Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

[cindy25]

just finishing it, and its a political book that is very timely. Atticus Finch was not a racist but a practical libertarian.

has anyone else read it?

[Warrior_of_Freedom]

No, just to kill a mockingbird

[acptulsa]

Well, that explains PBS.

Just last week, PBS did an hour and a half on Harper Lee, praising To Kill a Mockingbird all along, and mentioning the 'new' book. I wondered why, and found it odd but amusing that they closed out the show by talking about what a racist the Atticus Finch character is in the new one. Now I know. They want to poison the wells against the character because he says wise, libertarian things.

It all makes sense now.

Interesting to see a book called 'timely' when I think it was written before Mockingbird, and has been sitting in a safety deposit box for over half a century. But it may be. Maybe it will do what I hoped my Will Rogers thread would do--reintroduce Americans to a sanity they once had, but lost.

But not if we let the powers that be spin it unchecked by reality.

I'll be getting this book. I hope most of us do. It could be a damned sight more useful to us than Swords into Plowshares.

[RJB]

I was at a writers conference lately and listened to a group of "writers" lament how they couldn't read the book ever since hearing that Atticus was racist. I held my peace but wanted to say, "How dare Harper Lee make a complicated protagonist who deals with flaws and conflicting opinions."


I haven't read the book. I read To Kill a Mockingbird years ago. So I didn't feel comfortable giving an opinion of a book I hadn't read (neither had the other writers read it.) However it blew me away how narrow minded these self proclaimed writers were when it came to writing complex characters dealing with hot topics. I can only imagine how dull their 1 dimensional characters must be.

[specsaregood]

?/

[cindy25]

it is anti-NAACP, criticizes block voting by blacks, and Negro lawyers playing the race card. hard to believe it was written in the 50s

[acptulsa]

it is anti-NAACP, criticizes block voting by blacks, and Negro lawyers playing the race card. hard to believe it was written in the 50s

Wisdom is timeless. And there are always people who can recognize a bad idea even before it has been practically proven to be a bad idea.

'The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can't make anybody believe that he has it.'--Will Rogers

Thanks. I can now no longer wait to read this book.

Please tell me Miss Maudie Atkinson figures prominently in it. I've loved that woman since I was little--even though she isn't real.

[acptulsa]

No wonder the MSM is trying to demonize the character Atticus Finch. I'm sure they decided they had to tarnish this literary hero by Page 18.

In front of the chair in which he was sitting was a steel music stand, and on that stand was The Strange Case of Alger Hiss. Atticus leaned forward a little, the better to disapprove of what he was reading. A stranger would not have seen annoyance on Atticus' face, for he seldom expressed it; a friend, however, would expect a dry "H-rm" to come soon: Atticus' eyebrows were elevated, and his mouth was a pleasant thin line.

"H-rm", he said.

"What, dear?" said his sister.

"I don't understand how a man like this can have the brass to give us his views on the Hiss case. It's like Fenimore Cooper writin' the Waverly novels."

"Why, dear?"

"He has a childlike faith in the integrity of civil servants and he seems to think Congress corresponds to their aristocracy. No understanding of American politics a-tall."

[Southron]

I'm gonna pick this book up this weekend. Given the reaction, it's no wonder she didn't have it published years ago.

[Cissy]

I'm going to have to add it to my to read list. Thank you for the recommendation.

[acptulsa]

Oh, yeah. Not hard to see why PBS did an hour and a half alternately praising Mockingbird and demonizing this one. It's positively peppered with sacrilege.

Maycomb did not have a paved street until 1935, courtesy of F.D. Roosevelt, and even then it was not exactly a street that was paved. For some reason the President decided that a clearing from the front door of the Maycomb Grammar School to the two ruts adjoining the school property was in need of improvement, it was improved accordingly, resulting in skinned knees and cracked crania for the children and a proclamation from the principal that nobody was to play Pop-the-Whip on the pavement. Thus the seeds of states' rights were sown in the hearts of Jean Louise's generation.

[AuH20]

Atticus didn't believe in forced integration?

[acptulsa]

How did this thing get published? Just because if Harper Lee announced it existed, but told us every house refused to put it in print, there would be riots?

