Movie night: 'A Face in the Crowd'

Three thoughts about A FACE IN THE CROWD:

* Criterion: "A Face in the Crowd chronicles the rise and fall of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith), a boisterous entertainer discovered in an Arkansas drunk tank by Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), a local radio producer with ambitions of her own. His charisma and cunning soon shoot him to the heights of television stardom and political demagoguery, forcing Marcia to grapple with the manipulative, reactionary monster she has created."

So. You Know. Fiction.

* Patricia Neal's face during the movie's climax reminds me of the terror you usually see in horror movies.

* In fact, if I ran a film festival, I'd put this together with CITIZEN KANE, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE -- and, I think, the Boris Karloff version of FRANKENSTEIN.

Can K-State boot Jaden McNeil and still honor the First Amendment?

KC Star: 

A select group of student-athletes at Kansas State have begun circulating a letter on social media that states they will not play in games or participate in any donor or recruiting events for the Wildcats until the university makes changes that address racism on its campus.

The letter demands that K-State administrators create a policy that will expel any student who openly displays racism on any platform, such as social media or at school or athletic events.

Another demand: The university must deliver “strong consequences” to K-State student Jaden McNeil, who founded the white-supremacist group America First Students in Manhattan and posted an insensitive tweet about George Floyd that sparked a mushroom cloud of outrage from the Wildcats’ Black student-athletes on Friday.

I share the rage that K-State students feel about McNeil. I don't know, though, how K-State accommodates their demands without running afoul of the First Amendment. I don't even know if it should.

The law on this seems pretty clear:

In case after case, courts across the country have unequivocally and uniformly held speech codes at public universities to be unconstitutional. Public institutions of higher learning attempting to regulate the content of speech on campus are held to the most exacting level of judicial scrutiny. Typically, courts find speech codes to violate the First Amendment because they are vague and/or overbroad. This means that because the speech code is written in a way that (a) insufficiently specifies what type of speech is prohibited or (b) would prohibit constitutionally protected speech, it cannot be reconciled with the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech.

That's the "can" part. How about the "should?"

I've written before why I think restricting speech might be harmful to folks like the angry K-State student-athletes, from a purely utilitarian standpoint.

If American governance and culture are indeed soaked in hundreds of years of white supremacy, and:

If the ACLU protects the rights of anybody to speak, no matter how unpopular the stance or against the grain of government or public opinion, then:

Organizations like Black Lives Matter that are seeking racial justice are probably the prime beneficiaries of the ACLU's work and an expansive application of the First Amendment. After all, protests by minority activists — no matter how justified — are rarely popular.

The ground has shifted since I first wrote that. The BLM movement is relatively popular now, and that's a good thing! But activists had to endure a few years of Trumpism and a cultural default to honoring police officers before that was the case. They were able to make that case because of their right to free speech. The First Amendment protects dissenters and scoundrels. The main defense I can offer for the "defending scoundrels" part is that they are part of the price for "defending dissenters." And the right to dissent is elemental to democracy. 

My heart sides with K-State's minority students. But kicking Jaden McNeil out of school breaks down the protections that allow Black Lives Matter activists to have a voice and be effective with it. I'm not sure the conflict can be resolved.

Coronavirus diary: What I've learned about me...

...is how boring I am.

My routine in lockdown -- or semi-lockdown, as the case seems to be at this point -- is to read, write, watch movies, do a little housecleaning, and, well, that's it.

Which is pretty close to what I was doing before. But now I'm really tired of it.

The horrifying thing to me about my life is how little of it I have given up in lockdown. I don't have any real hobbies. I don't make stuff. I don't go places. I worked at home before, I work at home now, and that's it. Mostly, I miss going to the coffee shop now and again to see people.

I hope it's not too late for me to find a real and more active, more interesting life on the other side of this thing.

The joys and sorrows of reading during the pandemic

I've found myself as a reader again during the pandemic. 

There are several reasons for this. One is that I overdosed on screen time early on, obsessing about every new development as the virus spread. That hasn't changed as much as it should, but I've learned that the best way to curb it is to go to a room -- or a park, or even just sit in the car at Sonic -- and leave all electronic devices, including my iPhone, behind.

The good news is I'm catching up on literature I've long meant to get around to. I reread THE FIRE NEXT TIME, and finally go to Toni Morrison's BELOVED. Right now I'm juggling Jill Lepore's THESE TRUTHS with THE SECRET GARDEN -- a family read -- and MOBY DICK. I'm loving everything. And I'm not bothering with books that don't capture me. I read 50 pages of a relatively recent novel last week, decided it wasn't for me, and returned it to the library. Life's too short.

On the other hand, life's too short. And I'm more aware of it right now than ever. From where I'm sitting, I can see books by Louise Erdrich, Gunter Grass, NK Jesmin and others waiting to be read. I want to read them. I feel like I should. But I can't read what I'm reading fast enough to get to them as fast as I want. 

I want to read everything now.

On the final hand: Life's too short. I'm going to die someday. And all this reading I've been doing ... will it die with me too? If so, what's the point?

