Movie night: THE FAREWELL

Three thoughts about THE FAREWELL, coming up...

* There's a bittersweet pain these days to watching certain movies from the before times. I'm not talking about MCU movies or anything blockbusterish -- I'm talking about films like this one, that don't invent new worlds but take a close look at one small corner of reality. To see people living life together, arguing, celebrating, being passive aggressive, even drinking in close proximity to each other ... to experience that for real is something I miss dearly. And it makes a movie like this a bit more intense for me than it might've been before the pandemic.

* A lot of the coverage of the film, when it came out, was about having Asian representation in the movies -- both onscreen and behind the camera. This is very specifically a Chinese-American movie; the whole plot, inasmuch as there is one, hinges on very specific cultural difference between the two countries. Yet this is also a profoundly human (and utterly lovely) piece about the way we are with our families that is recognizable to anybody who has actually lived in a family -- the conflicts, the lies we use to grease those conflicts, the love that underlies our frustrations with each other. So beautiful.

* Alex Weston's score is memorable and beautiful. 

Trump, America and history

I keep thinking about Donald Trump's most recent interview with Fox News, in which he was asked what message he would send to Black Americans whose ancestors were held as slaves. His response:

My message is that we have a great country, we have the greatest country on Earth. We have a heritage, we have a history and we should learn from the history, and if you don’t understand your history, you will go back to it again. You will go right back to it. You have to learn. Think of it, you take away that whole era and you’re going to go back to it sometime. People won’t know about it. They’re going to forget about it. It’s okay.

Now this is a lot of nothing masquerading as something. We know that Trump's knowledge of history is limited, and I've argued that he doesn't really have a sense of history -- if he could think beyond today's news cycle, this hour's tweet, he might take very different actions with an understanding that history's eye is on him.

I've come to suspect, though, that Trump sees and tells American history like he tells his own -- it's a narrative, one in which inconvenient facts are omitted or glossed over, so that the story is one of ever-greater triumphs, never mind all those bankruptcies and unpaid workers along the way. The end of the story is now, and the end of the story is that he's rich, so he must have won, right? It is history as PR.

A fundamental dividing line in this country is between those who want history to be public relations, and those who have a more tragic sense of how events have proceeded. It is probably easier to get elected if you hold the former view. But the people with the latter view, in my estimation, probably have a more realistic understanding of the country we live in.

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.