I happen to be a big fan of animation. And I know that Mickey Mouse is the very symbol of animation. But does anybody really like Mickey Mouse? He is virtually personality-free, a goody-goody, a wimp.

Mickey Mouse is bland and treacly and safe because he was the signature creation of the Walt Disney cartoon machine.

Unlike Looney Tunes. Looney Tunes were the cartoons produced by Warner Brothers during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and they were modern, manic, antic, satirical, edgy, topical and trippy. The presiding figure of the Looney Tunes universe, deeply disrespectful anti-Mickey, was Bugs Bunny. Bugs Bunny ruled. Bugs Bunny rocked. Bugs, come to think of it, embodied most of the 7 deadly sins -- pride, gluttony covetousness, lust and sloth for sure. The animators who created him -- Tex Avery, Fritz Freleng, Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones -- were and are brilliant pioneering comic artists.

And so I was looking forward to June. Every June, the Cartoon Network airs a Bugs Bunny marathon. And this year they had been promising to up the ante. Now that they finally owned the complete library, they said that for the first time they were going to show "every single Bugs Bunny cartoon ever made," nearly 200 in all.

But a couple of weeks ago, the Cartoon Network executives decided instead to behave like network executives. They preemptively caved in to the pressures of political correctness. They will not air twelve of the Bugs Bunny cartoons, because those dozen, nearly all produced during the 1940s, include jokes based on racial and ethnic stereotyping.

If you're like me, you probably saw most of the offending cartoons as a child. There's the one from 1941, in which Bugs outsmarts a dimwitted rabbit hunter -- in other words, the plot of pretty much every Bugs Bunny cartoon ever made -- except in this case, he snookers a dimwitted American Indian rabbit hunter. There are the two wartime propaganda cartoons - the one in which he blows up a company of near-sighted, buck-toothed Japanese soldiers, and the one in which he humiliates Hitler and Goering. There's one in which a black hunter is diverted from his quest by the prospect of a craps game. There are a couple of cartoons with scenes of Bugs Bunny in blackface.

Cartoon Network had been planning to run the problematic cartoons late at night -- when fewer children would be watching. And the dozen would have all aired with a caveat scrolling across the bottom of the screen -- "Cartoon Network does not endorse the use of racial slurs. These vintage cartoons are presented as representative of the time in which they were created." And so on.

But no. Full self-censorship was required.

Now, of course, I do not endorse the use of racial slurs either.

But I strongly endorse honesty and historical completeness - even when it makes us uncomfortable to tell the whole truth.

And the truth about Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes is simply the truth about American culture at mid-century, back during the salad days of the greatest generation, when American life was racially segregated by law and custom. Images and gags we now find unacceptable - ranging from insensitive and unkind to ugly and racist -- were a regular part of the cultural mainstream. And no sanitizing 21st century revisionism will change that fact retroactively.

I know the intentions of the Cartoon Network executives and their bosses, at AOL Time Warner are good. But refusing to look squarely at all our cultural artifacts is dangerous, I think -- more dangerous than the risk of releasing the racist toxins of old Bugs Bunny cartoons into the air. If we don't know our past in all of its complicated detail, how are we supposed to understand the present? To allow ourselves only a bland and treacly and safe repackaged version of the past is, really, a Mickey Mouse approach.

I'm Kurt Andersen, in Studio 360.