Casting-wise, blackwashing has been a thing since the woke dambreak of ’16 or ’17. For decades Hollywood adhered to whitewash casting, and now that European paleface culture has been identified and discredited as the root of all social evils, the tables have turned — simple enough.
It’s a deal, okay, but a relatively small one. Not worth anyone getting into a twist.
True, Cressida Crowell‘s original children’s books were set in a Scandinavian Viking world, which for centuries has been a white-ass culture. (Just ask Kirk Douglas.) Ditto the 2010 Dreamworks animated version — white-ass Viking men and women from top to bottom. But the new social rules (including the doctrine of presentism) require that white-culture-based stories be reassessed and updated.
Casting directors understand that it’s politically safer to roll with diverse or multicultural mindsets, even if casting an actress of color as the heroine of a centuries-old Scandinavian saga defies any common understanding of Viking history.
Diminishing the visual presence of whiteness by going multicultural has been happening for six or seven years now (ratification of the Academy’s inclusion standards made it official in 2020). Politically speaking it boils down to this: if you don’t want industry people to give the side-eye, you need to play along.
Plus one other thing: Nico Parker was very good as the daughter of Pedro Pascal‘s Joel in HBO’s The Last Of Us.
As far as I’m able to figure, Jessica Hausner’s ClubZero is a satire of the academic woke insanity virus, which has been spreading among teachers and college professors throughout the progressive community for the last 20-plus years…a virus that has led to mental derangement and domestic terror and has triggered the culture wars .
Or at least, that’s how I read it.
Club Zero is about Ms. Novak (Mia Wasikowska). a chillingly self-possessed teacher at an elite private school, passing along a wacko food concept called “conscious eating,” which basically states that all foods from any source are kinda bad for you and should therefore be pretty much avoided. Eat less and thereby transcend.
Novak’s teachings require the slapping of foreheads, sure, but aren’t hugely different from insisting that (a) all descendants of European tribes (and white males in particular) are corroded and evil or (b) there are no clearly defined women or men any more (gender is a spectrum), or that (c) guys should get pregnant and deliver more babies and (d) the theology of trans people should be canonical and exalted above all other considerations and that (e) the jokes of Dave Chappelle are repugnant, etc.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis would never watch ClubZero (and certainly wouldn’t have the patience for it if he did) but if he somehow got through it he’d undoubtedly say “I endorse this film…two thumbs up!”
Style-wise Club Zero is quite dry and excessively poised and very soft-spoken in an Orwellian sense (which is the point, of course) and at the same time passionately out-to-lunch as far as recognizable human behavior is concerned. I didn’t really “like” it but any film that condemns wokery gets a pass from this corner.
On or about 11.5.19 I chatted with Leonardo Dicaprio at a San Vicente Bungalows party. He was particularly excited about Killers of The Flower Moon, describing it as a kind of “birth of the modern FBI” story. The basic line, he said, focused on former Texas Ranger Tom White (whom Leo was intending to play at the time) being ordered by top G-man J. Edgar Hoover to take over the Osage murders case and make sure the bad guys pay the price.
Eventually DiCaprio decided to play one of the killers, Ernest Burkhart, with Jesse Plemons stepping into the White role.
Given Leo’s summary, one could have been forgiven for presuming that Martin Scorsese‘s film, which didn’t begin shooting until April ’21, would be a “white FBI guys bring justice to Oklahoma” movie, or something in that general vein. Certainly not as fictitious or fantastical as Alan Parker‘s Mississippi Burning, as Eric Roth‘s screenplay has always been closely based upon David Grann’s scrupulously researched 2017 book. But perhaps with a certain good guys-vs-bad-guys attitude.
But between Scorsese, Grann and Roth, how could Flower Moon possibly have been made with the idea of delivering an Oklahoma version of Parker’s 1988 thriller, which ignored many facts about the 1964 murder of three Civil Rights workers and reduced the African-American characters to people who grieved, cowered and sung hymns?
But then, three months ago, along came Flower Moon costar Lily Gladstone, who, in a Variety interview with Zack Sharf, seemed to suggest that Scorsese had, up to a point, made a film that hadn’t, in fact, sufficiently considered the Osage native point of view of the killings and the investigation of same.
Gladstone said that Scorsese “worked closely with the real-life Osage Nation to ensure his movie would properly represent the community. The result was that “the Osage Nation ended up positively changingFlower Moon from what Scorsese [had] originally planned.”
“The work is better when you let the world inform the work,” Gladstone explained to Sharf. “That was very refreshing how involved the production got with the [Osage Nation] community. As the community warmed up to our presence, the more the community got involved with the film.
“It’s a different movie than the one [Scorsese] walked in to make, almost entirely because of what the community had to say about how it was being made and what was being portrayed.”
Glenn Kenny: “That’s Gladstone’s perspective, shaped through that of Sharf, and in any event has nothing to do with reshoots. Scorsese and company were getting Osage input from well before the cameras started rolling.
“Look, man, I know how precious the ‘Native Americans strong-armed Scorsese into going woke’ narrative is to you, and I know you’re gonna stick with it through thick and thin, but just don’t pretend too much insider knowledge here.”
HE response: “So Gladstone misstated Scorsese’s creative strategy (i.e., before the alleged Osage Nation re-think) in order to celebrate the Osage Nation’s strength as a culture and to emphasize that their perspective on the 1920s murders was, thank God, crucially included at the 11th hour.
“You’re saying, in other words, that Scorsese had understood the entire Killers equation from the get-go, as had original author David Grann, and that neither of them needed woke tutoring as far as the Osage perspective was concerned.
“Gladstone, in short, was spinning her own impressions last January, and Sharf, a go-along wokester parrot, played along?
“Maybe so.”
Here, by the way, is a snap of the actual Ernest Burkhart and Mollie Burkhart (played by DiCaprio and Gladstone in the film)
Co-authored by the highly esteemed Jon Frosch, David Rooney, Sheri Linden, Lovia Gyarkye, Leslie Felperin and Jordan Mintzer, the piece highlights several brilliant, important, well-chosen films, but for the most part it’s a DEI checklist roster…the same kind of diverse balancing act assessment that N.Y. Times critics A.O. Scott and and Manohla Dargis began to be associated with starting about five years ago….gay, Black, women, Asian + steer clear of any white male influence whenever possible…gay, Black, women, Asian + steer clear of any white male influence whenever possible…wash, rinse, repeat.
The key question must always be, “If you discount the DEI aspect, how good are these films on their own bare-bones merit?”
Most of these critics understand this is a fair way to winnow and select, but they’re fearful of not doing the DEI dance because doing so could be interpreted as exclusionary, elitist, racist or old-schoolish. In the old days (i.e., before 2017) such lists were sometimes driven by attempts to reckon with the best-of-the-best based on purely cinematic, dramatic, daring or transcendent, soul-drilling terms. Now it’s all about identity politics and Twitter and terror…about being afraid to say what they really think because this might get them into trouble or cause some kind of ruckus. They know this deep down but will never admit it.
Here’s what they chose (HE agreement in boldface)…HE enthusiastically approves of 12THR picks:
Bottom 25: Weekend (fine), Black Panther (gimme a break!), Time (difficult incarceration story), Bright Star (Jane Campion, John Keats, Fanny Brawne), Pariah (Dee Rees, Brooklyn lesbian saga), Bridesmaids (culturally important but not really good enough to make a serious “creme de la creme” list), Things to Come (Mia Hansen Love, Isabelle Huppert), Grizzly Man (great Herzog), Never Rarely Sometimes Always (weak tea abortion saga), Pan’s Labyrinth (top-tier GDT), Summer of Soul (found-footage POC concert doc…stirring as far as it goes), I Am Not Your Negro (gripping James Baldwin doc), Children of Men (brilliant, classic), Wendy and Lucy (good but basically a sop to the Reichart cult), Lover’s Rock (not the best of the five Small Axe films — the best is Mangrove), The Favourite (good Yorgos Lanthimos costumer but calm down), The Social Network (brilliant), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (blistering lesbian romance, emotional wipe-out), The Return (I’m more enamored of Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan), Manchester by the Sea (grand slam), Marie Antoinette (please!), The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Romanian classic), A Serious Man (magnificent defeatism, peak Coen Bros.), At Berkeley (Wiseman tribute doc), Y Tu Mamá También (classic Cuaron but “unbearably poignant”?). HE approval tally: 6.