She even says what the 'cultural' language patterns popularly referred to as 'ebonics' meant in the South back in the day--there were plenty of people of African descent in the South who could speak English as well as Sir Lawrence Olivier, but when around a certain breed of whites, they would not do it. They'd slip into ebonics as an Uncle Tom maneuver and hide whatever education they had managed to accumulate, lest they be thought 'uppity'.

And what's more, this sinful admission is even more sinful for being the Gospel Truth. I heard that happen more than once myself, back in the Dark ages when I was a child.

[acptulsa]

Damn it's good to hear Harper Lee's voice again.

"Decent government in Maycomb County'd be such a shock I don't think the citizens could stand it," she said.

[Barrex]

I feel so dirty and wrong. Second book that I bought in audiobook version.

[Brian4Liberty]

Oh, yeah. Not hard to see why PBS did an hour and a half alternately praising Mockingbird and demonizing this one. It's positively peppered with sacrilege.

I caught a discussion of this on CNN. They ripped the new one apart, and one commentator had the gall to infer that "To Kill a Mocking Bird" was rewritten by a progressive editor, not really the work of Harper Lee.

The Marxists have no shame. Time for them to rewrite history again.

[acptulsa]

I caught a discussion of this on CNN. They ripped the new one apart, and one commentator had the gall to infer that "To Kill a Mocking Bird" was rewritten by a progressive editor, not really the work of Harper Lee.

The Marxists have no shame. Time for them to rewrite history again.

It'll get worse. Far, far worse. It's no wonder Ms. Lee kept this one in a safety deposit box for fifty years. She had to wait for the whole nation to become as mature as she has been since she was in her twenties.

I'm halfway through. But it only just began; the book takes its slow, Southern time about getting acquainted. Remember The Bonfire of the Vanities? In it, the buzzards who parlay racial tensions into wealth are lightly touched upon and laughed at. They harm only the book's main character, who is hardly someone any normal person could empathize with. This book seems to be heading down the same path, but into deeper waters. I suspect I'm about to see an insider's look at just how Washington used ancient local divisions to usurp power that would better have been left to the states--whether the state governments all deserved such confidence or not [No, not that]

This book demands to be defended. And we need to be the ones doing it. I think I see why the Marxists want this to go over like a lead balloon. I smell gold. And I'm going to keep digging.

[acptulsa]

Gold!

"The only thing I'm afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn't be worth living in. The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won't be that way much longer."

Dr. Finch grinned like a friendly weasel. "Melbourne said once, that the only real duties of government were to prevent crime and preserve contracts, to which I will add one thing since I find myself reluctantly in the twentieth century: and to provide for the common defense."

"That's a cloudy statement."

"Indeed it is. It leaves us with so much freedom."

Chapter 14 is full of gold. It's Sutter's Mill. It's the Yukon.

No wonder the commies are up in arms.

[acptulsa]

Here's what they're trying to get you to believe is racism, folks:

He was prodding her. Let him. They were on safe ground. "Well, in trying to satisfy one amendment, it looks like they rubbed out another one. The Tenth. It's only a small amendment, only one sentence long, but it seemed to be the one that meant the most. Somehow."

"Did you think this out for yourself?"

"Why, yes sir. Atticus, I don't know anything about the Constitution..."

"You seem to be constitutionally sound so far. Proceed."

Proceed with what? Tell him she couldn't look him in the eye? He wanted her views on the Constitution, then he'd have 'em: "Well,it seemed that to meet the real needs of a small portion of the population, the Court set up something horrible that could--that could affect the vast majority of folks. Adversely, that is. Atticus, I don't know anything about it--all we have is the Constitution between us and anything some smart fellow wants to start, and there went the Court just breezily canceling one whole amendment, it seemed to me. We have a system of checks and balances and things, but when it comes down to it we don't have much check on the Court, so who'll bell the cat?"

[acptulsa]

'There is no such thing as a collective conscience.'--Harper Lee

[acptulsa]

Good God. It sat over fifty years in a safety deposit box waiting for me, but I swallowed it in less than twenty-four hours. I wanted it to be longer. I wanted it to go on and on like the New York City phone book.

But I'll read it again. And again. I can't count the number of times I've read Mockingbird. The first time I was barely old enough to make out half the words.

