Category Archives: Americana

Lincoln, Django Unchained, and the Civil War

Americana, Film

Ultimately slavery denied human beings the capability of being human. Walton Goggins

As an aside, I am not a Civil War buff, per se, but I am a admirer of General U. S. Grant – that may be an understatement, OK, that is an understatement – and, because I have a pretty good idea of Grant’s journey through life, especially the years when he went from disgraced Army captain to Commanding General of the largest military in the world, I have a middling knowledge of the Civil War and the despicable sin of slavery so I have eagerly awaited both Lincoln and Django Unchained. End aside.

Michele and I saw Lincoln about a couple of weeks ago and then we saw Django Unchained about a week ago (and then I saw Django again with Malcolm Pearson). Lincoln and Django Unchained seem so different but ultimately they are similar in that they are both radical takes on the Civil War. Radical in that they expose the Civil War as being about slavery. Up until now, the Civil War of the Hollywood collective memory presented each side as being equal in honor. These movies say No, the Civil War was about slavery (and Django actually says No! NO! the Civil War was about slavery. SLAVERY!). It shouldn’t have been so hard or taken so long, after all, the founding documents of the Confederacy start out with We . . . [are] dissolving a union with non-slaveholding confederates and seeking a confederation with slaveholding states, but, under the guise of fairness, the Hollywood Civil War has been presented as a sort of misunderstanding between brothers.

That has changed with both these movies. and it is more than about time. But, putting aside their common radicalness, they are very different movies. Lincoln is a small movie with almost an indie vibe – it could have been a stage-play made into a movie – pretending to be a big movie and Django Unchained is a big movie pretending to be B movie. To my sensibility  Django is the richer, more complicated, movie.

(Spoiler alert, if you have no idea who won the Civil War or have no idea of the theme of Django Unchained – and the title does, sort of, give it away – you might want to skip this.)

In the story arc of the movie, Lincoln doesn’t really change, he starts out as the Great Emancipator and ends as the Great Emancipator. Way before the war, Lincoln made it clear that he detested slavery, saying – among lots of similar statements – I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any abolitionist. But it was not as simple as that and, as he also said, My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. By concentrating on a couple months towards the end of the war, the movie clouds that issue and, sort of, ignores the huge shift about the morality of slavery that went on in the North during the war. All that said, the movie is Spielberg at his best (which is to say, his most restrained).

In Lincoln, Lincoln is the great white father freeing the slaves and the slaves are passive pawns; none of the black people in the movie seem to have any agency in their own freedom except in an opening sequence showing a battle between black Union troops and Confederates. Still, black freedom is presented as a gift from above. There are some nice bits, however. One that struck me was a scene when southern embassaries come across the lines to meet with Lincoln and their northern honor guard is composed of black troops. I don’t know if this is accurate, but it is something that Grant might very well have done and it is a nice visual (and, with somewhat over 180,000 black troops in the northern army, it could have easily happened).

In Django Unchained, Django ultimately,  frees himself. I can not think of another movie in which this happens: always, the black guy is saved by the white guy. (Hummm… maybe I am wrong here, maybe Beverly Hills Cop would qualify and In the Heat of the Night). In Tarantino’s story, Django goes from being a helpless slave to being the most powerful man in the movie. The change is slow and subtle, but powerful. Throughout the movie, the south is shown as a society that is built – in all its institutions, large and small – around slavery. It is easy to see the helplessness – and hopelessness – of being a slave; the day to day terror. It is easy to see that there is no way out, that escape is fantasy, that slaves do as they are told or they die a painful death. The story arc is Django being unchained – duh! – but it is also about, maybe more about, Django growing into his humanhood.

I liked Django Unchained immensely and my only regret is that its violence will keep some people away. I know that much of the violence is needed to establish the horrors of the slave society and, while the violence against the slaves is sometimes hard to look at, it is necessary to both, set the tone of the slave’s absolute helplessness, and establish the horror of the day to day denial of their humanity – as well as set up the orgy of violence at the end – but it is too bad that there isn’t a G rated version because the movie deserves to be seen by a wide audience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A thought on New Year predictions

Americana, Psychological Musings, Uncategorized

 

Predictions are almost always based on logic and the future is almost always outside the logic box of the present. In very late 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and, in retaliation, in even later 1979 or early 1980, then President, Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would boycott the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow.