Top 25: Call Me By Your Name (Guadagnino’s landmark romance), Timbuktu (Islamic nutters), 35 Shots of Rum (calm down), Before Sunset (not the best of Linklater’s relationship trilogy — that would be Before Midnight), Parasite (good but overrated — collapses when drunk con artists let the maid in and thereby ruin their whole con), Far From Heaven (commendable but overpraised Sirk tribute), Drive My Car (too long, too many cigarettes, exhausting, runs out of gas), Shoplifters (under-energized, over-praised), Talk to Her (magnificent Almodovar), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (fine), The Power of the Dog (no way in hell does this punishing slog of a film belong on this list), Wall-E (okay), Burning (corrosive and hard-hitting, but overlong and sluggish), Moonlight (way overpraised due to weak third act + too-muscular Trevante Rhodes, but Barry Jenkins‘ depiction of a world-class handjob on a beach will be long remembered), Boyhood (exceptional stunt film), Get Out (racially stamped Ira Levin zombie spooker…possibly the most overpraised film of the 21st Century), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (brilliant), In the Mood for Love (understated, appropriately respected romance, considerably aided by Chris Doyle‘s cinematography), Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee‘s timeless classic about letting love slip away), Spirited Away (fine), Mulholland Drive (take away the spookiness and perversity and what’s left?), Zodiac (drop-dead brilliant investigation of an endlessly fascinating cold case), The Gleaners and I (never saw it), Inside Llewyn Davis (another serving of world-class downerism from the Coens) and Yi Yi (ashamed to admit that I’ve never seen it). HE approval tally: 6.
It’s great that Mitchell is singing and playing guitar and sounding pretty good, particularly in the wake of having suffered a brain aneurysm in late March of 2015. She was in fairly bad shape after that tragedy, but she’s recovered (or at least is recovering) to a significant degree, and praise be to God for this.
The key question to me is “is Joni still smoking?” Because that’s almost certainly what helped to bring about her aneurysm. She initially lost her ability to speak and walk, and still needs a little help getting around as we speak.
I was so concerned about Mitchell’s well-being in the wake of the aneurysm that I once hand-delivered an admonishing fan letter to her Spanish home in Bel Air. I insisted I was one of her biggest fans and begged her to think about vaping instead of sticking with tobacco.
Mitchell may have decided that life isn’t worth living without the pleasure of unfiltered cigarettes, but maybe not. She once said in an interview that she began smoking at age 9 or 10 or something. At a certain point the body just can’t take the nicotine and the toxins and complications will manifest.
It’s wonderful, in any event, that Mitchell has regained (or is in the process of regaining) her singing and guitar-playing abilities. She’ll turn 80 on 11.7.23.
Posted on 3.31.15: I attended a short, smallish concert that Mitchell gave at Studio 54 in October ’82 to promote “Wild Things Run Fast.” The crowd was not huge, maybe 150 or so, and I was standing fairly close and pretty much dead center. No female artist has ever touched me like Mitchell**, and I was quite excited about being this close to her.
I was beaming, starry-eyed and staring at her like the most self-abasing suck-up fan you could imagine, and during the first song her eyes locked onto mine and I swear to God we began to kind of half-stare at each other. (Some performers do this, deciding to sing for this or that special person in the crowd.) Her eyes danced around from time to time but she kept coming back to me, and I remember thinking, “Okay, she senses that I love her and she probably likes my looks so I guess I’m her special fanboy or something for the next few minutes.”
