Fifty years with Scout...

My love for Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird" is not only well known (my firstborn's name was etched in stone long before he was even a gleam in my eye), it's also lifelong.

From the first time my eyes were opened by the novel as a child, it was and still is my favorite book. Harper Lee's masterwork goes beyond novels, and transcends literature in that it captured not only a stitch in the time of our nation...it's captured countless hearts, and shaped lives. Atticus was not only Scout's father and hero, he was (and still is) mine.

On this Sunday morning, in commemoration, and celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of "To Kill A Mockingbird" I'm going to do something I never do. This piece by Jesse Kornbluth deserves to be shared here and everywhere else the book is loved:

I never thought I'd see the day when the lawyer who argued Brown v. Topeka Board of Education before the Supreme Court and went on to be the first African-American to sit on that Court would have his career reduced to that most dreaded of all contemporary labels: "activist."

I never thought I'd see the day when you can legally carry concealed weapons into airports and bars and --- my sweet Lord! --- churches.

I never thought I'd see the day when allegedly smart adults would tell me that America's poor were so powerful that, given the chance to own real estate, they bought so many houses they couldn't afford that they tanked the economy of almost every country in the world.

But then I never thought I'd see the day when "To Kill A Mockingbird" --- a novel that has inspired readers for half a century --- would be derided as a book about "the limitations of liberalism" (by Malcolm Gladwell, no less, in The New Yorker, of all places) and "a sugar-coated myth of Alabama's past" with a hero who's "a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams" (by Allen Barra, in the Wall Street Journal)

But as we approach July 11th --- the 50th anniversary of the publication of "To Kill a Mockingbird" (to buy the paperback from Amazon, click here; shamefully, there is no Kindle edition) --- it's probably not surprising that we're seeing one of America's best-loved books criticized for its "politics."

And it's definitely no surprise that the downgrading is done by men.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" is a woman's book.

Written by a woman, Harper Lee, but more, written by a woman who dared to see herself as her region's Jane Austen. Told by a six-year-old girl. With a hero who's not, in any traditional sense, manly. With a message of kindness and empathy generally associated with female values:



And one more female value, once common in the heroes of Western movies, but less and less common by the time Harper Lee wrote her novel --- a willingness to do the right thing, regardless of the consequences. Readers often forget, but this is the foundation of the character of Atticus Finch: He takes on the legal defense of an African-American, knowing he can't prevail in court.

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand," he tells his children. "It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

I'm not one for stereotyping, but how many men do you know who step up to confront unpleasantness and conflict? Here's Atticus: "Best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open."

Atticus Finch is --- let's just say it --- a feminized man who appeared a decade before America started hearing about feminism. No wonder he appeals to English teachers, who tend to be idealists. And no wonder the film is a "family" favorite --- mother choose it in the hope it will make their kids kinder. (To buy the DVD from Amazon, click here.)

In the long clock of history, we have, only a moment ago, pretty much stopped killing each other over resources --- as individuals, anyway. Since then, we make progress, we take a step backward; civilization is a fragile concept. But I take it as an unvarnished Good Thing that readers have persistently loved "To Kill a Mockingbird" for as long as it's been in print. I think it's just great that Mary Murphy has written a book about Harper Lee's book: "Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of 50 Years of 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'" (To buy the book of "Scout, Atticus & Boo," click here. To buy the Kindle edition, click here.)

And it pleases me no end that, in a year when men denigrate Thurgood Marshall and get off on carrying guns in public and blame the poor for every failing of men in expensive suits, that some of the most passionate defenders of a book you'd think needs no defense are male. Like, for instance:



"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
- spoken by Atticus Finch, by Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird