Illegal Alien Threatens NYC's Central Park

The Phantom has learned an illegal alien has taken roost in New York's Central Park, just blocks from Trump Tower.  If Mr. Trump decides to shoot someone on 5th Avenue to demonstrate just how much he is loved, this alien may well be his first target.

Immigration and Naturalization officers have been stymied by fuzzy minded liberals from the Upper West Side, who have thwarted their attempts to arrest and deport this interloper.

Mandarin without papers

Crowds have formed.
Apparently, newspapers and TV stations have swarmed.
Has Central Park become a "sanctuary city" for illegal aliens?

The President has not commented, presumably because the arrival of this illegal was not part of a caravan, although it is by no means the only one of its homeland to violate borders with impunity.

Build the Wall!

The problem for the President is the presence of this particular alien belies his argument about THE WALL, which he claims will bring border security, as similar walls have always done for thousands of years.

This alien simply flies right over Trumpian walls.
It's beautiful, too, and one can only imagine the Central Park birders, who went so gaga over the Red Tailed Hawk, now that this luminary has arrived.

And how Mr. Trump will react when he discovers aliens can not only fly over The Wall, but can tunnel under it?

Tunnel digging alien

Red Tails still hunt from the skies above New York, but the Phantom has heard no reports of Red Tails picking off the Mandarin ducks. (There are several. Once you allow them in, family members follow, and pretty soon you have a changing complexion of parts of the city.) New Hampshire, which is soon to vote on making the Red Tails its official state raptor, may offer a solution: If the Red Tails decamp for the Granite State, New Hampshire has the potential to become a sanctuary state for Red Tails. For New Hampshire, the Red Tails are like immigrants from Norway and Sweden. Remember,  Mr. Trump, has called for more immigrants from these white bread countries. The Trumpling is not against all immigration. He simply wants immigrants to look more like him.

New Hampshire state raptor

The Phantom will not tell the Big Sissy about other possible interlopers, who can simply fly over his wall. If he freaks out over caravans of women and children, imagine how he'll react once he gets a load of these bats:

Trump to mobilize Space Command to shoot down big bats!

According to Trumplings, it all begins when immigrants are allowed to get their feet (or talons) in the door. 
The wrong sort of immigrants.
Consider the case of the sloth:
There is the sloth, who looks like this:

And then, there is the paler  sloth:

Now, the one has a  darker complexion, and of the two, who do you think Mr. Trump would object to? Well, duh. 

The Phantom thought these two sloths were different species, two toed being brown and three toed being white, but no:

As for the avian population, one can only imagine what the Central Park pigeons think about these Mandarin ducks. First it was the Red Tails, who make MS13 look like girl scouts when it comes to threatening life and limb. Now the Mandarins, who attract adoring crowds, and they don't even speak English. 

When the sloths arrive, you can bet the raccoons will be massing at rallies, bellowing: Build THE WALL!

Tell Me Something I Don't Know

Finally got around to reading the Sunday NYT 12/9/18 from which I have learned:

1/ A STUDENTS
From a Wharton professor: "A" students are often not as successful as "B" students who go into the real world with the mindset they have something to prove.
This was something my brother observed years ago as he assessed talent among the students he had to judge. I noticed the same thing. Not to say the kid who never got a "B" throughout high school, got into Harvard or Princeton was not bright. But there are all sorts of modes of "bright." 

When my younger son's girlfriend took command of him in college she forbid him from getting too interested or enthralled in any particular assignment: You've done the work to get your "A" now move on. Leave that stuff you find so fascinating behind. You're not here to fall in love with gene splicing; you're here to get your "A."
Before she arrived on the scene, he was struggling to get "B's." After, he got nothing but "A's." She became valedictorian.  He went on to medical school where he fell in love with "big vessels"--he really loved anatomy, vascular diseases and became a vascular surgeon. She went off to Yale and got a PhD in something and hasn't been heard from since. The A student who won the game; the B student who loved a particular subject. 