Mitchell was dressed in a white pants suit and some kind of colorful scarf, and she sang and played really well, and I remember she had a little bit of a sexy tummy thing going on. Sorry but that had a portion of my attention along with the songs and “being there” and a feeling that I’d remember this moment for decades to come.
A.O. Scott, the long-serving N.Y. Times critic (1999-2023) who’s shifting into book-reviewing, has tapped out a kind of farewell essay. Here are my reactions, including one unanswered question.
1. Why doesn’t Scott explain why he’s bailing? Does he feel like a burnt-out case? Okay, then say that and relate how he got to this point. What led to this presumed lethargy? What turned him off? Scott isn’t that old (56) but has reviewed films for the Times for roughly the same number of years that Vincent Canby did (23 or 24, give or take). So what’s the lowdown?
2. An unfortunate fact (and I take no pleasure in bringing it up) is that Scott, an excellent, highly perceptive critic for the better part of two decades, began to drink wokester Kool-Aid about three or four years ago, and in my humble view dented his rep to a proportionate degree. (Ditto Manohla Dargis.) On 1.17.22, I wrote about “a category of film lovers who have lifted off the planet so often and gone so far around the bend and outside of our solar system, caused for the most part by extra-passionate wokeness (which includes a rapt belief in the wondrous and transcendent benefit of abosrbing any and all films about POC characters, POC history and starring POCs), and who seem oddly committed to contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake (i.e., the Armond White syndrome). Due respect but after pondering A.O. Scott‘s recently posted list of the most award-deserving films of 2021, I have to acknowledge the possibility that even within his bizarre arena of N.Y. Times woke-itude, Scott may be even more of an eccentric than White, and that’s saying something.”
3. “Let’s not even mention Woody Allen,” Scott writes. No, let’s mention Allen and particularly Scott’s decision to wash his hands of this great Brooklyn-born artist, which for me was entirely foul and cruel and horrid. Allen is incontestably a great filmmaker — a man of considerable genius and relentless innovative creativity, a guy whose output has enhanced the quality and worldliness of American cinema over the last 55 years, and whose sterling reputation as a filmmaker will be remembered and cherished long after Scott and the other Allen denigrators have died and been forgotten.
4. Scott on Allen’s Match Point (’05): “It is the film’s brisk, chilly precision that makes it so bracingly pleasurable. The gloom of random, meaningless existence has rarely been so much fun, and Mr. Allen’s bite has never been so sharp, or so deep. A movie this good is no laughing matter.”
5. One of the finest opening paragraphs in the history of movie reviewing was contained in Scott’s 5.25.01 review of Michael Bay‘s Pearl Harbor: “The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II has inspired a splendid movie, full of vivid performances and unforgettable scenes, a movie that uses the coming of war as a backdrop for individual stories of love, ambition, heroism and betrayal. The name of that movie is From Here to Eternity.”
6. From Scott’s farewell essay: “I’m not a fan of modern fandom. This isn’t only because I’ve been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and (more recently) Top Gun: Maverick and Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s more that the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, groupidentity and mobbehavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.”
“From a sensible center perspective, woke is a divisive and destructiveideology that aggressively pushes hardcore leftwing agendas into all aspects of entertainment while demonizing anyone who happens to be straight, white and male…undermining western cultural values, hijacking and destroying long-established characters and franchises and generally chipping away at everything that our culture is built on
“Raising awareness of social, cultural and environmental issues [obviously] isn’t a bad thing. Neither is encouraging people to look at the world for various perspectives. Or giving historically underrepresented groups a bit more visibility and attention. But pushing all of this stuff too hard, too aggressively or with ill intentions is having a damaging effect on modern entertainment…instead of encouraging people to broaden their minds and consider new perspectives, woke is basically about lecturing and browbeating them into making them think the way their creators want them to think…replacing one form of arrogant narrow-mindedness with a different one…instead of elevating marginalized groups, it’s insulting and demonizing everyone else….socio–politicalindoctrination with a thin veneer of entertainment wrapped around it.”
