"Any decent society needs to defend itself from armed aggression without becoming a society not worth defending. This is never simple to accomplish." Jim Manzi, writing in National Review Online, makes an eloquent case against the use by the United States, or any civilized nation, of waterboarding as an interrogation technique. Most arguments on the issue, for or against, are hardly worthy of the name because they assume what they think they're proving. Manzi acknowledges the complexity of the issue, examines the historical record, and concludes that our current situation is not one in which the tactical advantages gained by waterboarding would offset the strategic losses.
The music is a little too red, don’t you think? Although true synesthesia—the bizarre crossing of the senses that enables some people to hear colors and taste sounds—is rare, researchers have discovered that most of us have this ability to some degree.
Br'er Rabbit rules! Katherine Dalton makes a poignant case for why Uncle Remus should never have fallen victim to Political Correctness.
Of all the folk and fairy tales I know, the Uncle Remus stories are rivaled only by the Brothers Grimm as a powerful and memorable expression of a people’s mind and spirit…. They are not always predictable, and often fantastic and amoral, yet they all resolve in ways that seem right because they feel culturally and humanly true. There is something both stirring and instructive about them.
These stories are so powerful, I believe, because they express the collective experience of many authors and editors under the stress of slavery, and so capture the essence of human nature and the human condition with the heightened understanding that comes to people in difficulty. And like the Grimm stories, these tales are not only for children and originally weren’t even principally intended for children. They are the stories adults loved to tell each other, back when many of us were illiterate, and had much more of a culture.
Most of what we know as the Uncle Remus tales began as trickster stories in west Africa. They were then transformed through retellings in the American South during its slave period, influenced by American Indian and European stories, and collected by a white man during Reconstruction. The versions Joel Chandler Harris started publishing in 1879 were stories he had heard as a young man in central Georgia.
[The character of Uncle Remus is] an old family servant and former slave who tells the Brer Rabbit tales to the little son of the family. The child’s mother is a Southerner, the father a former Union soldier, and Uncle Remus, though a strong and even imperious character, is loyal to his white family and has a strong tie to this child. It is a frame Harris expressly constructed to help his white audience heal the wounds of war and Reconstruction. As such it now angers some readers, and most modern versions leave it out and let Brer Rabbit take center stage alone. Also, because the dialect is thick, it has been softened in the more recent retellings… and Uncle Remus’s occasional use of the word “nigger” has been left out as offensive. For children these changes make sense.
But adults should read Harris’s original, to hear the stories as he heard them. He took his work as transmitter as seriously as any ethnographer. It is especially sad that the dialect he worked so hard to reproduce accurately is now blasted as demeaning, when to Harris’s mind it was integral to the stories themselves. He felt the tales would be diminished by being translated out of their vernacular—and so with no training but a good ear, he recreated several black dialects of the mid-century in a way scholars today judge to be accurate. This dialect is presented without irony or mockery. The stories are told as a black man might have spoken them, not in blackface.