Just a little coming-of-age story. Just a feminine parallel to Catcher in the Rye. Doesn't even have Miss Maudie Atkinson in it, though she does get mentioned once.

But it could be the story that helps millions of liberal progs come of age. If we don't let their ringleaders succeed in burying it.

Perhaps she should have released it forty years ago. Perhaps she was right, and the nation wasn't ready for it yet, if that's what Ms. Lee was thinking. But the book is out now, and now is the time this nation needs to hear what it says.

[acptulsa]

Is To Kill a Mockingbird a coming-of-age tale?

If so, whose? Jean Louise is still a child at the end. Jem does a lot of coming of age in the book, but that isn't much of a tale. He seems to be one of those enviable people who come of age with such grace that the tale is hardly worth telling. No drama to it. Besides, it can't be his tale; he spends the climax of the book knocked cold. Is it Atticus' coming-of-age tale? It can't be that; he comes of age long before the book begins. Heck Tate talks him into a wiser course of action at the end, with a little help from his daughter, than the course of action he originally intends to pursue. But these little false feints in the wrong direction are a fact of life, even long after one comes of age.

No, it isn't. But it was a tale that helped a nation come of age. For the first time since The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn came a book that was all at once an engaging, human tale that almost anyone could relate to, and a powerful statement about some things the human race really, really needed to finally learn how to outgrow. There are about a billion copies of it in print, it won every prize a book can get, it is a national institution.

And that's a goodly part of what makes Go Set a Watchman very, very important. It's especially important to us.

For those who don't know, Watchman was written first. It was also written extremely well. I'm trying, here, to discuss what this book could mean to us and to this nation without divulging any spoilers. It is, after all, a novel. A very well written and engaging novel. And I don't want to spoil it for anyone. This is hard, as the whole plot of this one is one long permutation that should be allowed to unfold for the reader with no road signs warning of the curves ahead. But at the same time, the nature of this book and the fame that the author's other book has so rightly achieved (and the respect all thinking Americans have for that author) make it uniquely able to spark a conversation in this nation that this nation desperately needs to have.

For those who don't know, Harper Lee wrote this book and submitted it. The editor saw her ability as a fine writer, but saw the book as a tale with a tiny audience, and maybe self-indulgent. Read the book and you may well consider that an outrage. But if you think back to the mid-1950s, and consider the state of things then, and you can see that this editor was not actually talking out of his ass. The concerns raised by certain characters in this book are concerns few shared at the time. For example, a desire to defend the Constitution was laudable in the era, but that instrument seemed unassailable back then. Obviously, any enemy of the Constitution would have to erode its base away for half a century or so to put it in any real danger. Half a century later, this has become a much bigger deal than it was then.

No, that editor seized on one thing mentioned in a flashback in this book, and said to Harper Lee, 'Now that would make a good novel. That one thing was a rape trial during the Depression. I don't even know, in a sense, what the world was before To Kill a Mockingbird, because when I was born, that book had just changed the world.

Watchman, on the other hand, is also as much a historical document as Mockingbird. But where the latter addressed an issue very much of the moment, the former addresses issues much more of the moment today. Go Set a Watchman is, or could be, if we're good and we're lucky, a metaphor for the whole nation. It took half a century of the miracle of television and an increasing tendency to use the power of that technology to drive a wedge down the middle of the whole nation in an effort to divide and conquer us all. The powers that be have taken to digging moats, creating schisms, and trying to arrange us all on either side of a chasm they hope we cannot bridge. This book is about that chasm. This book shows us that this bridge would be easy to build.

The impatience of youth sees a problem and wants to tackle it. The wisdom of age stops to examine solutions, and see if they create more problems than they solve. 'Bunkie' Knudsen, former head of Pontiac and Chevrolet, and president of the entire U.S. operations of the Ford Motor Company for a time, once said you can sell a young man's car to an old man, but you can't sell an old man's car to a young man. Which is a lesson Buick has learned, oh, about a dozen times over the course of its history. Well, they seem intent on selling a young person's government to us all, no matter how much the wise may object. There is an old saying that goes, 'Do something, even if it's wrong.' In wartime, that is a necessary evil. If you are on guard duty, and people who look like civilians advance toward your position, and they will not halt when you demand they do so, you have to shoot them. If they are innocent, you have to live with that until you can learn that you did have to do something, even if it was wrong, and you are not to blame for the fortunes of war. The people who started the war are. But in peacetime, we seldom have to do something even if its wrong. A more careful approach is often possible; the luxury you can't afford in wartime you can generally afford in peacetime.