For the most part, Harvard, Yale and Princeton grads go on to become middle managers, semi rich and undistinguished. They are worker ants, the drone bees. The movers and shakers are the kids with something to prove. 

The professor notes the almost complete lack of correlation between grade point averages in subsequent success in the work place.

It must mean something neither Gates nor Zuckerberg stayed long at Harvard. 
Now, there are only one or two of these types, even at Harvard, so for most students staying with the faculty, getting the merit badges works out. But still.

There are plenty brilliant scientists and scholars on the Harvard faculty, but if you had to choose between universities and the business world to power innovation and progress in your nation, for its economy, for its science and technology, for its art and vigor, you'd probably be smart to pick the business community.

2/THE CASE AGAINST MERITOCRACY
 From Ross Douthat I learned American "meritocracy" has replaced American aristocracy. Privilege based on birthright and family money has given way to a "meritocratic elite" which from Douthat's perspective is too bad, because it is a driven by an "ambition untempered by self-sacrifice," a group which wants to move fast and break things and which gave us the crash of 2008. Like the aristocrats of the 20th century, they feel entitled to their privilege and wealth and advantages, but they do not know who or what they are. 
This is what is wrong with so much of American journalistic punditry: It is unconnected to the real world. It is a dreamworld, the way the Douthat's of the world think things ought to be. Mostly, it's like so many of the big numbers cited on the internet or in polls or studies--either completely made up or the product of garbage in, garbage out.

There are some people who live mostly in the coffee houses of the upper West Side of New York City, or the green pastures of Harvard yard who can, somehow, see the truth occasionally.  Reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan's memos to Richard Nixon is a trip, not just to the past but to the present and future. He is utterly dispassionate and he notes:
1/ The welfare system of the 1970's, well meaning as it was, was utterly destructive of the very people it sought to help. It was based on providing services which corrupted those in the service industry and injured those receiving the services and provoked profound resentment among the working class Whites who saw their taxes supporting undeserving poor.
2/ The basic lesion in American society was unemployment among Black males, especially men who might otherwise be heads of households, but the African American family had collapsed, leaving working mothers trying to raise children alone, with absent fathers.

All of this was dynamite at the time and Moynihan was reviled as a racist. Somehow, from his White world, his offices in government and academia, he managed to understand what was happening in the inner city ghettos and he tried to speak truth to power.

Even in the era of Trump, it turns out, there is such a thing as truth, and reading Moynihan today is a bracing tonic.

Someday, maybe some college will gather together  Jill Lepore, Elizabeth Kolbert, Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Gloria Steinem, Bill Gates, and other actual truth seekers and seers and lock them in a dormitory, make them eat meals together and talk about what they know and what they'd like to know and we might actually make some progress.

The Real War on Christmas

Some years ago Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and various other right wing luminaries decided they were outraged by the liberal penchant for inclusivity which had reached the point where people were cautioned against saying, "Merry Christmas" but rather "Happy Holidays," for fear of offending people who were Jewish or Muslim and did not celebrate Christmas.
 
Pretty soon, Blacks were told they ought to be celebrating Kwanza or some such holiday nobody had ever heard of, and few American Blacks had any interest in.


And all this, the Righteous Fox brethren were broadcasting as "The War Against Christmas!"

The Phantom hates the idea he might have to agree with Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly on anything, but he had found the whole practice of avoiding "Merry Christmas" as fundamentally stupid.


Has any Jew ever been harmed to be wished a Merry Christmas? Most American Jews have learned, growing up in America, to simply say, "Thank you" and move on.
Or, more often they say, "And Merry Christmas to you."
It's a harmless interpersonal ritual, like "Have a nice day."  
It does not violate the Constitution. It does not denigrate the Jewish or Muslim religion to recognize there is such a holiday as Christmas.