Until this morning I had somehow never heard, and had certainly never used, the slang term "bougie." Short for bourgeois, it means people with elite or pretentious airs who haven't earned the cred. The Urban Dictionary examples suggests it's primarily a Black culture term, but it's okay for guys like me to use it. A white female friend used it this morning.
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Nearly 14 months after debuting at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, Jamie Dack‘s Palm Trees and Power Lines, a fearless film about teenaged sexual vulnerability if I ever saw one, is finally opening commercially.
I saw it on my computer 13 and 1/2 months ago, and raved…well, not actually. My initial review conveyed serious shock at how dark and sinister this film is. A “holy shit” rave.
I plan on seeing it sometime late tomorrow at the Village East Angelika. The reason it look so long to sell is that very few are going to want to sit through this stunning and ghastly film, albeit composed in a masterful fashion.
The Palm Trees review (1.24.22) by Variety’s Owen Gleiberman conveys a pretty good taste. I expect it to do less-than-zero business.”
“I actually didn’t convey my true, deep-down feelings, which is that in the realm of stories about young girls dealing with predatory relationships and the sexual issues that always come with that, Dack’s film is one of the most shocking and upsetting that I’ve ever seen — period.
“I’ve already reported that it’s about a hugely creepy relationship between a fatherless 17 year-old (Lily McInerney) and a 34 year-old opportunist and latent scumbag (Jonathan Tucker), and that what happens would make any decent person gag. Without divulging specifics I should add that the film contains what I regard as the most odious and grotesque sex scene in motion picture history. And the ending is completely shattering.
“A friend doesn’t believe the ending, which again I can’t be specific about. But I can at least state that each and every dude in this film is either a dog or a beast. We’re talking implications of sexual cruelty, brutality and animality in every scene featuring a male of any age.
“I recently described the plot to a female friend with a 20something daughter, and she said, ‘This is basically how younger Millennials and GenZ see all white cis men…they think they are all rapists and assaulters.”
“I’m not disputing that many if not most younger males (late teens to mid 30s) are animals in terms of their sexual behavior. This view or judgement is certainly out there, so it wouldn’t be the craziest thing in the world for Dack to share this opinion.
“The shocking part of Palm Trees and Power Lines is the degree to which McInerney’s character is seemingly off-balance and emotionally starved for paternal attention and affection. Because right away you’re wondering how and why McInerney would go out with Tucker in the first place (there are all kinds of red flags). By the end of the film you’re left with an even more perplexing question. I thought McInerney might be safe at the end, and then she does something that made me go “oh my God!”
“You can argue that what she does is not entirely believable, but for me the dramatized horror outweighs the credibility.
“Friendo to HE: “I could totally buy that [McInerney] is damaged and would get seduced by this guy’s tricks…all of it. But as the movie portrays it, what she goes through in that motel room is so horrific, and in both that scene and the aftermath she is so filled with fear, that I just thought: The fact that she’s got daddy issues is going to transcend that?
“Her mother” — a good performance by Gretchen Mol — “seemed nice enough, not perfect but loving. Why would she be so alienated from that home situation?”
…and yet from an opposing perspective it all feels fine. You just have to hang on tight to what you know and are sensing all around, and what you deeply believe.
The EEAAO sweep (I’ve actually just typed those words!) is about cultism and political industry upheaval and a dynamic assertion of Millennial and Zoomer power by the under-45s along with various older lapdogs who want to profit by or otherwise get in on the action.
EEAAO worshippers know that the Daniels film is a peculiar head-trip thing and VERY pulpy, Marvel-esque and Millennial-minded and therefore a huge turn-off for tens of millions of over-40s or over-45s (the loathing for this film is, make no mistake, intense) or anyone, really, who’s acquired a semblance of classical taste.
And they don’t care. They love the fantasy tropes and the hip urban minority identity stuff (queer daughter, Asian family, Jamie Lee Curtis‘s crabby neurotic white woman representing the IRS) and they know it’s a film that has confounded, alienated and/or infuriated the majority (including moderate people like myself as well as your generic flyovers).
