Why I regret leaving Greenpeace and why I am angry again
I became an unwitting digital activist in the fall of 2011. Until that watershed year, I hadn't been an activist of any variety since the early days of the First Gulf War, when I was canvassing for Greenpeace in neighbourhoods throughout the greater Puget Sound region. The ensuing war eventually made this sort of work untenable for me when discussions about environmental issues became marred by the nightly televised bombings of Iraq in the living rooms of people I visited. How could I possibly discuss deforestation in Brazil against the backdrop of the media's video game-esque portrayal of George Bush's war? I was compelled to talk about the Republican elephant in the room! Most people were glued to their sets and deeply polarised.
After a few weeks of competing with the Gulf War, I quit and moved on to something less volatile and distracting – your basic nine-to-five job that paid the bills, with a little left over to drink to the stupidity of US foreign policy. But during those last few weeks hitting the streets every night and knocking on doors, I was impressed by the deeply divided opinions. The hundreds of people I spoke to knew where they stood on George Bush and the war in the Gulf. There was a clarity of conscience. Citizens didn't necessarily need the political parties and the media to tell them how to think and feel, although that happened too in a big way, as it still does today.
In retrospect, I regretted the decision to leave Greenpeace when I did, though I was likely too immature at the time to carry on effectively with the distraction of an ongoing war. I failed to recognise that it was a potential learning experience from which I could have become a more effective activist, or maybe even a better human being. That learning curve was to arrive 20 years later, in another lifetime, so to speak, in the same year Mark Twain was censored and the the Occupy Wall Street movement arose out of Zuccotti Park in New York City.
Censoring of Twain
When NewSouth Books announced in early January, 2011 that one of its authors was publishing a censored version of Mark Twain's classic, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", I got my first jumpstart to being an activist once again, although I didn't think of it in those terms at the time. I was too incensed that someone – that someone being Dr Alan Gribben, teacher and Mark Twain scholar – had the gall to take advantage of public domain material and a dead author's story. He argued that a sanitised version of Huck Finn without racial epithets like nigger, would reach a broader audience and spare him the shame and embarrassment of having to utter racial slurs during readings of Huck Finn.
He opined that many members in the teaching profession would feel the same. No doubt, many did. "For nearly forty years I have led college classes, bookstore fora, and library reading groups in detailed discussions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in California, Texas, New York, and Alabama, and I always recoiled from uttering the racial slurs spoken by numerous characters, including Tom and Huck," Gribben wrote in an excerpt of his book. "I invariably substituted the word 'slave' for Twain’s ubiquitous n-word whenever I read any passages aloud. Students and audience members seemed to prefer this expedient, and I could detect a visible sense of relief each time, as though a nagging problem with the text had been addressed."
A pity he couldn't have left it at that and carried on with his cowardly tradition of soap-to-mouth readings. He didn't need a book to pull off this feat for nearly 40 years – though the potential for book sales in school districts which had previously banned Twain could have been a factor in a premeditated white-washing-for-profit scheme.
Somewhere in the great beyond, maybe in hell, where the conversation is arguably better, Twain and Orwell were exchanging raised eyebrows over tea.
Back on Earth, the debate raged on in the media for a few short weeks and then fizzled out. The book was published. Out with nigger and in with slave – two very different words with very different meanings. Gribben now had his very own personalised Huck Finn book that he could read to a crowd of reality-avoiders without blushing. And I was truly puzzled as to how someone, a white liberal, who could have easily been one of those people who invited me into their homes in 1991 to talk about the crimes of war, could ever hope to openly talk about racism and slavery by white-washing the lexicons of slave owners and the general populace of the 19th century, via censorship (or in the name of editing, a useful euphemism for the same thing in this instance), without a single qualm. I know there are people out there, even authors, who claim that what Gribben and NewSouth Books did wasn't censorship. I've had that debate with a certain author and others. But I feel that even if I am wrong about what constitutes censorship, there is something truly sleazy and dishonest about changing literature so that it's more pleasing to the masses. No amount of white-washing, however well-intended, could ever convince me that some literary Big Mac is more nutritious than the real deal, written by the author, word for word, as intended, and without apology.