Opinion

Page 6
The Michigan Daily
Vol. XCII, No 3S
Ninety Years of Editorial Freedom
Edited and managed by students;
at the University of Michigan
Cost orbenefit?
OKAY, EVERYBODY, take a deep breath.
Now hold it-this may be one of the last
clean breaths of fresh air around in many cities
if the Environmental Protection Agency has its
way.
The EPA plans to relax carbon monoxide
standards that will incr6ase concentrations of
the harmful pollutant by 33 percent, according
to agency documents released by three
congressmen.
EPA officials have labeled the charges
"ridiculous," but have made no secret of their
aim to allow more pollutants to foul the nation's
air and its citizen's rungs.
The proposal is merely the latest of the
Reagan administration's assault on environ-
mental quality to placate grumbling industries.
It will allow cities to exceed carbon monoxide
standards five times yearly instead. of the
single violation currently permitted.
Administration officials have insisted in the
past that governmental regulations be subjec-
ted to cost-benefit analysis. In their review of
environmental rules, however, the government
has disregarded the benefits of clean air and
water in both aesthetic and medical terms.
Admittedly, the proposal may mean slightly
cheaper cars and electricity. The human costs
of such a move, however, may prove
staggering. Both the American Lung and the
American Heart Associations have asserted the
plan will lead to declining health standards.
Undoubtedly, environmental regulations cost
American industry money. But relaxed air
standards will cost American citizens their
health.
"THINK OF THE JOBS MY PLAN W0 CREAtg --
MECAIcS TO REMOVE AHTIPOWLTION PEVICES
MORE DOCTORS --MORE HOSPITALS-
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Friday, May 7, 1982

The Michigan Daily

Was 'Huck'racist?

By Henry Binder
Recently, an official at the
Mark Twain School in Virginia
denounced "The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn." written by
Mark Twain, as "racist trash."
Therefore, racists teach the book,
said the official, while it damages
students by offering a degrading
portrait of blacks. Jim, Huck's
companion on the river, is
referred to in Huck's own ver-
nacular asa "nigger."
The official, John Wallace,
joins a deathless tradition of
American educators, self-styled
and otherwise employed, who
have tried to protect American
youth from such subversive
works as The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the
Rye, and Soul on Ice.
WHAT THESE books do is
show America as a violent,
dangerous place for anyone,
especially those wishing to
preserve a measure of innocence,
moral sensitivity, and personal
liberty.
Our culture, it seems, spawns
both a schoolmaster/marm im-
pulse to sterilize American
realities along with its writers
who persist in taking readers to
the volatile center of those same
realities, racist or whatever-a
center that has provided material
for many of our most widely
known and culturally defining
fictions.
Where do you learn about
America anyway-in
classrooms, in the streets, in
novels, at local bars?
Maybe Huck Finn is racist.
But what about Huck himself?
The last time I read the book, I
noticed that Huck (who is a white
southern boy living before the
Civil War) spends a lot of
ingenuity and personal risk
trying to free Jim (who is black
and a slave) even if doing so
means Huck will be condemned
to hell, by whatever gods.

- X
Mark Twain, as portrayed by Hal
Holhrook, discusses Huck Finn.
IF THE BOOK is racist, we
need to know. And if it is so suc-
cessful a piece of racist
propaganda-as Wallace seems
to think-that it romances,
brainwashes, or deludes students
to become racist personalities,
we need to know that, and put a
stop to it immediately.
In a 1970 essay in Entertain-
ment World, Robert Culp, who
played alongside Bill Cosby in "I
Spy," wrote about violence in
movies and said of the theatre:
"There is no danger in this
place ... in you maybe." We
must hope that, beinga school of-
ficial, Wallace is not a dangerous
misreader..
It is hard to recollect a time
since Ralph Waldo Emerson
when one major American writer
or another was not making a
frontal attack on narrow minds,
mean spirits, racism, political
corruption, the system, or
anything that constricts or
threatens personal liberty.
BUT DOESN'T it seem odd
that Mark Twain, who was
probably the most popular person
in America at the turn of the cen-
tury, should seem threatening to
a grown presumably professional
man in our time, after two world

wars, Korea, and Vietnam? Or
perhaps Wallace's idea is that we
have come so far, that Mark
Twain embarrasses us in
retrospect.
Which brings me to another
question: Namely, what would
Mark Twain himself, if he were
alive now, reply to Wallace?
We'll never know, but to help us
guess, let me repeat his often
quoted response to a Brooklyn
librarian concerning the banning
of his two most famous American
stories from the children's
reading room:
I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and
'Huck Finn" for, adults ex-
clusively, and it always
distresses me when Ifind that
boys and girls have been
allowed access to them. The
mind that becomes soiled in
youth can never again be
washed clean.- I know this by
my own experience, and to this
day I cherish an unappeasable
bitterness against the unfaith-
ful guardians of my young
life, who not only permitted
but compelled me to read an
unexpurgated Bible through
before I was 15 years
old ... More honestly do I
wish that I could say a sof-
tening word or two in defense
of Huck's character since you
wish it, but really, in my
opinion, it is no better than
those of Solomon, David, and
the rest 'of the sacred
brotherhood.
Binder is a lecturer for the
English Department.

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LETTERS TO THE DAILY:
Freedom of and from religion

To the Daily:
The Michigan Daily editorial
statement, "A Constitutional
amendment allowing school
prayer will not destroy the
separation of church and state
outlined in the Constitution," is
true, but this historic American
principle is nonetheless under at-
tack. Our founding fathers knew
that the role of government con-
cerning religion must be one of
strict neutrality neither en-
couraging nor discouraging
religion or religious practice.
Therefore, when they wrote the
U.S. Constitution, they included
no reference to a God, a creator,
or a deity of any kind.

The president of the U.S. is now
urging that the first amendment
protection of freedom of (and
freedom from) religion be cir-
cumvented by another amen-
dment. He is calling for the state
to get into the prayer business. It
is nothing short of a full-fledged
frontal attack on the U.S.- Con-
stitution, the Blill of Rights and
the separation of church and
state.
If freedom from religion can be
attacked so can freedom of
religion. Today the law allows for
any individual to pray in any
school in the.lJ.S. This is a matter
of privacy and personal freedom.

The state cannot, however, en-
courage, support or maintain
prayer (or any religious prac-
tice) which is what any
meaningful amendment would
change. Religion belongs in the
home, the church and in the
heart-not in public affairs.
It is because we have a secular
state that religious freedom is
possible. Amending the Bill of
Rights to break down the wall of
separation between church and
state would be a dangerous move.
Let us not forget, the "moral
majority" rules in Iran.
-David Treece

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