It does not violate anyone to be addressed as if they were Christian, when, in fact, they are not.
In fact, as any reader of Phlip Roth will know, many American Jews have aspired to assimilate so completely nobody even knows or guesses they are Jewish at all. They are, in fact, only too happy to be wished a Merry Christmas as a sign of acceptance, something which some more zealous Jews have decried as "the next holocaust," i.e., assimilation in which Jews simply disappear, melting into the background of a Christian society.
The thing is, America is no longer simply a white, Christian society. It is in fact a diverse, secular society, fundamentally indifferent to Christmas beyond the gluttonous orgy of gifting and gift receiving of that most wonderful (bountiful) time of the year.

The Phantom would bet atheists do not caterwaul in dismay if someone says, "Merry Christmas."

But looking at the interminable Christmas ads on TV, as he runs on the treadmill every morning, the Phantom is really revolted. They are worse even than the ads for food which glisten in saturated fats. The Christmas ads glisten in saturated fats of the soul.

Children are shown, tucked into warm beds in fuzzy pajamas, dreaming of toys; mothers dream of diamond necklaces; fathers dream of pick up trucks with ribbons tied round their flat beds.

The whole "holiday season" is about the piling on of "stuff," the purchase of affection with gift wrapped items.


The Phantom is aware there can be a certain pleasure buying gifts for others, trying to craft a gift to a person, showing how well you know someone.


And the Phantom is well aware that he has reached that pleasant, comfortable station in life where he has enough "things," more than enough stuff and presents simply add more to an already overstuffed closet.

When he was less financially comfortable "things" and the products of mass production were far more exciting.


But still, the Phantom can only imagine how Jesus would react to Christmas as he would see it on TV and in the malls with all the background Christmas music being piped in to stoke sales.

The whole idea of a rapacious, consumer society is just so unappetizing.
Jesus is reported to have said it is difficult for a rich man to get into Heaven.
Must be a reason for that, and the pursuit of money and gifts purchased with money must make that all the more difficult.
Reportedly, Jesus told a story about the Good Samaritan, who finds a man lying in the dust along a roadway, naked, beaten, and he freely gives this man clothes and nurses him back to health. Now there is a spirit of giving. But this was done to restore someone who had all this taken from him, to get him back on his feet, not to pile on gifts to someone already swimming in material things.

The Phantom does not know Jesus in any way whatsoever, but he has read about him and he can only surmise, Jesus would observe what America has done with Christmas and he would puke.

Andrea Long Chu and Transgender Happiness

Once in a great long while you read something in the New York Times or the New Yorker or the Atlantic which is really different, new and gives you pause.

"Surgery, Hormones, But Not Happiness," in the 11/25/18 NYT is one of those.

Speaking about her "transition" from male to female, Ms. Chu hits the main themes, that nobody ought to be made to feel badly, demeaned over something they cannot control, over a strong urge to change from what they have been to something different.

But she also touches on the very important reservations at least some doctors have about participating in the treatment of patients who say they feel they have been born in the wrong body, the wrong sex.

She addresses head on the medical aphorism: "First, do no harm," by asking what makes the doctor think he can always know whether or not he has done harm?

It is a fair question.

But Paul McHugh, when he left Cornell and went to Johns Hopkins, where he was asked to participate in the Hopkins transgender program as chief of psychiatry, some 40 years ago, discovered the suicide rate among patients undergoing transgender surgery and hormone medication was somewhere above 30%. He asked, "What other practice in medicine would be continued with a 30% death rate? Would coronary bypass surgery be allowed if 1/3 of the patients died?"

Nothing has changed in the suicide rates of transgenders since then, far as I can discern--in fact it is usually quoted as being close to 40%.

Discussing the reluctance of physicians to treat patients with "gender dysphoria" Ms. Chu remarks:
"In this view, it is not only fair to refuse trans people the care they seek,; It is also kind. A therapist with a suicidal client does not draw the bath and supply the razor. Take it from my father, a pediatrician, who once remarked to me that he would no sooner prescribe puberty blockers to a gender dysphoric child than he would give a distemper shot to a someone who believed she was a dog."

