TCM's Woke-arama

 Turner Classic Movies is running a series in which films from the past are weighed in the balance by the standards of leftist “wokeness” and probably found wanting. Tonight is The Searchers'  turn in the barrel, and the results are both idiotic and annoying. The Searchers is the story of a man’s search for his young niece who was abducted by Comanches after they slaughtered his brother’s family, including a sister-in-law he loves. Among its themes, besides its main one of obsession and its consequences, are  ideas of courage, perseverance, redemption, the nature of the outsider and his relation to a community, conflict, moral ambiguity, strength of character, and the pioneering spirit. It is a masterpiece that has been appreciated as such by serious and thoughtful people for years. It needs no defending, but what the people at TCM are saying about it does need ridiculing.

Their first accusation is against  the film’s depiction of “indigenous people”. The simple refutation  is that the depiction of the actions of Comanches is accurate. Raids and abductions of the kind shown the movie happened frequently on the Texas frontier. The Comanches were a rough bunch, and it is neither stereotyping nor improper nor “problematic” to present things as they were. It is foolish to think otherwise.

An even sillier claim is that the main character Ethan Edwards is a racist. The supposed evidence is that he bitterly hates and obsessively pursues the band of Comanches who murdered his family.  Yet in the story that has nothing to do with racism, but rather with loss and revenge. (One might suppose that the only way he could have avoided being a racist in the TCM people’s eyes would have been to go back east and meditate on what thought crimes his  family must have committed to deserve being butchered.) His behavior toward his enemies is harsh and brutal in ways often disapproved of by others who ride with  him, but it is because they are his enemies not because of their race. He does not demean  Indians as inferior beings. He shows no hostility to other Indians he encounters, including at least one Comanche.  He just wants to find his niece and settle with Scar.

TCM seems to have gotten more politically  correct over the years. Perhaps people in the business of showing old movies and acting as though they liked them have felt they needed to for cover.  It is annoying, and a little hypocritical, since it involves some serious talking out of both sides of the mouth.  Still they do show some good movies, and the mute button is always there for the commentary.

 

  

Cuomo's Two Troubles

 Governor Andrew Cuomo is in political trouble this week for a couple of reasons. He sent people with active cases  of Covid back to nursing homes leading  to the infection and deaths of thousands of people, lied about the number of people who died, and got caught in his lie. He also has been accused by several women of groping or sexually harassing them. Some organizations are covering both stories, but many people in the traditional media are reporting on the second story and ignoring the first. Almost all Democrat Party politicians are doing the same.

At first that must seem odd. Boorish remarks toward women and a case or two of unwanted grabbing are bad things, but they are so far less bad than negligently killing people and lying about it as to make them almost irrelevant in judging the man and his fitness to stay in office.  Yet Democrats and their public relations people in the traditional media are behaving as though the reverse were true.

I can think of a couple of reasons why. One is the desire to maintain and stick to the theme that Democrat governors and officials uniformly handled the epidemic wisely and effectively while Republicans did not.  Telling the truth about Cuomo’s failure would be implicitly admitting  the story was false and might lead to having to face doubts about the behavior of Newsom, Whitmer, and various others and even to questions about whether some of the decrees and power grabs were necessary or even productive.

Another reason might be simple embarrassment. Throughout the first months of the epidemic Democrat politicians and people in the traditional media treated Cuomo as a hero and near genius for his handling of it. They gave him awards and touted him as the obvious relief pitcher to be held ready to step in as their candidate for president in case Biden’s mental decline became too obvious to hide.   One can see how it might be a little deflating to have to admit what he was and did. It also might make cynical people wonder whether they can trusted to be accurate about anything political.  

Of course both of those guesses make the charitable assumption that they are suppressing the story only for reasons of expediency and not because they  really believe the killing of to them insignificant old people is less an offence than rudely  inconveniencing a few women of a quality and type similar to their own.  There are some cases in which that assumption would be very charitable indeed.

A Sensible Precaution

 As well as I can remember, I’ve never read a book by Dr. Seuss as a kid, parent, or grandparent.  So I will not miss his recently banned books and will not be paying the hundreds of dollars that used copies of them are being offered at online. However I would miss Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, Romeo and Juliet, Tamburlaine the Great, Blazing Saddles, The Searchers, Madame Butterfly, Don Giovanni, and many other things our present day legions of decency and listers of prohibited books might decide to ban next.