At the time, I thought that it was a bad move on Carter’s part and have come to think even less of it as I look back. In 1980, the Olympics were advertised as being about the amateur joy of Sport and one of the – alleged – differences between the Soviet Union and the United States was that our athletes were independent amateurs and the Soviets were state sponsored professionals. How could the President tell them to stay home? But he did; and they did. I still think that the boycott made us look petty and powerless.  It was a childish, If you are going to invade Afghanistan, I’m taking my toy and going home (when the team wasn’t even – theoretically – the President’s toy).

More importantly to my argument here, I also thought that it was a bad precedent. The next Summer Games would be in Los Angeles and it seemed to me that the Soviets would probably return the favor by boycotting our Olympic fifteen minutes of fame. After that, would come the Olympics in Seoul, an American client state, which would not even allow the North Koreans, a Soviet client state,  into the country  so the Soviets would most likely pull out of that Olympics. This was less than twenty years after Khrushchev had – reportedly – banged his shoe on the lectern at the UN, saying We will bury you. and the Cold War was still going strong. Of course. none of this happened. None of this came even close to happening and I realized how weak my chain of logic was.

By the 1992 Olympics, the Soviet Union no longer existed, something that had never occurred to me (or the CIA, I might add).

In the 1950s, General Electric starting building their Appliance Park in Kentucky and by the 1980s, it was the largest production facility in the world; bigger than FoxCom. But, during the late 1990s and the oughts, GE shipped production overseas leaving much of the Appliance Park empty. A couple of years ago, there were rumors that the Appliance Park was being put up for sale, but nobody wanted it because everybody was shipping production overseas as fast as possible. The experts were writing about the almost universal job flight to some cheap, offshore, factory. We lamented that, with the loss of manufacturing jobs, went the machinery and the collective memory needed to compete for future production.

Then a funny thing happened, Jeff Immelt, GE’s CEO, started to actually look at the numbers. The costs of sending production offshore were more than expected, the cost of bringing the produced items back is increasing with the increasing cost of oil, and the problems turn out to be more extensive than projected (what a surprise). It began to look like it might be slightly cheaper to manufacture some high-end stuff here, so GE brought back the production of a high-end water heater. It turned out that, because we have lost alot of our production ability, the water heater, as designed, was too complicated to build in the USA. But the engineers, the designers, were right next door and they could walk over and talk to the – probably few remaining – production guys. They could work back and forth, making the water heater simpler, easier, to build. While they were at it, they redesigned the production line.

In the end, General Electric was able to drop the sales price of the water heater by about $300, form about $1600 to $1299 and – probably – make more money. As a bonus, the quality of the water heater has gone up and GE was able to cut their inventory because it is so much easier to ship from Kentucky than China. Now GE is bringing back some manufacturing capacity from Mexico and I just read General Motors is bring back the production of the new Camaro from Canada.

None of this was projected – say five years ago – when jobs were  being shipped overseas like crazy and we were all worried that we would end up not actually making anything. The problem with projecting the future is that we almost always project the present out into that future void and, often, that is not what happens. Back when Jimmy Carter protested the Soviet intervention to basically protect the pro-Soviet Norther Alliance, nobody would have believed that – some twenty years later – we would be in Afghanistan arming, training, and protecting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. The unknown future is often ironic.

In an asides, one of my favorite movies is Personal Best which is about a group of women competitors vying for berths on the 1980 U.S. Olympics team which did not go to Moscow.

 

 

Tavi Gevinson

Americana, Psychological Musings

Until I saw a sort of offhand reference – as if the reader would obviously know who she is – to Tavi Gevinson, I had never heard of her. I don’t know how I missed her as she is about as famous in her world as Fernando Alonso is in his. On the outside chance that there is atleast one other  person who hasn’t heard of Tavi, she is a sixteen year old fashion blogger. The astonishing part, however, is that she started when she was eleven – she was born in 1996 – and was famous enough by the time she was 15 to interview Joss Whedon for her blog ( The Style Rookie).