But what Ms. Chu argues is it is not for the doctor to make the judgment. The goal ought not to be to make a patient happy. Even after receiving treatment, she says, few transgender patients are happy. The goal is to serve the stated needs of the patient.

"As long as transgender medicine retains the alleviation of pain as its benchmark of success, it will reserve for itself with a dictator's benevolence, the right to withhold care from those who want it."

She then decries the condescension.

"I also believe that surgery's only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want. Beyond this, no amount of pain, anticipate or continuing, justifies it's withholding."

Up to this point, I was in Ms. Chu's thrall, but she lost me here.
The surgeon, it should be noted, also has a right to decide how much pain he is willing to inflict.
If you have a transgender surgeon who wants to do the surgery, fine.
But for my part, I do not see participating in what is a very unsettled realm which may be doing more harm than good, whoever gets to define that.

Ideals, I Miss Them So

A trip down memory lane this morning, watching President Obama, in a tuxedo, at the James Baker Institute at Rice University, speak in his halting, considered, wry way.
One of the things he said was that going into the Oval Office to meet with George W. Bush, after the election but before he was sworn in, was his first visit to the Oval Office. And he said, "You know, that place deserves a sort of reverence. Not for the place, but for what it represents and if you don't have it, well, you shouldn't be there."

Revered

Which, of course made me and everyone in the audience think of its current occupant.

But then, I thought: Isn't this what change and a disrupter and the rejection of previously accepted norms are all about? 

And maybe the new norm is no worse, just different.

Consider, as an example, the idea of a "scholar athlete." 
We all knew, for years, what a sham that was. Boys were admitted to Duke to play basketball, to Harvard to play football who had test scores and grades not remotely close to what was required of  other students.  And for most student/athletes, they weren't even interested in the student part. They attended classes only because it was part of their contract.

These players are more like the custodians Duke hires. They are employees of the university, but not students.

The Reality of Slavery

The most famous example was the Penn State running back, who, when the professor called on him, simply stared back at the professor, who persisted, "Uh, Mr. Moore, I asked you a question," the professor said.
"My name is Lenny Moore" he said, "I don't answer no questions. I just carry the ball."


That, at least, was an honest answer.


For years, Duke University, tried to pretend their basketball players were like the Ivy League players, young men admitted to play football or basketball, but who studied, and got their college degrees after four years on campus. Until about 10 years ago, that was occasionally true, with Duke players recruited, playing for 4 years before signing their NBA contracts. But now Duke recruits "one and done" players, who play their year, get their exposure, get drafted into the NBA and are gone. LeBron James changed the dynamic, showing a player with no college training could play in the pros.


Fantasy Hero of the Lost Cause

After LeBron, all that is gone. There is no attempt to even pretend the hired guns, these 17 and 18 year old players will even go to class, much less spend more than a year before cashing in and going off to the NBA.  Now the young studs skip college mostly, doing their year of audition then on to where they really intend to go. 

As a commentator from UNC recently observed:

First, let's be clear: the idea of a Duke “Scholar Athlete”, at least when involving their basketball program, is a fiction. Recruiting one and done players raises a lot of issues, including whether keeping someone academically eligible for one semester indicates any real commitment to balancing academics with the need to maintain a competitive basketball program. Duke University, by allowing Coach K to recruit academically deficient “One and Done” high school players, sends a very clear signal that education of athletes is not a priority. They are there for one reason – to win games for the basketball program, which for Duke is a cash cow, bringing in millions. It had better, because they've certainly got enough invested in it - in 2013 Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski received a pay raise to to $7.2 million, making him the highest-paid coach in all of college sports.
--UNC sports columnist


Duke is, in a way, refreshingly honest, like that football player.
Sure, we used to talk about the value of a college education, about how these players represent something that is good about Duke, how they are part of the fabric of quality which is part of the university.
Now, it's, no, they are just hired help, entertaining the fans. We bid. Our competition bids and we buy the best we can get. Bread and circus. This is the circus.

