Will zealots spell the doom of great literature?

* Pride and Prejudice--a marriage manual. Jane Austen, a traitor to her sex, ended all of her books with happy marriages. Shame, shame, shame.

* The Maltese Falcon--suicide sexism. Sam Spade sent over Brigid O'Shaughnessy for killing his partner. The truth was that Miles Archer so hated women that he shot himself in the heart in order to frame Brigid.

* Rudyard Kipling--a militaristic maniac who wrote poems about the plight of soldiers in peacetime: "It's Tommy this and Tommy that, and Tommy go away, but it's Thin Red line of Heroes when the band begins to play." Homages to a nation's hired killers.

I've heard, in one form or the other, every one of the above libels against classic works of literature.

The following five works of literature have the seal of approval from the PC/MC thought cavalry:

"The Sky Is Gray" is taught because it was written by a black man and deals with a day in the life of a black woman and her son in America in 1940. It takes considerable misreading not to conclude that the mother is a monster.

Her son has a toothache so severe that she has to take a day off from work in order to get the boy attended to by a dentist. The night before the dentist visit, she forces the seven-year-old to kill his pet chicken for dinner. After refusing, the small boy is struck in the face, directly on the site of his infected tooth. The mother has other, similar, lessons for her child, including a demand that he not turn up his coat collar to protect his aching jaw against a biting winter wind. this done because, she I says, "You're not a bum, you're a man."

If a big, white man had slapped his small, sick son for not killing an animal and then told the boy this was done to make him into a man, can anyone honestly say that the writer of such a short story would not be condemned for condoning child abuse? Yet, Ernest Gaines, the author of this vicious tale, is in the PC Hall of Fame.

Equally horrific, and equally politically correct, is Things Fall Apart, written by Nigerian Chinua Achebe. The hero is Okonkwo, an African warrior famous because of his wrestling prowess. Possessed of at least four wives, Okonkwo shoots his rifle at one of them, causing her to flee over the garden wall, then he terrorizes the other three into cowering silence. The story's central event centers around the man's beheading, via machete, of his adopted son to satisfy a rule of conduct between two tribes.

If this African tale were the biography of an Irishman from Chicago, satisfying his lust through polygamy, using one of his wives for target practice, and decapitating his son because it was the law of the land, the book not only would be banned by the PC patrols, it would be burned to a crisp.

On a somewhat less violent note, there is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, which is just what those like Takaki believe is good for what ails America. The thesis of this novel is the struggle of four immigrant women to maintain their Chinese identity in the midst of American society.