There were several reasons for my writing a critique of To Kill A Mockingbird on behalf of children five years ago, and why I was invited to do a book signing of it April 6, 2001 at Russo’s to coincide with TKM being the featured book for the whole city to read. The folks at Russo’s and I have enjoyed a personal relationship of years standing, and they have always welcomed my books.

Among the reasons for my writing the critique was the increasing madness pervading the leadership of America, a madness that is leading America to becoming a pariah among the nations of the world due in large part to a system of government that seems to hate families and children.

Copies of the critique went to Mayor Hall, the Californian, the Beale Library, and nearly two hundred copies were sent to various organizations secular and religious, columnists, and politicians. Over this past five years requests for the critique continue to come, though requests are now delayed until a new edition becomes available. While only 24,000 words in length the critique covers a good many questions arising from the novel; and some of my comments have resonated with many people.

From the critique I point out my favorite non-fiction book is Thoreau's Walden. My favorite novel is To Kill a Mockingbird. It, together with Walden (and Emerson’s essays), occupies a space on the table next to my bed. And perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to give both books to college graduates along with their diplomas.

One reason for my keeping Harper Lee's wonderful and masterful novel so close at hand is the fact that I was a contemporary of the era Miss Lee describes; and I was born into, and raised in, the identical culture with the identical kinds of people straight out of the Dust Bowl and Grapes of Wrath with the identical ignorance and prejudices all around me (and diet and idiomatic dialect), described in the novel, which is not to discount the very best of civilized manners and behavior portrayed by Harper Lee characteristic of the South.

And thanks to my maternal great-grandmother and grandparents, I am most familiar with the best of the values, sense of justice and fairness, good manners, and civilized behavior so characteristic of the best of Southern people like Atticus Finch. And I am ever grateful loving people so representative of him raised me. But I am also well acquainted with what cruel poverty and ignorance can do to any people of whatever culture or race.

Riots and rhetoric, films like To Kill a Mockingbird, A Woman Called Moses, Mississippi Burning, Ghosts of Mississippi, A Time to Kill, The Tuskegee Airmen, Miss Evers' Boys, and Amistad, have not changed things for the better; and the world lacking wisdom, with evil seeming to be ever in the ascendancy how can they? Nor can Hollywood have it both ways; pretending to fight discrimination on the one hand and hypocritically supporting violence and perversion on the other.

In respect to the kind of madness and bullying that seems all-pervading and prevents good people from seizing the initiative in acquiring wisdom, Harper Lee has Calpurnia telling the children, “You're not going to change any of them by talkin' right; they've got to want to learn themselves. And when they don't want to learn there's nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.”

And sure enough most do not want to learn but do all they can to silence people like me who as with Harper Lee don’t “talk their language;” they not only have no interest in talkin' right, they want to bully others into talking their language no matter how ignorant or self-serving, to be polite to their idols, myths and superstitions no matter how harmful to wisdom. The worst of these insist on everyone either talkin' their language or they will mount a jihad in order to destroy anyone who does not! In spite of how very, even selfishly, ignorant their own language may be, they not only do not know better, like the ignorant Ewells of the novel, they have no interest in doing any better.

The Pulitzer was given Harper Lee for all the “right” reasons. At least all the right reasons adults were capable of knowing. But the Pulitzer is not awarded for some of the major things Harper Lee points out; things like the fact Jews can be just as ignorantly prejudiced against Negroes as any southern Caucasian, that some Negroes are no more interested in doing any better than the ignorant white trash Ewell’s.

Thinking back to that era where I was a contemporary of the kinds of people and place Harper Lee wrote about it wasn’t surprising I would relate to the novel when it first appeared; that I would immediately go see the film when it was released; that I would require reading the novel by my pupils in literature classes, generating many an essay about it.

The one interview Harper Lee gave was to Roy Newquist and originally appeared in his book of interviews, Counterpoint, published in 1964 by Rand McNally.

To the question by Newquist about those seeking reward from their writing Harper Lee replied, “Well, I've got news for them. (You must think I regard writing as something like the medieval priesthood—and sometimes I wish our government could see its way clear to support our writers on bread and water and shut them up in a monastery somewhere.) People who write for reward by way of recognition or monetary gain don't know what they're doing. They're in the category of those who write; they are not writers. Writing is simply something you must do. It's rather like virtue in that it is its own reward. Writing is selfish and contradictory in its terms. First of all, you're writing for an audience of one, you must please the one person you're writing for. I don't believe this business of "No, I don't write for myself, I write for the public." That's nonsense. Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself. He writes not to communicate with other people, but to communicate more assuredly with himself. It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.”

In this way Harper Lee summed what every real writer knows “in their bones.” But when asked about her further aspirations as a writer Harper Lee replied “As you know, the South is still made up of thousands of tiny towns. There is a very definite social pattern in these towns that fascinates me. I think it is a rich social pattern. I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe that there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing. In other words all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”

But the film great as it is betrayed Harper Lee, which may be one reason she stopped writing. The film made Atticus a card carrying member of the ACLU; it condemned all those in the South that did not subscribe to the ACLU party line. America was changing rapidly in the wrong direction due in large part to the ACLU bastardization of the main points of Harper Lee’s novel, one many acclaim as the “Novel of the Century!”

Columnist Jay Sekulow asks the relevant question “Who elected the ACLU?” He goes on to cover some of the issues where this infamous organization has thwarted the will of We the People extorting our taxes to support it while at the same time cutting the throats of Americans and America. I recommend people read the column and go online to “What’s wrong with the ACLU” for a grasp of the depth of this organization’s betrayal of America, a betrayal that continues unabated because the ACLU is so well funded not only by money extorted from taxpayers but funded by so many of the enemies of America.

We will never know what Harper Lee may have gone on to contribute as the “Jane Austen of south Alabama.” But I do know what the infamous ACLU has done in stifling voices like hers raised in defense of the South she loves and the America of We the People.