Look at the poor guy's eyes,...

"In all of these dramas, the black people's stories are simple, almost banal. As the kidnapping victim in 12 Years a Slave says, 'I don't want to survive. I want to live.' He simply endures, with all the courage and dignity he can muster. His situation, the heroism of his situation, is easy to understand."

"The slave owner, played by Michael Fassbender, is a far more mysterious, more fascinating type: What kind of man wants to flog nearly to death the mother of the child he adores? What kind of man rests against people as if they were furniture? It is a testament to the power of American denial that Fassbender's portrayal of a slave owner is the finest ever put down on film."

Black women have been pretty damned equal - and loved for it - all along. Feminism is weird - not to mention, someone else's beef:

Y'all should watch 12 Years A Slave, and ask yourselves, "Who's been oppressing who, again?"

 

Here's an idea going around, amongst my friends, anyway:

"No More Slave Movies; Show Us as Kings and Queens Too"

I agree with the "too". It's important, that Hollywood finally makes movies about black successes in history, but here's what I also see:

   

 When you have over 400 years of untold American stories - on the brutality (and length and breath) of slavery, slaves outwitting slavers (brilliantly) the effects of slavery today, then Reconstruction and it's lies and failures (also length and effects), followed by the Civil Rights Movement, etc. - not only is it a crime how few have been told, but it's harmful to society not to mine them so we can, all, be on the same page culturally. Blacks, whites, and everyone else, need to know these stories:

Like studying the noxious, and obviously taboo, topic of NewAge (to understand our current "spiritual but not religious" culture) our racial politics - especially when it comes to identifying bad actors - too often make little sense because, as I've said, they lack context. 

We simply have to look back - to know how we got here:

And why some still resist,...

 

I guess, it could go without saying, I am NOT a social scientist:

"It doesn’t take a social scientist to see that a blizzard of how-to books on “positivity” suggests its lack in everyday life. Behind the facade of smiley-faced optimism, American culture seems awash in a pervasive sadness,...."

But being able to see past the facade ain't exactly a party either,...

 ADDED - Forgot I had it waiting:

 

 You know, like me,...

 

Jonah Goldberg blew big chunks a few days ago. Conor Friedersdorf finger wags today. 

Might be related.

And I found 12 Years A Slave online for free. 

Completely unrelated - maybe.

 

 

 There's a new movie about a black girl who stopped slavery in England or something. I knew nothing about it or her.

And somebody in Mississippi is learning new things, too:

  "It is clear that slavery continues to have lasting impacts on our society. We are not living in a post-racial America. Disproportionate levels of poverty in the African American community are just one manifestation of slavery’s lasting legacy. In order to confront today’s societal ills, we must engage in a conversation with the past — one that can be truly painful, but at the same time, necessary."

 

A new Rock band likes driver training soundtrack vocals.

While USA Today has seen fit to do a new piece on Stanislaw Burzynski - learn that name. 

Crush him for fun.

The Pope wraps it up with a searing new message on The Scarlet Letter and related matters.

Nothing new about that, unfortunately,...

 

"We have issues in this country with telling stories of suffering that don't result in uplift."

“The atrocities in North Korea reached another peak on November 3, as roughly 80 people were publicly executed in seven different cities for crimes such as watching films made in South Korea, dealing in pornography or possessing a Bible.

The executions were the first mass executions of the Kim Jong-un regime,...

Wonsan’s executions were carried out by binding a group of people to stakes, putting white sacks over their heads and blasting them to pieces with a machine gun in front of thousands of witnesses at a stadium, among whom were many children. Families of the executed victims were sent to prison camps along with the victim’s accomplices.”

Yes, Richard Cohen, a journalist and columnist for nearly half a century, a college-educated, award-winning commentator, thought slavery was not such a bad thing until he saw a movie about it in 2013. Richard Cohen admits, in a major American newspaper, that until this month, he believed an archaic, widely discredited “Lost Cause” white supremacist myth. And in his nearly 70 years of literacy, he has not seen or heard or read anything to challenge that myth until he saw a Hollywood film on the subject. This is ignorance on a staggering scale. That paragraph should only preface a retirement announcement. “I am a deeply ignorant and cloistered old man,” should be the next sentence, “and no one should pay me for my views and opinions, because they are worthless.”

“We do not revere. We do not respect. At some fundamental level, we do not even understand. Or want to.”

Description: Quite possibly the craziest cult ever, Heavens Gate was founded by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. Heaven's Gate members believed that the planet Earth was about to be recycled (wiped clean, renewed, refurbished and rejuvenated), and that the only chance to survive was to leave it immediately. While the group was formally against suicide, they defined "suicide" in their own context to mean "to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered," and believed that their "human" bodies were only vessels meant to help them on their journey. In conversation, when referring to a person or a person's body, they routinely used the word "vehicle". This documentary investigates an incident in 1997, where thirty-nine members of the San Diego-based cult "Heaven's Gate" committed mass suicide. They intended to reach an alien spacecraft which they believed to be following Comet Hale-Bopp, which was at that time brightly visible in the nighttime sky.

To all those hoping I'll fail (Cody, I'm talking to you) you'll be happy to know that - though I should finally be moving into a new apartment on Saturday - everything else is staying about the same,...

A new documentary finds exactly what and who I said was happening during the primary:

The not-so-secret hero of “Caucus” is former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who plugs his way across Iowa in his Dodge pickup and an endless wardrobe of endearingly dreadful sweater vests, talking to anyone and everyone who will listen. He’s almost a Frank Capra character, a plainspoken man of principle who believes in old-fashioned politics and refuses to tell lies just to get elected. “Caucus” is in many ways the story of Santorum’s triumph, short-lived as it turned out to be: Despite polling in the low single digits in the fall of 2011, Santorum outlasts Bachmann, Gingrich, Cain and Perry and winds up in a dead heat with Mitt Romney, candidate of the GOP establishment.

Let’s be clear: I wouldn’t vote for Rick Santorum for dog-keeper if the other candidate were a dog. He’s a committed Christian conservative – actually, a Catholic conservative, a subtle but important distinction – who is forcefully opposed to abortion rights and marriage equality, and rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. I do not lament the fact that he didn’t get elected to national office (and never will). But amid all the overheated anti-Obama rhetoric and wild, unfulfillable promises of the Iowa campaign, Santorum comes off as the only candidate who isn’t telling people exactly what they want to hear, and who isn’t fueling hatred for its own sake.

So, once again, the Republican Party - in it's so-called wisdom - wasted the best candidate it had going,...

 

"There are reasons why films of this vein are more readily produced than others. Both economic and social values influence the resurrection of historical accounts like the Amistad while Gabriel Prosser, Harriet Tubman and Charles Deslondes suffocate in obscurity.

One thought is that white audiences should never be left feeling guilty about their ancestors’ sins. Many can walk out of the theater and say to themselves: 'I would’ve been more like Brad Pitt if I was alive during Slavery,' even though residue of the system still permeates around them today — and one could argue that there’s a shortage of mass white outrage over the fact.

In essence, the Prossers and Tubmans of our past deny Hollywood this safety net. They resisted oppression and sacrificed their lives to liberate others.

But more importantly, they don’t leave much room for white saviors. They are the black Bravehearts. And for many of us, we hope to see the day when they’re finally seen in full heroic form on the big screen."