Author Harper Lee and her groundbreaking novel To Kill a Mockingbird have received a well-deserved defense in the Washington Post, exactly fifty years after the book’s publication. The fact that such a thing is necessary indicates the truly terrifying amount of stupidity and arrogance that stain the contemporary mainstream media. Columnist Kathleen Parker’s defense of Lee and her only novel is rather weak, but at least she attempts it, rebuking the spectacularly overrated writer Malcolm Gladwell’s meandering article in the New Yorker on the subject. Gladwell’s risible essay is chock-full of instances of his technique of alleged reversals of conventional thinking, which are in fact either already commonly understood or wrong or both. Gladwell’s notion that To Kill a Mockingbird, first published in1960, is insufficiently hateful toward white Southerners and is unsophisticated in failing to embrace radical politics is a truly breathtaking instance of ignorant bigotry. It is also not original, and it is wrong. Gladwell writes, for example: If Finch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict. But he isn’t. He’s not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law. He’s Jim Folsom, looking for racial salvation through hearts and minds.

Read more »