Harper Lee: On Second Thought

Atticus Finch In the Catbird Seat:   The Vichy-Ization Of American Culture

 By Tio Blanco Negro de la Valle for CPW News Service

 

     It turns out that Atticus Finch is a different bird than the one novelist, Harper Lee, a contemporary of Southern writers Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Margaret Mitchell and Truman Capote, first reported in To Kill A Mockingbird. Okay, the editors assisted her in rethinking her original version from the initial draft/s.  Still, it was her decision to release it with the saintly Atticus we all grew to know and admire.
     "Harper Lee's second novel is titled Go Set A Watchman, but it should be titled Go Set A Watchman By the Woodpile," said Dr. Cletus Codlicker, a director of The Institute for the Analysis of Scientific Anomalies and a long-time fan of Lee's original story of the beloved Atticus Finch.

     Atticus, as it turns out, was more like this reviewer's Castillian ancestors, like the Spaniards who inflicted their Claveria Laws on the poor indigenous people of their conquered provinces.  “Yes, indeed” said expert on the movie roles of actor Gregory Peck, John “Stubby” Arbuckle of Los Angeles, California.

     This was Gregory Peck’s favorite part of all the parts he played. “Gregory loved playing Atticus,” said Arbuckle.  “It gave him that great sense that he was defender of human honor.   Now that Harper Lee’s second novel uncovers a decidedly different side of Atticus, I am wondering just how Peck….if he could return from the grave….would feel about his favorite character?” asked Arbuckle.

     Arbuckle is circumspect when it comes to Harper Lee’s disappearance from the South and her move to New York where she was befriend by socialites Michael and Joy Williams Brown.  While Michael Brown promoted American industrialism through industrial musicals and his lovely wife supported the New York ballet community.  "For all I know, Michael Brown's family owned the Baltimore, Maryland Brown's Merchant Shot Tower where pre-Civil War musket ball maker, James Hamlet, played the dramatic role of the first African American to be tried under the war-fueling Fugitive Slave Laws, being returned to his job after the case to fashion George Luther Stearns' lead....a 'Secret Six' backer of abolitionist, John Brown, from Boston into bullets for the Civil War.  Baltimore was not only the manufacturing center for U.S. industrialists' China clippers, but home to Alexander Brown the progenitor of National City Bank for which Marine General Smedley Darlington Butler lamented his role as a "Goon on three continents" and which morphed into Brown and Root....Kellogg Brown and Root or KBR," said Arbuckle.  "Now with this assertion that Atticus was a goddamn typical bigot, no worse, a Nazi-like eugenicists like those uncovered by Edwin Black in his book War Against the Weak and like those enraged Dixie dufusses from South Carolina, the seemingly random copulative assembly of Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, runaway killers from New York's prisons, border jumping pistol plinkers of innocent young white girls in San Francisco and escaped drug kingpins in Mexico and the stage is set for another Hitlerian era," he continued.

     “Why Harper just disappeared for all these years is as great a mystery as the work of Margaret Mitchell, the great Southern writer from Smith College, alma mater of Barbara Pierce Bush, Nancy Reagan, Julia Child, Phebe Novakovic, Shelly Lazarus, Sylvia Plath, Gloria Steinam and Betty Friedan.    Now I knew that when Margaret Mitchell published her one hit wonder, Gone With The Wind, produced as the film by John “Jock” Hay Whitney, husband of Barbara Cushing Paley Whitney, that this sad story of Miss Scarlet and Rhett Butler was a marvelous piece of propaganda ready-made for keeping the clod hopper Southerners, ninety percent of whom had no slaves, in the dark about the real history of the Civil War, fed and watered by the likes of Caleb Cushing, Jefferson Davis, Braxton Bragg, William Tecumseh Sherman and a host of dead Union Generals buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati.  They lie there nestled next to their key oligarch and founder of the 1833 Order at Yale, home of the Connecticut-based Baltimore opium cutter-builders, the Huntingtons, Russells, Cushings, Tafts and a bevy of bodacious Boston Brahmans who fueled the U.S. Civil War under the pretext of abolitionism when it was to secure the rail route to the Pacific and the Middle Eastern opium that made them all fortunes as it was dumped for other goods along the Yangtze River in China,” said Arbuckle.  "Freed slaves in urbanized ghettos were to the U.S. what the Chinese coolies were to the British and Chinese opium wars," said  Arbuckle.

     “You can see the charade continue in the Gregory Peck movie The Big Country.  Playing the part of a sailor from a wealthy Baltimore shipping family, James McKay, he finds himself parked between two warring Hatfields and McCoy-type ranchers in the old American West.  This gentleman sailor wants peace between the feuding settlers, but nowhere in the story is the history of Baltimore  unpacked as with the 1999 book from Thomas Layton, Voyage of the Frolic: The New England Merchants and the Opium Trade,   That book reveals that Fred Bailey, also known as Frederick Douglass, was laying hulls like that of the Frolic for another New England China Trader within the social and business circle of the Huntingtons and Russells.... the Heards,” said Arbuckle.

 

"We are essentially seeing the Vichy-ization of the U.S.." -John "Stubby" Arbuckle

     Arbuckle is quite sure that 90 percent of America’s media is about the support of a military industrialist complex's proper line that keeps the mythology moving in the direction of profits for the power elites.   “Take JEB Bush’s recent assertion that the Americans whose middle class has been decimated should now be working harder than ever to hold on to whatever jobs haven’t been exported overseas to countries that practice economic slavery.  We are essentially seeing the Vichy-ization of the U.S.” said Arbuckle.  “This is now being normalized for the average American.  It's as if Humphrey Bogart who starred in the anti-fight film The Harder They Fall is now Dana White of Ultimate Fighting Championships promoting caged gore and telling Senator John McCain that if he wants whatever war he cannot live without that he has to shut-up about his criticism of this domestic brutality since it feeds the war mentality and money mill.  A killer nation must kill its heroes to continue its downward descent.  The fact that Harper Lee has given us a time machine on the Atticus Finch story at a time when James Baldwin cannot find only a single index reference in the letters of correspondence between Walker Percy and the now famous Shelby Foote, thanks to Ken Burns and his PBS-based Civil War histories which never reports as Brian Lamb’s interview with Foote did that “I consulted no original manuscripts….it’s all been gone over before.”   That admission shows the degree to which the American mythology is a string of big bamboozles,” said Arbuckle.  

     Arbuckle holds nothing back.   “PBS is part of the U.S. Information Agency’s front line of defense on the great American myth which clearly hides the reality of its history like Uri Geller attempting to make a fortune from the CIA via the Stanford Research Institute before his bamboozle was outed by Johnny Carson and James Randi or like the Iran-Contra bamboozle was outed by Gary Webb in his 1996 book, Dark Alliance,” said Arbuckle.  “That Thomas Layton’s 1999 book, The Voyage of the Frolic was published by Stanford is an amazing development considering just how close Leland Stanford was to William Tecumseh Sherman, George Bragg, Braxton Bragg,  Thomas Bragg and the Caleb Cushing connections through the Northeast where lots of good Southern writers are quickly identified, put on ice and exported to a place where their writing can do the least harm to the prevailing myth.”