In a way, this is all good. The whole lie that college was somehow materially valuable to students, whether they are elite athletes or, for that matter, for most of the students who will leave college for careers running HVAC businesses, landscaping companies, selling insurance or stocks is just that, a lie. College may expand minds, for those who do not spend it all on fraternity porches drinking themselves into oblivion, but expanded minds do not translate into dollars.  The fact is, for most people, all that is valuable to them is the certification process, which has devolved into a starkly commercial enterprise in the United States. Pay your money, take your exam, get your certificate, and you can move on.

The idea of "qualifications" whether it be for running a business or running for government office is a sham. You prove you are qualified by winning. 

Rules are made for breaking. Doing is the only important thing.

Think of Trump, who when it was suggested in a debate he had not paid income taxes replied, "Yeah.  If I had, they'd have just wasted the money."

The Reality: War is Hell

And his base lapped it up.

But there was some comfort in our illusions, sometimes. And even if we knew they were fantasies, they were warm dreams, or, as Hemingway said, "It's not true. But it was pretty to think it."

What Is Knowledge?

As an undergraduate in college, the Phantom sat in a classroom when a professor asked, "How do we know we, any of us, are even sitting in this classroom right now? How do we know we, you, are not somewhere else?"

Are Rhinemaidens real?

And the Phantom groaned silently. "I just want to go to medical school. Why am I sitting here in this classroom, listening to this?"

This had all started when the professor asked, "But what is a 'fact?'"

Real House or Just Hollywood mock up?

Students had offered up, "One and one equals two."
"That," the professor replied, "Is an agreed upon definition."
"I am sitting here," another student said.

Fake house by Obadiah Youngblood

And that's how we launched off into metaphysics.

But now, fifty years later, the Phantom is trying to remember the rest of that discussion, because now "facts" are much more fluid, in the age of the internet.

Fake House or Real House interpreted by Edward Hopper

The same class had spent time talking about the fine occasionally invisible line between fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, the notion of a non fiction novel. And now we have two excellent films ("Infamous" and "Capote") which are the reality of the Cutter family for millions.

Fake News?

All that liberal arts stuff which at the time seemed like so much mental masturbation--just playing with thoughts that had no real world application, and at age 20, the Phantom wanted to know more about the real world--he had lived long enough in his fantasy world. 

Real children or Just Actors?

But now, with Alex Jones telling us the children murdered at Newtown, Connecticut were just actors and the World Trade Center was an elaborate provocation executed by the American deep state, and with Trump insisting Obama was born in Kenya or Mars or wherever Trump is now saying, with his biggest ever in the history of the country crowd at his inauguration, and his "almost complete victory" in the midterms, all those classroom exercises seem suddenly relevant. 

If the Phantom could just recall what was said.

College is wasted on the young.

The lawyer for Alex Jones, defending his client asked the reporter, "But how do you know those children really were murdered at Newtown? Did you see the bodies? Were you at the autopsy?" And, about the moon landing which Alex Jones claims was staged at a Hollywood studio, "How do you know? Were you on the moon when Neil Armstrong stepped off that ladder?"

Indeed.

We are always living with doubt, with too little information.
But as my mother once observed, "You don't have to jump off a cliff to know that is not going to end well."

Real wrestlers

But when it comes to Mr. Trump, the reason, the Phantom thinks, he upsets so many college educated people, is he challenges all they learned, or failed to learn along those 16 years of "education." He is proud of his anti-intellect. He is saying his way of thinking is superior and the fact he is in the White House proves it. Only winning matters in politics.

Fake wrestlers?

And in life, too. The victors write the history.

Reading the New York Times in New Hampshire

The Phantom moved to New Hampshire for reasons large and small, and has been a happy, grateful refugee ever since.