The whole woke Oscar brand of the last four or five years (i.e., films that are into apologizing for the venality of Anglo Saxon culture or at the very least are seeking to minimize its presence in films while simultaneously branding those who may object to the venalizing of their identity as the carpings of racists…quite the rhetorical imprisonment mechanism you’ve created there, fellas!) means little or nothing to most Average Joes, hence the plummeting viewership.
If it wasn’t certain before, James Hong locked in Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Best Picture win at the Oscars with this part of his speech pic.twitter.com/qsaSPjEVyk
EEAAO fans know that the viewing public regards industry voters as curious or eccentric or myopic and to a large extent unconcerned about (or even hostile to) anything except their own cultural power — largely an island unto themselves…a largely anti-straight, anti-white-majority (at least in a rhetorical or social-fashion sense), mostly or at least significantly woke. The in-crowd know this is why the show has no across-the-board cachet, and why there’s no general interest in the Branch Davidian aspects of wokeism, and they absolutely love this state of affairs.
They’ve decided that emphasizing their apartness is a way of emphasizing their moral superiority, which they regard as the only path, the only way. [See “the David Ehrlich bubble”.]
Enough of straight, women-suppressing Anglo-Saxon white male dominance, and up with non-white or multicultural or women-favoring, LGBTQ-trans-embracing identity and stories about same, hence the Best Picture celebrations of Moonlight (anti-“Oscars so white”), Nomadland, Parasite, The Shape of Water, CODA, EEAAO. Six movies that — are you listening? — have ridden on the back of the woke tiger and thereby seized the brass ring.
I latched onto the Ukraine situation yesterday (“Shattered Into Shards”) because from a moralistic perspective it’s a no-brainer. Moral clarity = lacking in moral ambiguity. There is similarly no ambiguity in the essence of what EEAAO is deep down. You either (a) understand what it’s saying and what it represents, or (b) you don’t, or (c) you’ve chosen to ignore the obvious because you don’t want to be seen as an anti-woke contrarian because that might challenge or weaken your political standing and therefore your economic security.
This is what motivates so many out there, including (and I mean no offense in mentioning this) HE’s own Bob Strauss, whom I love like a brother. I feel for him and his situation. I feel for everyone in a sense. Except for the Ehrlich bubble fanatics on Twitter. I really hate those guys.
This isn’t a dream. This isn’t a delusion. This is actually happening. What I’ve described here is as real as the behaviors in Emily The Criminal or the Sicily episodes of The White Lotus.
Is it a bad look that a 17th century ancestor of Jeff Daniels was one of the Salem Witch Trial accusers? When you first hear this, yeah, but if you think about it for eight or nine seconds, not really.
If an ancestor or two did something awful or failed to stand up against evil during their brief hour upon the stage, I can only say “well, I wish they had been braver.” But unfortunately, most people go through life with their head down and avoiding eye contact with the beasts. Most people are mice — they just want to survive and get along, and unfortunately that means looking the other way when wrong-doing occurs, human nature being what it is.
“I’m afraid we can only do what it has been given to us to do, right to the end.” — Edward Anhalt by way of Jean Anouilh, Becket (’64).
Posted on 8.7.19: “Speaking as an X-factor white guy from a middle-class New Jersey and Connecticut upbringing, I don’t feel repelled or disgusted by my Anglo-Saxon heritage and family history.
“I deeply regret the cruelty visited upon immigrants and various cultures of color by whites, but the fact that racist attitudes were common throughout most of the 20th Century and certainly the 19th Century doesn’t mean that white people (more particularly my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, reaching back to the mid 1800s) were inherently evil.
“By current standards they seem insufficiently evolved, of course, but they were born into a certain culture and were dealt certain cards, and most carried the weight as best they could. They weren’t born with horns on their heads.
“Nor do I feel that elemental decency is absent in the majority of white people today. I feel profoundly repelled by the attitudes of your backwater Trump supporters, of course, but they are not me. I come from a family of relatively good, well-educated, imperfect people who believed in hard work, discipline, serving in the military and mowing the lawn on Saturday afternoons, and who exuded decency and compassion for the most part. I am not the devil’s spawn, and neither are my two sons or my granddaughter. I’ve witnessed and dealt with ignorant behavior all my life, but I’ve never bought into the idea of Anglo-Saxon culture being inherently evil. Please.”
