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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back into the hospital

Science

I am back in Sequoia Hospital – three days and three nights – for an Atrial Fibrillation ablation. Ablation means the removal or melting away of an unwanted structure or tissue (and I can’t help but think of that scene in India Jones where the the Nazis’ faces melt off). With the caveat that I really don’t know the details of what is going on inside my body, I think what is happening is that my heart was making extra – weaker and erratic – heartbeats. Usually, our heart contracts and relaxes to a regular beat pumping blood through the lungs to aerate it and then through our bodies. To quote an American Heart Association webpage, In atrial fibrillation, the upper chambers of the heart (the atria) beat irregularly (quiver) instead of beating effectively to move blood into the ventricles. About 15–20 percent of people who have strokes have this heart arrhythmia.

Normally, the sinus node fires an electrical charge to start the heartbeat and – because the cells in the heart muscle transmit that electrical charge – the upper chambers contract, pumping the blood. The heart can develops additional beats from the other nodes that are caused by the thickening of the heart walls (in my case by the heart working harder before I had my aorta valve replaced with a cow valve).

The ablation disables the troublesome extra node activity by fishing a tube up through a vain from my groin to my heart and burning them with radio frequency energy (with the heart full of blood, and not, at first so obvious to me, in the dark). Among other semi-miracles, they find the troublesome areas by mounting plates on my chest and back that guide the inserted probes with a sort-of personal GPS.

This was all done on Friday and I have been in the hospital – feeling much better and a little bored –  ever since to  monitor the results. I am looking forward to getting out on Monday and – hopefully – will be more active than I have been in the last year.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

Voisin and the Mullin Automotive Museum

Art, Cars

A week or so ago, Malcolm Pearson and I went to see the Voisin show at the Mullin Automotive Museum. Actually, Automotive Museum is somewhat of a misnomer, it is really a museum of French cars and – really, almost exclusively – pre-World War II French cars, extreme Art Deco French cars. The Mullin Museum is in Oxnard, about five and half hours – without gas, pee, or food stops – out of our way, and there are not many people that I enjoy being with, besides Malcolm, that are also willing to get up early enough to leave San Jose at 6:30, drive to Oxnard, walk around the Mullin for three hours, and drive back to San Jose that same night. Even to see a brace of Voisins (17 Voisins might be more than a brace but they were bracing).

As an aside, Voisins are fine cars and seeing a group of them is interesting and great fun, but they are not great cars. Maybe a better way to put it is that they are great cars, but they were not great in the right direction. To my mind, they seem to be on the same level as Lancias (and, as somebody who has owned three Lancias, I mean that in the best possible way). Both Lancia and Voisin were trying to make – make is pretty weak sauce for the passion involved – great cars but both made engineering decisions that were both brilliant and wrong for the market. End aside.

One of the very nice things about this special show of Voisins is how they reflect the early history of the automobile. Because Voisin was an aircraft inventor and manufacturer – he first flew an airplane in 1906 and, because the Europeans didn’t know about or didn’t acknowledge, the Wright Brothers, he won a prize for the first controlled flight – the early cars were built using typical airplane construction techniques  (including aluminium rather than the more typical brass).


By 1938, when Voisin built the Avions C30S Coupe for the Paris Auto Salon of the same year, the cars were more mainstream – and not all personally designed by Gabriel Voisin himself – but still very distinctive and exquisitely made. Along the way, the company made some memorable cars that, in my humble opinion, would do honor to anybody’s livingroom as a piece of sculpture. In 1934, they built the black and yellow Avions Voisin C27 Grand Sport Cabriolet with a body designed by Giuseppe Figoni – before he joined forces with businessman Ovidio Flaschi, thereby creating Figoni & Falaschi that is, by far, the best name of any car-body design company, ever – and was sold to the Shah of Persia. In 1935, they built the Avions Voisin C27 Aerosport Coupe with a large sunroof.

In 1938, Voisin built the  Avions C30 Cabriolet with coachwork built by Dubos that was later requisitioned by an Nazi stationed in France (maybe the Nazi liked it because it was more sedate, even a little Germanic, compared to many of the other cars.

In 1935, Gabriel Voisin, himself, designed and built the C25 Aérodyne which was Voisin’s “car of the future”. It was hyper-expensive in the middle of the depression, improbably streamlined, featured an huge – powered – sunroof, and had the best Art Deco upholstery I have ever seen.

 

By almost any standard, it was a tour de force but it had a six cylinder, sleeve-valve, engine while Bugatti – out in the sticks in Molsheim – was building less expensive cars with with eight cylinder double overhead cam engines.

What I like about these cars is that they were built by individuals, artists. Idiosyncratic artists that often got lost in their art and held it dearer than making money or, even sometimes, making a good car. For years, Ferrari built very fast cars with V-12 engines designed by geniuses like  Gioacchino Colombo and Aurelio Lampredi and they didn’t have radiator fans which Ferrari considered – I don’t know exactly, undignified? too feminine? too ordinary? – unnecessary. The problem was that no radiator fan made these cars very hard to drive in the real world with actual traffic and traffic jams. When asked about this problem, Ferrari said that Nobody should drive a Ferrari in traffic, if there is a traffic jam, just pull over to an espresso bar and wait for traffic to clear. This is the same guy who – for years – refused to install disc brakes on his race cars because they were invented by the English. (I had a Ferrari Lusso – luxury in English – that didn’t have a radio or a glove box, or, even, a locking passenger door.)  Bugatti refused to install hydraulic brakes on his cars, preferring to keep mechanical brakes – with delicate cables and pulleys going every which way – long after everybody else had agreed that hydraulic were the only way to go.

To me, all this makes the cars more fun, more interesting, even if it makes them less of a transportation appliance and the French were and still are  the best -worst? – at idiosyncratic cars. Here are a couple more examples without further comment.

1939 Delahaye Type 165 Cabriolet with a Figoni et Falaschi designed body

1938 Dubonnet Hispano-Suiza H6C Xenia with a Jacques Saoutchik designed body

 

.