Of course, when he left Washington, DC, his friends wistfully told him, "Well, no matter how deep the snow gets up there, at least you won't be on ground zero."

The Phantom took considerable relief in that thought, until he discovered to his right, a two miles away, was the Seabrook Nuclear Plant, and 10 miles down the road, to his left, is the nuclear submarine facility at the Portsmouth Naval Yard. So, the likelihood of nuclear annihilation is, if anything, closer and more likely in New Hampshire. 

Nevertheless, there is a sense up here, that problems have been left behind in Washington, DC, a town which the Phantom regarded the way a person regards his  large, fractious family--it's part of you, but you are glad to have escaped, to the extent you can ever escape your own family.

Every Sunday, there is a letter from home, however.  It takes the form of the Sunday New York Times, which brings news from Washington, and from New York, a megalopolis, which has merged, intellectually at least, into a single place of the mind. 

This Sunday, two articles grabbed his attention: A piece by a woman leaving Germany, to move back to the States where she will place her children back in California schools, and an article by Tim Wu, about the problem of consolidation of economic and financial power in banking, the pharmaceutical industry, the internet companies, manufacturing, medical health care systems, and how this gives rise to oligarchs and destroys the basis for democracy and a middle class.

The article about schools the Phantom could read from the perspective of personal experience. The failings of public schools have been much on his mind. The idea of public schools has been perverted, undermined, by evangelicals, by identity politics and by bigness. The Phantom was told his public school was one of the best in the country, that his classmates were the creme` de la creme` and he believed it, until he got to college where he discovered everyone else, from Winnetka to Darien to Shaker Heights  to Orange County, California had been fed the same malarkey, and swallowed it whole.  Years later, returning to his home town, watching his kids go to the same schools, he realized, public schools had probably never been as good as he thought and had declined since then. They were instruments of public policy first and educational institutions second. The Phantom had personal experience with them and could judge confidently.

But for the Phantom, macroeconomics is not something with which he has personal experience. The idea of concentrated power, monopoly, lack of competition sounded nasty, but then again, Amazon is a monopoly of sorts and it serves the Phantom well. 

Then again, the Phantom has run up against the whip hand of anti competitiveness. In his part of New England, there are simply too few health care systems and this means whether you are a doctor working for one or a patient using one, you are at the mercy of the only game in town. 

Reading the Times in New Hampshire ties the Phantom to the rest of the world, to his country. That and the New Yorker and National Public Radio, and the Phantom has a new family, which reaches beyond the home town.  I know those folks--David Remnick, George Packer, Jill Lepore, Ky Rysdaal, Mara Liasson, Ninatotenberg. 

This is America now. The shire and the web which connects us. 

Subject to the jurisdiction thereof: The 14th Amendment

You know President Trump has been fed his ideas by people at the Heritage Foundation or some other White Power group when you hear him quote, "And under the jurisdiction thereof."

Like so much of the Constitution, phrases are thrown in which are underdeveloped to the point of opaque. Any English teacher worth her salt would circle that in a red crayon and give a D- to its author. Explain. Clarify.


Same for "two thirds of all other persons," but at least there, we have more than a wink and a nod--the authors already tell you they are not talking about Indians and the only folks left are slaves, the name they dared not speak.


But why did they throw in "and under the jurisdiction thereof" in 1865, rather than just saying, excluding diplomats, Indians and children born to members of invading armies?


We'll never know.
Well, actually, we will know, when the Alito-Thomas-Gorsuch-Kavanaugh-Roberts majority rule, the President does have the right revoke and exclude citizenship from children born in the United States if he wants to and whoever he wants to exclude.


Scalia disciples, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh being "originalists" and will find in the "original intent" of the authors the idea of what being under the jurisdiction means, as television disciples will know the mind of God, through his writings in the Bible.
The Constitution is not a living document but an immutable source which means only what it's 19th century authors meant it to say, which is to say, whatever Gorsuch and Kavanaugh want them to say.


