I Will Pull This Blog Over!

To the First Grade Team at my children's elementary school,

I just wanted to thank you for the way you handled the timeline assignment. Although X isn’t adopted, his sisters are and the timeline project is one of the projects that adoptive (and foster) families dread. In many cases there are not photos of the children from infancy or even sometimes for years beyond infancy. There are not always people who know when the child first sat up, or took their first steps, or what their first word was. Rather than a timeline consisting of milestones (when you walked, talked, etc) the children can simply select anything that would represent that year of their life. Your assignment is general enough that is allows all children, even those who are missing large parts of their personal history to complete their timeline. In addition, rather than requiring photos, you allowed children to draw or otherwise represent these events. Often in these assignments, all of the other kids have photos and the child who doesn’t is told to “just draw something”. You included those options initially so drawing isn’t a “consolation” activity, but an actual option. Since my other children will also be faced with this assignment I wanted to thank you for creating it in a way that is responsive to the family situations of all children.

And this review of the movie and the relevance of not deleting the offensive words. Find the original here in it's entirety. (and yes, I realize this is a comedy and Huck Finn is not- but the parallels are the same)

The brilliance of Mel Brooks, back in his heyday at least, was that Blazing Saddles embodied both and all of these things. If his gleefully raunchy farce were about only its "bad taste" or the number of times the word "nigger" gets deployed, then it would be just another forgettable splat on the ever-growing mountain of in-your-face shock comedies.

Instead, as a satirical flag waving in the racial and social winds of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Blazing Saddles' casual vulgarity, racial epithets, and pants-dropping silliness are spread like the very best butter over the more serious business of iconoclastically upturning expectations and tropes, especially some shibboleths found not just in old-fashioned cowboy movies. Its humor is the palliative that lets Brooks mock prejudices and, with gloves off, prejudiced people. Not that Brooks sought to make a "message film," oh hell no. After all, we still get the famous campfire beans-and-farts scene, which is about nothing more than being the first beans-and-farts scene in cinema history. Still, it's fair to say that Blazing Saddles broke ground as well as wind.

What keeps the potentially offensive from being genuinely offensive is something that may not be obvious at first viewing. Cleavon Little's Bart is never played as a victim. This intelligent, good-looking, elegant, well-spoken black man knows exactly how to play off the idiocy of the asinine white crackers that surround him. "These are people of the land," consoles the Waco Kid, summarizing Bart's antagonists with perfect deadpan, "The common clay of the new West. You know," — here's where nobody times a pause better than Wilder — "morons."

A fundamental ingredient that Brooks' latterday genre parodies lack is a sense of purpose beyond their hit-or-miss humor. Blazing Saddles faced down contemporary racist attitudes, ending with its foot triumphantly planted on racism's chest.....

Blazing Saddles laughs at racists, not with them, recalling Brooks' objective in The Producers to "dance on Hitler's grave." While its broadsides pointed at institutional redneckery are projected against the most conservative of movie genres, there's nothing mean-spirited here. Blazing Saddles is playfully disarming at every turn, downright joyful even. You can search through the movie with calipers, a magnifying glass, and a Geiger counter and still not find an angry, whiny, or uptight moment. Here is cinema's most affable, most happy-to-meet-you movie to include an apple-cheeked old granny barking "Up yours, nigger!" from under her bonnet. Anyone actually offended by Blazing Saddles is someone in dire need of a hearty offending....

Now, thirty years on, we have trouble imagining any A-list studio, including Warner Brothers, having the gumption and guts to let Brooks, or anyone else, ring some of those bells today. But heaven knows they should. And don't start with calling Blazing Saddles "politically incorrect," a lazy-ass term redefined and misused so often that it's bled dry of any useful meaning. In these times when sanctimony and sound-bite puritanism are treated as virtues, we need a Blazing Saddles, a wry, bold, good-hearted taboo-buster that deflates bigots (and their fear that others would monger), while simultaneously suggesting we unclench our sphincters and get over ourselves.