Which is probably why the government is all the time trying to start wars, and telling us we're at war with this and that, and trying to keep us at each other's throats.

And Go Set a Watchman? It's about none of that. It's just a simple coming-of-age tale. Yet, it's about all of that. All of it and more. It's about people impatient to see the change that really needs to come, and never seems to come, and people who do want that change to come, but want the change to be managed, who don't want new paradigms to roll over innocent people even if more people do benefit than get steamrolled. Even more, it's about people of good conscience jumping to the erroneous conclusion that other people of good conscience have no consciences at all.

And when it was written, it was all of that. But today, it is two things it certainly wasn't back then. For one thing, and despite being the inspiration for the other, it is the sequel to the seminal masterpiece that changed the world. For another, it is a metaphor for the whole nation today, and if we play our cards right, could become the impetus and the vehicle for a whole lot of healing that this society desperately needs to do.

Mockingbird was about black and white. It was published in the right place and at the right time. Watchman is about shades of gray. And while it was aging in the safe deposit box like good whiskey in a charred oak barrel, its time came.

I don't think I spoiled it for you. I do hope I have in some ways given you new eyes to read it with. Please, please, get this book and read it. Read it, then defend it. The sooner we can turn this nation into a giant book club discussing this book, the better off this nation will ultimately be.

[acptulsa]

A liberal is a man who wants to use his own ideas on things in preference to generations who he knows know more than he does.

She resolved not to be intimidated by several messages stenciled around her compartment--a roomette, they called it--but when she went to bed the night before, she succeeded in folding herself up into the wall because she had ignored an injunction to PULL THIS LEVER DOWN OVER BRACKETS, a situation remedied by the porter to her embarrassment, as her habit was to sleep only in pajama tops.

Liberals are so quick to insist on changes which are, admittedly, long overdue--even if a steamroller is needed to make it happen right now. And they are so seldom still around to help the unfortunates who happened to be in the way when that steamroller came through.

[Anti Federalist]

Never read either one.

Never saw the movie with Gregory Peck.

So, which first?

[Barrex]

Never read either one.

Never saw the movie with Gregory Peck.

So, which first?

I watched movie first, read book second and am listening Watchmen at the moment.

I suggest that you read the book first. When you know how it will end it is not that interesting.

[fr33]

Never read either one.

Never saw the movie with Gregory Peck.

So, which first?

I haven't read them either. It's a great movie though. My wife has always been obsessed with the first book and the movie, and is reading the newly released one right now.

[acptulsa]

Well, now that I think about it, of course To Kill a Mockingbird is a coming-of-age tale. It's Arthur Radley's coming of age tale.

That guy's easy to overlook.

Never read either one.

Never saw the movie with Gregory Peck.

So, which first?

Well, Watchman is pretty much the sequel, being based some fifteen years later than Mockingbird. And I always thought the movie was kind of overrated, myself, though there really isn't anything wrong with it. But you can read whichever one you get your hands on first; they're both stand-alone novels.

[Okie RP fan]

I have seen multiple reviews all over the Internet saying how dreadful it is and that it doesn't live up to the glory of To Kill a Mockingbird, which I thought was just okay to begin with.

If, however, as some of you say it has some libertarian messages in it, that explains why I've only seen negative reviews and opinions about this latest book.

Very shameful, but entirely expected.

[Brian4Liberty]

I have seen multiple reviews all over the Internet saying how dreadful it is and that it doesn't live up to the glory of To Kill a Mockingbird, which I thought was just okay to begin with.

If, however, as some of you say it has some libertarian messages in it, that explains why I've only seen negative reviews and opinions about this latest book.

Very shameful, but entirely expected.

They are trying their very best to bury it before it gets out.

It's like Abraham Lincoln coming out of the grave and saying "yeah, we ended slavery and held the Union together, but everything else you leftists are doing is absolutely horrible, evil and wrong". Then it would be time for them to demonize Lincoln.

[Barrex]

On amazon.com it is currently #1 best seller.