So President Trump will be able to exclude whomever he wishes from citizenship.

And you know, wink, wink, who that is going to be.

Free State of Jones: If Jill Lepore Had Written Gone with the Wind

"These Truths," Jill Lepore's allegory cum history of the United States is a case in point of how we use history for present purposes.  Reading Lepore, you soon realize she's not really talking about the past. She's talking about the era of Donald Trump and she's showing us the truth about him and his meaning through stories about our past. 

She brings to life Faulkner's famous, "The past is never dead. It's not even past," and as she says, "the study of history unlocks us from the prison of he present."

So it is with "The Free State of Jones" a neglected masterpiece film about Newt Knight and the rebellion in a county in Mississippi during the depths of the Civil War, a story which Southerners today find so distasteful, they cannot even discuss it without spitting. 

The life and exploits of Newt Knight expose the lie in the whole myth of the "Lost Cause," which Jim Crow Southerners dreamed up to sanitize the ugly truth that the Civil War, whatever it may have been when it first started, quickly became all about ending slavery and challenging the racism in which slavery was so firmly rooted. 

Shelby Foote, and many other Southerners,  have tried to argue that Southerners were simply fighting because the Yankees were down in their home states raping and pillaging. These fantasy historians dreamed up an image of the noble Confederates embodied in Robert E. Lee, who was seen not as a savage slaver, but as a taciturn noble aristocrat, too pure to ever harbor even a shred of animosity toward his enemies. And then there was a purely fictional character, who was actually no more fictional than the image of R.E. Lee later prof erred, and then there was 
Ashley Wilkes in "Gone with the Wind,"  the righteous but conflicted, spiritually pure officer in gray and gold, a knight errant of  Camelot so noble neither he nor his doomed civilization (based on barbarous slaving) could survive in the coming cold world of heartless Northern industrialization. 

In fact, only a small percentage of Southerners, an agrarian society, owned slaves and "The Free State of Jones" begins with a scene in which poor, white farmers, conscripted Confederate soldiers, sit around a campfire, and seethe about the Confederate law exempting slave owners, the "twenty Negro law," which allowed one male in each family exemption from serving in the army for each 20 slaves the family owned. So a family with a father and four sons who owned 100 slaves sent no soldiers to the front, while the poor fought to keep them rich. The soldiers joke maybe they should get together and buy one slave, so they might get a few days reprieve from the fighting.

If the Smithsonian Magazine article about Newt Knight is accurate, Knight sold his fellow Jones County citizens on this idea:  the Confederacy was making a rich man's war a poor man's fight,  and folks down in Mississippi still hate him for telling this turth and for opposing the Confederacy. What really rankles today's Mississippi neo Confederates is Knight's rejection of racism. A local man says, "I'm not a racist, but I am a segregationist," with perfect aplomb, as if that would make perfect sense to the readers of the Smithsonian Magazine.
The worst offense of Newt Knight was he openly fathered children with a former slave, a half Black woman.  The 19th century story interweaves with a 20th century story, in which a descendant of Knight and the former slave is on trial for having sex with a white woman, which given his "drop of Black blood," is illegal in Mississippi, even in 1956. 

"Free State" addresses the thinking of the white citizens of Jones County, who called blacks "niggers" even while making common cause with a rebellion against the Confederacy. For the poor whites, having someone below them on the social scale is all they have, but Knight tells them, "We are all someone's nigger. The rich man makes sure of that."

This is a movie which is so relentless and angry it will never replace "Gone with the Wind." There is not enough in it for young women and girls to fantasize about--no beautiful scenes from the balcony, as Ashley in his silk vest, and Melanie in her  lovely gown, look  out over the fields where happy slaves pick cotton singing "Swing Lo', Sweet Chariot." 

But it's a wonderful, important movie, worth the subscription to Netflix.