It is a problem with an obvious solution. One should not trust any streaming service, corporate vendor, library, or broadcasters to keep something available once the cancelling gang goes after it.  Instead, a person should have his own copies of the books, movies, and music he likes in his physical possession completely independent of and separate from any other party’s storage, devices, or offerings. (Antique stores and independent book, music, and video sellers are good places to shop and often staffed by people interesting to talk to.) The cancellers may be able to remove a book from Amazon’s or the public library’s shelves, but they cannot touch yours, at least not in this country and not yet.  

That may seem excessive. It certainly can be expensive and take up a lot of space, but  it is a sensible precaution. Foolish, unreasoning, barbarous minded, dogmatic fanatics will try to do foolish, irrational, barbarous, fanatical things.  Given the present political climate in the country and the general level of cowardice in corporations and institutions, the cancellers will often get their way. One cannot tell what they will next decide is problematic or when enough people finally will come to their senses and tell them to go to hell that it will not matter.

Big Lies, Here and There

 A political big lie is first a lie told for political gain and second big -  a statement  that if true would have important consequences and implications for a society.  It is usually also big in another way -  that of  being  frequently and consistently repeated and claimed as fact by influential advocates and supporters of those telling it.  Big lies may be completely unconnected to anything in reality or have a superficial and irrelevant connection to something true which may make them seem more believable.  

The most recent political big lie is from the Republicans - Trump’s claim that he won the election in a landslide, but the Democrats stole it from him by changing millions of votes in voting machines, dumping hundreds of thousands of fake ballots in close states, counting hundreds of thousands of votes from dead people, illegal aliens, and  non-residents, and other forms of cheating.  He has been saying  it since the election without presenting any evidence to back it up. He has been joined by some Republican politicians and a high percentage of talk radio people and others in the conservative media. They have not given people any evidence either. It is true that Democrats like to cheat some in elections. It is a tradition with them. Robert Ingersoll was warning about it not too long after the Civil War.  That says nothing about whether they did  cheat  or even could have cheated in the ways Trump has claimed and is no excuse for someone falling for Trump’s lie.  People are right to see Trump’s behavior and that of his supporters in media and politics as outrageous, dangerous, and harmful to the country. According to polls millions of people who voted for Trump believe it and thus have been led to conclude at least for a while that the country’s politics are rigged and its government is illegitimate. Thousands of people who believed it wasted their time and money coming to Washington on January 6^th to demonstrate their belief, and a couple of hundred or so of them rioted and attacked the Capitol.

However Trump and company are not alone in their demagoguery. Democrats have  their own big lies.  One  is the  apocalyptic take on climate change – the claim that unless Democrats are given vast new powers over people’s lives, civilization and perhaps even human life will be destroyed by global warming in three, five,  or ten years. It is preached continually by  leftists, Democrats, and their public relations people in  the traditional media. There is no evidence for it, and the dates from past similar prophecies of climatic doom have passed unnoticed.  It is true that the general climate has gotten warmer over recent decades. It is also true that human produced carbon dioxide in the air contributes to that. That  does nothing to validate self-serving scare stories about the coming end of the world. This lie is outrageous, dangerous, and harmful to the country. Millions of people are said to believe it, and many of them are going through life worried and fearful, some  enough to be willing to accept any orders they might be given to save the planet and to demand that their neighbors do the same.

Another notable big lie of the Democrats is the claim that America is plagued by systematic anti-black racism. Even if one accepts that they do not mean racism in the literals sense of a belief that members of some racial groups are inherently superior or inferior to others solely because of their membership in the group,  but only racial bigotry or prejudice, it is still a lie, and those saying it have no evidence for it.  (Some of them  have more or less admitted this by resorting to  the easily refuted assertion that any statistical difference in anything between racial groups is evidence for racism.) The systems of government, colleges and universities, the traditional media, and large corporations are slanted in favor of black people through affirmative action quotas and set asides, lower admission standards, “diversity” training and  indoctrination, and a tendency to view and report things from the viewpoint of political correctness. Yet Democrats, leftists, and their friends in the traditional media make the claim  of systematic racism continually. It is true that there are plenty of anti-black bigots out there, and that some of them are cops who do bad things. It is surely true that the days of Jim Crow were an inexcusable national disgrace. That does nothing to validate assertions  of present day systematic racism.  The lie is outrageous, dangerous, and harmful to the country.  It increases hostility between racial groups, tells black people they cannot succeed in the world without being lifted by the benevolent hand of Democrat politicians, and tells white people they are worthless bigots, whether they know it or not, in an attempt to make them easier to rule.

A willingness by large numbers of people to accept big lies is a bad thing for a society, apart from the damage done by any particular big lie.   On the record of the success of the lies mentioned above, there is plenty of that willingness in the country these days.