Well, yes, I understand that it may hit certain individuals hard to hear a certain word, even in satire. That depends on their own background and what they've dealt with in life, I suppose. One of the great dangers in doing any kind of humorous satire is that you may inadvertently upset various people who either don't get it...or are upset by the material even if they do get it. Actually, I think that is probably unavoidable when doing effective social satire...or political cartoons. You will delight certain people and offend others.

It's a tricky business.

I find it particularly sad that a great book like Huckleberry Finn gets censored, altered, and banned from various places by well-meaning (?) do-gooders who happen to object to the word "nigger" appearing in its pages. Have any of them actually read the book? It's a superb book in every way. Mark Twain was depicting characters (including Jim, a black man of wonderful character) who used the word nigger in normal speech, simply because that was a very ordinary thing to do at that time among those people. It was the way they talked! If one doesn't leave the word in, how is one to know what life was like back then? Furthermore, Jim was one of the finest and most likeable characters in the whole book. Mark Twain was in no way putting down black people in that book.

When the fight against prejudice is waged in such a way as to produce sheer ignorance of the past then it is a fight that is being waged wrongly.

Likewise, requiring model airplane companies to delete the historical swastika marking from their models of WWII German airplanes is of no benefit to Jews whatsoever (despite the fact that some Jews may feel the sight of that symbol as a physical blow...). It is an attempt to deny factual history and suppress real historical information. Denial of reality is not healthy. One needs to know about evil and face it in order to fight it effectively. One cannot know about something if one cannot even bear to LOOK at it. To model the plane with the swastika is NOT to honour Naziism in any way whatsoever, it is simply to build a historically accurate representation of the actual airplane.

God knows, there must have been generations of Native Americans who felt struck by a physical blow whenever they saw the American flag. Their whole way of life was brutally destroyed in the name of that flag. Does that give them the right now to ban it from public use? No.

What goes for the few goes for the many. No one has a right to ban a historical symbol, just because THEY happen to have emotional baggage with regards to it. They have a right to dislike or hate it...but not to ban it. Your freedom to be who you are should not be won at the price of denying someone else's freedom to be who they are. If it is, you don't really believe in freedom, you just believe in being the winner...the one who is in control. And that's what the Nazis believed in, as far as I can see.

I'm not aiming this at you, McGrath, I'm just talking in general terms about a theme which is important to me.

- LH