Defiling Mark Twain should be a federal crime.

> [Mark Twain](http://topics.sfgate.com/topics/Mark_Twain) wrote that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter.” A new edition of “[Adventures of Huckleberry Finn](http://topics.sfgate.com/topics/Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn)” and “Tom Sawyer” will try to find out if that holds true by replacing the N-word with “slave” in an effort not to offend readers. > > Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who is working with [NewSouth Books](http://topics.sfgate.com/topics/NewSouth_Books) in [Alabama](http://topics.sfgate.com/topics/Alabama) to publish a combined volume of the books, said the N-word appears 219 times in “Huck Finn” and four times in “Tom Sawyer.” He said the word puts the books in danger of joining the list of literary classics that Twain once humorously defined as those “which people praise and don’t read.” I don’t know whether to be sad, offended, or outraged about this. Maybe I’m all three.

Anyone who reads Mark Twain and doesn’t immediately get that he was way ahead of his time, MAKING FUN of racist ignorance in the deep South doesn’t deserve the gift of literacy. Seriously. Go home and shoot yourself. You’re not contributing anything positive to planet Earth.

This is the worst kind of Political Correctness gone berserk. We’re literally whitewashing our history and destroying one of the few truly worthy pieces of literature to come out of this country for what, exactly? To make some people feel better by pretending that no one ever used that word? Pretending that people still don’t use that word?

This has nothing whatsoever to do with not offending African Americans, by the way. This is about lying in order to diminish white guilt. Plain and simple. Turn a blind eye and pretend it never happened. Great way to ensure that it keeps happening.

Notice the guy publishing the book is white? Notice the parent groups who always want to ban Huck Finn are predominantly white? See a pattern here?

You don’t reduce racism by pretending it doesn’t exist. You diminish it by bringing it to the light, forcing people to face it, starting an uncomfortable conversation about what those words mean to different people and why they’re so offensive.

Huck Finn is the best tool we have in American Literature to teach about this incredibly important period in our history. It’s literature, history, politics, sociology, and child psychology, all rolled into one. It’s the thing you put into the space capsule and blast into the next universe as a symbol of what mankind is capable of producing. That’s exactly why the book has been a staple of public education for so long in this country.

And this dillweed gets to defile it? And no one is stopping him?

For God’s sake, why must America continue to run at full speed toward the biggest idiots on Earth prize? We won. A long time ago. No one is catching up anytime soon, believe me. We can stop now.