Dorrit?

Nowadays we follow a cruder moral economy according to which, when you defend a vulnerable group from danger, you must bring the moral budget back into balance by redistributing precisely the same degree of prejudice on to somebody else (Americans, Jews). And so, when the 1988 feature film Mississippi Burning attempted to renovate Mockingbird's moral lesson in a fictionalised account of the deaths of three young civil rights workers in the early 1960s, the buddy-movie aspect worked well enough: hard-bitten Mississippian Gene Hackman and earnest northern liberal Willem Dafoe traded nuggets of world-wisdom.

But instantly the film turned to race relations, it capitulated to the same crude moral transference. The black folks, tarred by the whites as unwashed monkeys, are depicted in the film in an aspect of pure, Christ-like spirituality, while the local white folks (with a single exception dictated by the requirements of romantic tension) are ignorant, foul-mouthed and simian.

Yes, yes, but you see, that's the reason why some people object to To Kill a Mockingbird. Whenever film-makers or novelists jettison complexity and ambiguity for simple moral tracts, or messages, they might gain some emotional traction with audiences or readers, but they present a world view stripped of what makes great works great. You could apply Burchell's criticisms of Mississipi Burning to Harper Lee's novel without missing a stride or a beat.

In Lee's novel, the white folks are depicted as noble and righteous and caring and Christian, well at least the good ones are, while even the naughty white folks are given a get out of jail card, like the odious Mrs Dubose. Does Burchell even have a glimmer of an inkling of what he's talking about?

I doubt there has been a time in modern Australian politics when the simple morality of "stepping into the other's skin", in the spirit of Atticus's precept, was a more necessary discipline than it is at present. On the one hand, it is important for us not to harden our hearts too much, or to forget - simply because the currency of human suffering has been devalued by opportunists - that there are, at this very moment, people around the world in mortal danger whose lives might actually be saved by us. On the other hand, it is indefensible for refugee advocates like the sanctimonious Julian Burnside to traduce the motivations of their detractors, or to declare it unconscionable to wonder why, if the majority of those on the boats are not actually deemed to be refugees, pretty much all of them ultimately manage to secure permanent residency.

Uh huh. But you see they achieve residency because they actually are deemed to be refugees.

And how can the sanctimonious - since if there was just one word to describe Mockingbird, surely sanctimonious would be it, with righteous a close second - berate Burnside for being sanctimonious? Especially having just led with sanctimonious claptrap and dog whistling about Christian values ...

Can we get another clue where all this is heading?

Perhaps the most neglected character in Mockingbird is Mrs Dubose, whose story anchors the transition between the book's two parts, though it was thoughtlessly deleted from the film version. Mrs Dubose is bad-tempered and intolerant, and, like others among the townsfolk, she sneeringly calls Atticus a nigger-lover.

Defending their father, the Finch children exact their revenge on her, only for their father to punish them by forcing them to read to her every night after school.

Later Atticus explains that Mrs Dubose, having suffered acute pain for years, had become addicted to tranquillisers. In her last months she fought a battle against her addiction so as to die in dignity.

When she abused Atticus as a nigger-lover she was thrashing around in her own private haze of pain and grief. Atticus calls her "the bravest person I ever knew".

And how many of our own self-styled moral sages, I wonder, would have summoned up that same degree of elemental human generosity?

Uh huh. There you have it. You see, we should really care about is Mrs. Dubose, sad and sorry victim of her prejudice. Don't worry about the black people, they can look after themselves. Show magnanimity and understanding to the rednecks. Deliver unto them, in your humble Christian way, elemental human generosity ...

So instead of worrying about people fleeing Afghanistan while a war rages around them, and we support a corrupt regime, and the bullets and the bombs fly, instead we should be worrying about the fear mongers, and the haters, and the rednecks and the Hansonites, because deep down they're good people. Sure they might be racists to boot, but what the heck, where's your Christian charity.

Well at last I understand why there's a good reason they cut Dubose out of the film, and would to the absent god, Burchell had cut her out of his shameless pandering to the prejudiced ...

By the way if you want a rebuttal of Mallon, and a little more complexity and thought than what Burchell has to offer, why not read Stephen Metcaf's On First Looking Into To Kill a Mockingbird, or try Allen Barra's demolition job in What 'To Kill a Mockingbird' Isn't as he too tears apart that ungainsayable endorser of the obvious.

Atticus is a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams. He actually seems to believe the fairy tale about the Ku Klux Klan that he tells Scout: "Way back about nineteen-twenty, there was a Klan, but it was a political organization more than anything. Besides, they couldn't find anyone to scare." They gathered one night in front of a Jewish friend of Finch's, Sam Levy, and "Sam made 'em so ashamed of themselves they went away."

It's impossible that anyone who grew up in Alabama in the mid-1930s, when the book is set, would believe that story, but it's a sugar-coated myth of Alabama's past that millions have come to accept.

Never mind, it must surely bring tears to Burchell's eyes. Complexity isn't on view in Harper Lee that often, but it's remarkably absent in Burchell's scribbles:

In all great novels there is some quality of moral ambiguity, some potentially controversial element that keeps the book from being easily grasped or explained. One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the real nature of the relationship between Tom and Huck, or why Gatsby gazed at that green light at the end of the dock across the harbor. There is no ambiguity in "To Kill a Mockingbird"; at the end of the book, we know exactly what we knew at the beginning: that Atticus Finch is a good man, that Tom Robinson was an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad. As Thomas Mallon wrote in a 2006 story in The New Yorker, the book acts as "an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious."

Yep, and we also learn now that conservatives are innocent victims of small l-liberals and latte sippers, that conservatives are good people, that honest caring dinkum haters of boat people are victims of an inverted kind of racism, and that calling them rednecks is bad.

Put it another way. Simple minded sentimentalism isn't any kind of solution to structural injustice, and adopting the posture of victimhood when not a victim is surely more offensive than just being a straight out redneck.

It's time to stop pretending that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is some kind of timeless classic that ranks with the great works of American literature. Its bloodless liberal humanism is sadly dated, as pristinely preserved in its pages as the dinosaur DNA in "Jurassic Park."

Still, all the talk of Martin Luther King reminded me of Glenn Beck thinking that he might actually be called on to carry out King's mission, and that reminded me of Stephen Colbert's take on Glenn Beck.

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