By the time she was 13, Gevinson was a special guest of Vogue Magazine at the New York Fashion Week. By the time she was 15, Gevinson founded Rookie Magazine which bills itself as a website for teenage girls with advice like How to Decorate Your Room like a Movie, or Ask a Grown Man:Jon Hamm, or Breaking in a Broken Heart : How to draw power from a truly crappy experience. Looking at Rookie Magazine started out as surprising and slowly became an amazing experience. Everything I have read about teenage  girls is written by someone who was a teenager years before and is – sort of – remembering their teenage years from an older perspective, this is written – or edited – by an actual teenage girl and it is so much more sophisticated.

In Breaking in a Broken Heart, Rookie says Develop compassion. Now you know what it feels like to feel like garbage. So you can recognize that feeling in others, and empathize. It strangely becomes a healing experience for both people when this happens. You get over your heartbreak even more, and so do they….Discover that you are loved. Go ahead and try to reject this because it sounds corny and you don’t like feelings. I’m sorry, it’s just the objective truth of the matter. When you understand that you are loved, that there are, really, people who love you, that you DESERVE their love, and that you really do have huge, undying support in this world, from your friends and/or family and/or pets and/or God if you believe in that, the love that you lost begins to feel smaller in comparison.

In talking about Loosing It, Rookie says To avoid having to answer a million questions, I prefer to regard “losing your virginity” as a choose-your-own-adventure. Oral, anal, vaginal, manual, sex toy, something else? YOU PICK! When it comes to identifying as a virgin, only you can decide what “counts.” Maybe you “lost your virginity” the first time you gave oral to your girlfriend. Maybe you it was the first time your boyfriend fingered you. Maybe it was your first-time P in V. There is no wrong way to decide when you’ve lost your virginity. It is an intangible characteristic that only you get to choose whether or not you identify with…That said, maybe you think the whole concept of virginity is stupid. Who’s to say that you ever had one in the first place? Who’s to say that you lost anything when you had sex for the first time? I prefer to think of first-time sexual encounters as gaining a new experience, not losing something. Instead of thinking of things in terms of virginity, feel free to tell someone that you gave oral sex for the first time, or that you haven’t tried vaginal intercourse yet. There is no wrong way to talk about first-time sexual encounters, and anyone who tells you otherwise is likely just as clueless as the rest of us.

I sometimes have a feeling that the next generation will not be able to handle the trashed world we are leaving them. While it is true that we are leaving them a country in which the average kid will not be able to live the same lifestyle as their parents – lifestyle usually being defined as having as much stuff and using as much energy – and we are leaving them a world in which our leaders refuse to even admit that the climate is changing, and we are leaving them a future world in which we did pretty much everything I was taught to believe was responsible for the fall of Rome, this, next, generation just seems better. More capable of looking at real problems.

Reading Rookie, and reading about Tavi Gevison or listening to her TED talk – yes! at something like sixteen – is a hugely reaffirming experience. Check it out, I suspect you will be shocked and thrilled as much as me.

Happy Pearl Harbor Day…I don’t get it

Americana, Psychological Musings

I don’t understand why we celebrate Pearl Harbor Day. After all, we lost, we got bombed by surprise, we bungled it.

In the early nineties  when Kosovo was trying to get away from the yoke of the Serbs, much was made of the fact that a sacred Serbian battlefield was in Kosovo and the Serbs didn’t want to let that battlefield leave greater Serbia. Several newscasters, by way of showing how wrong the Serbs were, commented on how old grudges never die in Serbia and the Battle of Kosovo Field – lost by the Serbs over 600 years ago in June 1389 – was, stupidly, still a big deal.

But we do the same thing in celebrating Pearl Harbor (we even have Pearl Harbor license plates in California so, I guess, the car owner can remember – every time they go to their car – that 2400 sailors and soldiers were killed on December 7th). It is the same thing with The Alamo lost by a hearty group of volunteers fighting for their right to keep slaves which Mexico had outlawed. All three battles were loses.

Why don’t we celebrate April 18 when we killed – by surprise in semi-Pearl Harbor fashion – Isoroku Yamamoto, commander t of the Imperial Japanese Navy that launched that attack on Pearl Harbor? Or the Doolittle Raid when we bombed Tokyo on the same date one year earlier? Or some win in the Texas war against Mexico?

I have no idea. It seems we – humans – prefer to remember when we got our ass kicked sometime in the past. Anyway, Happy Pearl Harbor Day, and many more.