and finally... Attitudes both ancient and modern


Chris Proctor finds the stone age everywhere


T


he woman who wrote The Little House on the Prairie in the 1930s has been kicked off the US list of approved scribblers. Her work offends modern values. Fair play, I


say, but how come we leave people alone who are writing now with stone age ethics? The Association for Library Service to Children says Laura Ingalls Wilder’s work “includes stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness”. You have to say it’s a fair cop, guv. Like when Laura explained that it was OK to occupy the land as “there were no people on the prairie. Only Indians lived there.” One neighbour was of the opinion that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” and Pa, when not taking his belt to the children, was a great fan of minstrel shows. Wilder is clearly a tad old fashioned: but, in her defence, many attitudes that were acceptable when they were written are offensive now, even those of our sainted Bard. When the Sydney Opera House staged his Merchant of Venice last year, they gave Jessica a few extra lines to explain her guilty feelings, and invented a new end for the play where Portia predicts a bright new world without prejudice. I can see reasons for these things: even if Mein


Kampf were nicely written, I’d still be happy to live without it. No art’s so precious that entire races should have to suffer for it. No, my complaint is that if we can update old


books and plays to conform to modern norms, why can’t we do it to current writing that reflects the morality of Fred Flintstone? Apart from being socially useful, it would create stacks of jobs for subs. A legion of us could be allocated to Donald. Ask


yourself – do his tweets reflect inclusiveness, integrity and respect? For example, he once confided to Esquire magazine that, “It doesn’t really matter what they [journalists] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” Call me pernickity, but I don’t see this as over respectful (or grammatical) and it is certainly discriminatory. On Don’s formula, I’d never have been offered a day’s work in my life. A good sub could have stepped in here and


rephrased it to conform with contemporary values as: “It doesn’t really matter what they [journalists] write as long as it is objective and truthful.” Similarly: when the president suggested, “When somebody comes into our country, we must immediately, with no judges or court cases, bring them back from where they came.” This could be updated to read: “If after human rights and the penal system had been fully considered, an immigrant is proved to be illegal, repatriation could be considered reasonable.” As regards stereotypes, attention is clearly required for his view that black people were not to his liking for counting cash in his Atlanta casinos: “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes.” I suggest a rewording along the lines of: “Honesty is the only criterion of importance when dealing with financial matters.”


In some cases, I concede that the subbing


system would prove unwieldy and more radical action may be necessary. I offer the example of Jacob Rees-Mogg. It would be tedious work to simply insert the word ‘not’ in each sentence, so it might be less burdensome to ignore him completely or, better still, re-cast him as a satirist. What line, properly viewed, is more lampooning than his comment on the increased take-up of food banks? “I think it is rather uplifting and shows what a good, compassionate country we are.” Add an exclamation mark and it’s a positive rib-tickler. Reassessing Tony Blair with reference to


integrity would provide plenty of work for subs. His declaration to NBC that “We know that Saddam has stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and biological weapons” is best refashioned, “I’d promised my mate I’d hold his coat while he changed a regime.” As an aside, it also reads better.


On the same probity basis, a revision of


Borris’s“we send the EU £350m a week: let’s fund our NHS instead” should really read, “I’ve no idea about Brexit finances but, in the unlikely event that there are savings, they won’t be going into the public sector, I’ll tell you that.”


26 | theJournalist


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