....t Bob Dylan's Hurricane for an N-word, and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA for a 'yellow man' to mention just two other potential improprieties...
Yes, and now there's even a move by an American publisher to sanitize Huckleberry Finn. Political Correctness runs amok.
ryck
Well, to be fair, the motivation behind banning those songs and the motivation behind changing the "N-word" in Huckleberry Finn are very different.
First, there's the matter that the changes to Huckleberry Finn don't make the original version unavailable. The two would only really be comparable if a publisher changed Huckleberry Finn and then passed an ordinance banning people from buying or reading the original.
I thought the Huck Finn thing was PC gone mad until I actually listened to the publisher and understood what they were trying to do. Essentially, what they're trying to do is to allow modern readers to read it the way that it was written. When it was written, the "N-word" did not have the same explosively emotional, hurtful overtones that it has today. Modern readers can't really get a sense of the original, because the word's emotional connotations tend to overshadow everything else. For that reason, teachers are often forbidden from teaching it in school, and people who might otherwise be able to get a valuable lens on American history through the stories simply aren't given the chance to be exposed to someone who is arguably one of the greatest American writers.
If the goal was somehow to purge all the original books, or to ban the original versions, then I could see being upset by it. But that's not what's happening. The original and the modified versions are still being printed side by side; people have the choice which one they want to read. The modified version can be taught in school, with the idea that people who are then more familiar with Mark Twain's original intentions free to reread the original.
So I see a huge difference between that and a government agency banning something completely, telling its citizens "You are not allowed to hear this at all because we have determined that it contains words you should not see."
