Bush to Give Presidential Medal to Harper Lee

President Bush is entitled to hand out the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award, to anyone he wants. Rank has its privileges. He has picked some really bad candidates for this in the past: George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, L. Paul “Proconsul Jerry” Bremer, and General Tommy “I Don’t Need So Many Troops” Franks. However, Mr. Bush definitely got it right when the White House announced that Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird would receive the medal.

Honors in America are an odd thing. There is a leveling streak of republicanism in the American that derides medals, titles and such. And as a wannabe meritocracy, there is a sense that achievement deserves recognition. However, unlike Britain’s elaborate honours system or France’s quite prudent Legion of Honor, the American approach to these things is slapdash at best.

Part of the issue is just what has the honoree done that is so damn swell that the country needs to hand out a medal for it? The answer tells more about the country than about the honoree. Success in business? Success in diplomacy? Revolutions in science? Cutting edge artwork? When poets get more medals than retired politician, one can say that the country in question is happy indeed.

In Ms. Lee’'s case, her medal will be for services to literature. Yet, she only wrote one novel, the aforementioned Mockingbird. Of course, she also held Truman Capote’s hand through his ordeal In Cold Blood, and for that, one might expect her to have won a combat service ribbon at least. But what a book.

Atticus Finch, the widowed lawyer who defends a black man in the South on a charge of raping a white woman, was selected by the American Film Institute as the best human being on film. Gregory Peck won an Oscar for that role. But without the book, there was nothing. Ms. Lee told Newquist magazine in 1964, “I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”

At the age of 81, Ms. Lee may not have another book in her, but the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her one novel might be sufficient pour encourager les autres. And as she told Oprah Winfrey’s O, “Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.”

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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