A colleague of mine had as his tagline to his emails the old saying, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. Recent events have made me think that “When you have a gun, everything looks like a threat’, while less pithy, expresses a truism.

This thought was triggered by a recent set reports of people shooting at others seemingly for no reason other than they felt threatened by innocent actions and happened to have guns conveniently at hand to use. In each case, death and injuries arose simply because one person had a gun and felt that its use was the only way to deal with a situation when doing nothing or just talking would have worked much better. But having a gun not only prevented them from exploring other options, it escalated the situation beyond all reason.

One case that has received a lot of publicity is that of a 16-year old Black adolescent Ralph Yarl who happened to go to the wrong house in Kansas City, Missouri to pick up his younger siblings from a party. When he rang the doorbell, the 84-year old white homeowner Andrew Lester, seeing him through the glass door, shot him twice, once in the head. Yarl survived but it is very likely that there will be long-term consequences that he and his family will have to deal with.

The homeowner’s grandson said that he was disgusted by the shooting and that his grandfather said racist things and watched Fox News round the clock.
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Rightwingers in the US have made schools and libraries the focus of their culture wars, seeing those venerable institutions as somehow indoctrinating children with liberal values, when in reality they are largely providing fairly ideologically neutral services. What has happened is that rightwingers have lost the culture wars as the zeitgeist has shifted under their feet, resulting in the public at large more accepting of those groups that were formerly invisible or marginalized because of their gender identity or sexual orientation or ethnicity. As a result, the rightwingers have become the fringe but still see themselves as upholding mainstream values, and have launched an assault on schools and libraries in their effort to take control of what they think they have lost.

But it looks like becoming ever more extreme, as often happens with groups fighting culture wars, may be a losing political strategy because it makes their toxic views more public and alarms those do not agree with them. Those who may formerly have been somewhat passive politically have now become more active in trying to stop the extremists and we are seeing some evidence of that as rightwingers have recently lost in many school board elections.
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When the publishers of Roald Dahl’s books announced their decision to change some of the language that was seen as offensive, my thoughts immediately went to my favorite author and his very funny book Thank You, Jeeves. In that book, the hapless Bertie Wooster, in an attempt to escape from the yacht where he was being held captive by an angry prospective father-in-law, uses shoe polish to darken his skin in order to blend in with a troupe of blackface minstrels who had been invited to perform on the yacht, hoping to slip off with them after the show.

Nowadays, white people performing in blackface is severely frowned upon but in those times it was not uncommon, with people like Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Shirley Temple being among those who did so. In this book, however, it is even worse because the narrator Bertie casually calls the performers ‘n-word minstrels’, again something that was apparently a fairly common description at that time. But reading that was really jarring, however much one might believe that there was no bad intent on the part of the author and that he was merely using the accepted language of his time.

So I welcomed the decision by the publishers to revise Wodehouse’s books to eliminate this and any other language that are no longer appropriate. In my view, doing so does not detract from the books. There are some books, such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, where retaining the original language is defensible because Twain was making social commentary and the language played an important part of his message. But while one might argue that Wodehouse’s use of those words tells us something about attitudes in those days and thus should be retained, his books were meant as light entertainment and those words were incidental to the book, so eliminating them should be uncontroversial.

But is anything involving race and gender uncontroversial these days?