Back when I was a little kid, I think I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, oh, I dunno, maybe 10,000 times each. Of course, they were still new back then. The thought of Tom and Becky (I still have the hots for Becky Thatcher :hubba:. I bet Huck was doing her behind Tom’s back) being lost in that cave still sends shivers down my spine. And when Injun Joe threw that knife at Tom when he was on the witness stand and then crashed out the window? Oh, awesome, man (the people responsible for turning these books into a freakin’ musical with that prissy kid from Family Affair should be shot – though I’d be willing to grant a pardon to whoever cast Jodie Foster as Becky). Except, guess what? It aint gonna be “Injun” Joe anymore.

That’s right, in an effort to appease those crusading, professionally offended do-gooders out there who apparently have nothing better to do than ban books from schools because your kids can’t handle the content, damnit, the John F. Blair publishing company (whose rich history dates all the way back to 1954 – fun fact: the first book they published was written by John Henry Boner) has seen fit to publish a new edition combining these two classics, retroactively censoring Mark Twain in favor of more politically correct language (I’d make a white-washing the fence analogy, but it would be too obvious). Oh, it’s OK to have Joe be a homicidal maniac – you just can’t refer to him in an insensitive manner.

Thus, “half-breed” becomes “half-blood” (what, that’s better? I guess if it’s good enough for Harry Potter, right?), Injun Joe becomes Indian Joe, and Huck’s friend Jim (referred to by the name that white people can’t use in public any more) becomes, “the slave Jim” (I’m surprised they didn’t make it “native American Joe” and “African-American Jim”).

I can’t wait to read Blair’s upcoming “History of the Civil Rights Movement,” where the kindly white folks meet their black friends in Selma and let them play with their puppies while offering them cool drinks of water from high pressure hoses to slake their thirst, or perhaps a new tome about the Civil War, detailing the South’s fight to preserve “State’s rights” against the aggressors from the North.

I also eagerly anticipate the remake of Blazing Saddles

“Good day, ma’am.”

“Up yours, nice looking young African American man.”

I’m sorry, but things were the way they were, and people did what they did and spoke the way they spoke, and while it might be shocking or embarrassing or inconvenient to remember the way it was, it’s important to do so. We don’t want to amend every piece of literature in existence until all that’s left are West Virginia history books and officially sanctioned Texas Board of Education versions of how the world is 4,000 years old and fossils are a practical joke left by God to test our faith, do we?

I mean, you might as well make a big show of reading the US Constitution on the floor of the House of Representatives and leaving out the inconvenient part where our glorious founding fathers allow slavery, oppress women, and consider black people worth about 60% of a “real” human being.

But only a bunch of assholes would do that.