I don't know.

But I'm going to keep reading anyway.

On John Bolton, and why 'virtue signaling' is a con

John Bolton is making a big deal of how bad the president is now. Why didn't he say this stuff when he saw it -- particularly to Democrats who were proceeding with impeachment at the time?

This confirms my long-held view that the term "virtue signaling" is a con -- a way to avoid acting virtuously, to hold virtue in contempt, while still preserving an air of superiority.

Don't get me wrong: Lots of people want to be seen as behaving admirably, and that can lead to hollow, performative acts. But a lot of times when people -- conservatives -- use the term, it's is because they disagree with the virtue being signaled (say, acting against racism) and hate to see people acting as though the virtue in question is actually admirable. They're not really against virtue, or acting virtuously, or a lot of people who use the term perjoratively would never go to church again. They just dislike left-of-center virtues.

Bolton's use of the term is even worse. Nobody was asking him to "signal" anything -- they want to know why he didn't take real-time action, potentially effective action, against corruption and criminality. In his hands, an already hollow term becomes an even more hollow slogan to provide cover against doing the right thing. And paradoxically, it becomes it's own signal -- Bolton may be criticizing the president, but he can still use the language of conservatives. He's letting them know he's still one of them.

You can't say #BlackLivesMatter and play college football this year

Slate's Joel Anderson offers up some chilling statistics:

This week, players returned to campuses all around the country preparing themselves for a season that almost certainly shouldn’t be played. Just look at the early numbers. Two weeks ago at Oklahoma State, three players tested positive for the virus. Last week, the University of Houston suspended workouts after six players tested positive. And Thursday at the University of Texas, news reports emerged that 13 players tested positive — an uptick from the six reported the day before.

I've long predicted that American sports leagues probably will try to resume playing soon, but that somebody will get sick, and everybody will shut down for the rest of the year. But it's ironic that efforts to resume sports are happening at the same time as the "Black Lives Matter" protests -- which started out as a policing issue, but have spread to hard discussions about racism and the exploitation of Black people in all sectors of society.

College sports should be one of those sectors. In the major sports, black and other minority athletes provide disproportionate share of the labor with relatively little compensation, considering the money they're generating for their schools. It's already an exploitative system. But now there's a chance that exploitation will lead to illness and, possibly, death. The excuse that young, healthy people don't face as much danger from the coronavirus, but the truth is there's still a lot we don't know -- and we're learning all the time that asymptomatic carriers of the virus might also face long-term health problems.

The coaches and other university officials need to stop this, now, or their words of racial harmony will ring especially hollow. You can't say that "black lives matter" and keep playing the games. Not this year.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sam Brownback and the GOP's view of "Sharia law"

Trump-adjacent conservative Henry Olsen writes in the Washington Post says Republicans must defeat GOP congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, because of her conspiracy-mongering views. Part of Olsen's bill of particulars:

Let’s start with her anti-Muslim bigotry. She has said there is an “Islamic invasion” of the U.S. government and that members of Congress should have to be sworn into office on a Bible. She slurred Muslim men, saying they can have sex with “little boys, little girls … [and] marry as many women as they want.” She said Muslims who “want Sharia law” should “stay over there in the Middle East” and “have a whole bunch of wives, or goats, or sheep, or whatever you want.” She said on Wednesday that “Sharia Law” is “a real threat to our nation,” a blatant falsehood since there’s no effort anywhere in this nation to institute it.

Is opposition to Sharia law out of bounds in the Republican Party? If so, that would probably be news to a lot of Republicans. From 2012:

Republican Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed a bill aimed at keeping state courts and agencies from using Islamic or other non-U.S. laws when making decisions, his office said on Friday, drawing criticism from a national Muslim group.

The law has been dubbed the “sharia bill” because critics say it targets the Islamic legal code. Sharia, or Islamic law, covers all aspects of Muslim life, including religious obligations and financial dealings. Opponents of state bans say they could nullify wills or legal contracts between Muslims.

Brownback, incidentally, is now the "ambassador at large for international religious freedom," because irony is dead. But Kansas wasn't the only state to undertake such an effort. Less than a decade ago, conspiracy thinking about and efforts to ban sharia in the United States were pretty mainstream among conservatives. At one point, as many as 13 states saw bills introduced to ban sharia. Several states adopted the bans. I can't swear that all the bills came from Republicans, but Republicans were the main drivers of that effort.

Those efforts didn't just fade out. Here's Andrew McCarthy at National Review in 2017, arguing that immigration policy should deliberately shut out those he called "sharia supremacists": " To fashion an immigration policy that serves our vital national-security interests without violating our commitment to religious liberty, we must be able to exclude sharia supremacists while admitting Muslims who reject sharia supremacism and would be loyal to the Constitution."

So the idea that Islamic law is a threat to the American way of life was, and appears to remain, a mainstream conservative position. Henry Olsen treats it as disqualifying. Did conservatives change their minds while I wasn't looking, or is Olsen just trying to make the GOP look less nutty than it really is?