My class of sixth graders has been reading Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird this month. Today, I am showing them the movie version. I just now saw the scene where Atticus leaves work, comes home, and kills a rabid dog with one shot. It struck me forcefully in that moment how much Barack Obama is like Atticus Finch. Osama bin Laden was his rabid dog—his chance to show the hard edge that exists under all the beliefs about the importance of taking someone else’s perspective. And when he had to, he pulled the trigger.
NO. The bin Laden family and the Bush family are business partners in Carlyle Group who mainly invests with defense contractors. Your view of current events is... elementary, and regrettably, delusional.
ReplyDeleteGo do your homework and connect all the dots, and then figure out who Obama would shoot as the rabid dog, but in doing so, you'll find that Barrack has nothing in common with Atticus, and I stood in the cold January morning in DC to see him inaugurated.
You bum me out, dude. I am so sad I am practically forced to send my kid to a school to be taught by you and your ilk. The only thing that Obama has in common with Atticus is the fact they are both lawyers, and they have two kids. That is it. That is all.
ReplyDeleteA more appropriate literary comparison to Obama would be Wesley Mouch, a Washington insider who rises to prominence by trading favors and harming the production of the U.S. economy by passing wildly unpopular legislation aimed at derailing the production (profits) of successful businesses.
If Obama was in Atticus' shoes in that moment he would have handed the gun to Heck Tate, told him not to protest, and to just get it done. He then would have hopped into that truck on screen, (that wasn't his) and promptly drove to the nearest golf course and played the full eighteen while complaining about how the owner of the dog nearly ruined his day. He would then dream up legislation to restrict the ownership of dogs, on the basis of the possibility of rabies being such a danger to the children, and all.
JZ
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