They built and labored and created alongside dozens of tribes and cultures, and they certainly weren’t the only ones who suffered grievously as this country gradually developed and bloomed and grew into itself…a nation of primarily European-descended immigrants (even today) and a conflicted multicultural stew.
Two and a half years ago (7.30.20) I posted a loose-shoe retort to the 1619 Project, which attempted to (a) define the U.S. of A. as an empire built upon slavery and (b) to define 1619 (when the first slaves arrived in Virginia) as this country’s primal defining event rather than the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
In the wake of Disney’s The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder, which at least partly seeks to indoctrinate 5 to 7 year-olds into the theology of anti-white racism and the basically racist idea that whites are inherently evil, and with the understanding that anti-racism essentially advocates for the furtherance of more racism (i.e., defining ourselves primarily by race and the huddling of separate tribes, pride within those tribes, white against black, etc.) and with the Proud Family chant of “slaves built this country,” I’m reposting “What’s Your 1619 Beef?”
“Slavery has always been an ignominious chapter in the first 245 years of US history (1619 to 1865) and racism has stained aspects of the culture ever since, but to assert that slavery and racism (which other cultures have shamefully allowed over the centuries) are THE central and fundamental definers of the immense American experience strikes many of us as a bridge too far.
“Many factors drove the expansion and gradual strengthening and shaping of this country, and particularly the spirit and character of it…here are 40 for starters, posted in groups of 10:
1. Immigration. 2. The industrial revolution and the cruel exploitations of sweat-shop workers by wealthy elites; 3. The delusion of religion; 4. Anti-Native American racism and genocide; 5. the American Revolutionary War against the British; 6. The mid 19th Century influence of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick C. Douglas, John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe; 6. The vast networks of railroads; 7. Selfishness & self-interest; 8. Factories and construction; 9. The two world wars of the 20th Century; 10. Scientific innovation.
11. Native musical forms including jazz, blues (obviously African-American art forms) folk and rock; 12. American literature; 13. The influence of New York theatre and Hollywood movies; 14. 20th and 19th Century urban architecture; 15. The influence of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry; 16. Major-league baseball (Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Hank Aaron, Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Roger Maris); 17. Family-based communities and the Protestant work ethic; 18. Fashion and the garment industry; 19. Midwestern farming and individual gardening; 20. Native cuisine and the influences of European, Mexican, Asian and African cultures, not to mention hot dogs with mustard.
21. The shipping industry; 22. Hard work and innovation in all industries great and small; 23. John Steinbeck, George Gershwin, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, JFK, MLK, Stanley Kubrick, Chet Baker, John Coltrane, Marilyn Monroe, Amelia Earhart, Malcom X, Taylor Swift, Charlie Parker, Elizabeth Warren, Woody Guthrie, Katharine Hepburn, Aretha Franklin, Jean Arthur, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carol Lombard, Shirley Chisholm, Marlon Brando, Woody Allen; 24. Barber shops; 25. Manual lawnmowers; 26. The auto industry; 27. Prohibition & gangsters; 28. The Great Depression and the anti-Communism and anti-Socialism that eventually sprang from that; 29. Status-quo-challenging comedians like Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Steve Allen (“schmock schmock!”), 30. Popular music of the ’50s, ’60s and ‘70s (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Beatles and Rolling Stones, Queen).
31. Television, cable and streaming; 32. Great American universities; 33. Great historians; 34. Great journalism (including the National Lampoon and Spy magazine); 35. Great poetry; 36. Beats, hippies and post-Stonewall gay culture; 37. The anti-Vietnam War movement; 38. Pot and psychedelia, cocaine, quaaludes; 39. The late ’70s splendor of Studio 54; 40. 20th & 21st Century tech innovations (Steve Jobs).