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. 

Embracing the Wah of Ignorance

Ever notice how much people love talking about things they know next to nothing about?
The flip side of that coin is how people really do not enjoy talking about things they actually do know a lot about.

When you know something about a topic, you typically are aware of the uncertainties the other possible explanations. Ask a mechanic about the loss of power in your car, or the doctor about the pain in your leg and he will trudge through the most likely explanation but he'll then have to slog through the other possibilities, which is tedious, and somehow not pleasurable. Nobody likes uncertainty.

What people like is certainty and nobody is more certain than the man who does not really know, or does not appreciate the other possibilities.

Listen to the pleasure Rush Limbaugh takes in not knowing what he doesn't know. He is the definition of smug. The ultimate smugness of the ignoramus.

As Bertrand Russell once asked: Why is it the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubts?

Because being intelligent is to live with uncertainties, to entertain doubt, to ask more questions. What else? What am I missing?

The essence of Trump is his certainly, which begets smug, which begets electoral success.

It's the same appeal the clergy once had: We are certain in the face of uncertainty. You are paralyzed by doubt. We know. We can move boldly forward where angels fear to tread.

Fie on Goodness! Fie!

There is a wonderful sequence in "The Last Kingdom" (Netflix) in which the king, Alfred, who has been trying to be a good and pious Christian, mulls over his speech to the men of the army he has gathered to repel the invading Vikings and his best warrior, Uhtred, listens patiently to the King's ruminations about his exhortation to the army to fight for God against the heathens.

"These men.." Uhtred says, "are not angels."
They want a warrior to lead them, Uhtred is saying, not a saint.

And the king responds with a Donald Trump like rally, which works wonderfully well.

Now we are watching the gathering invading army of rapists and criminals approaching our southern border from slithole countries like El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and our President, always eager to sound the alarm, is rallying his hordes and pointing his finger at the Democrats as the enablers, Democrats who want open borders, who want to allow rapists to plunder white American womanhood. 

President Heel Spurs looks at the children who arrive on the Southern border as "an infestation," which, of course suggests what action must be taken: What do you do with an infestation, but eradication?

 In this he comes as close as an American politician ever has to suggesting genocide--well, any American politician  in this century. 

The Hondurans could hardly have delivered a better gift to the Trumpling, had they been on his payroll, and the Phantom would not be at all surprised if they are. But Mr. Mueller is likely busy with other investigations, so we will never know. Pity the Hondurans if they are on his payroll--he is notorious for not paying as promised. 

And where are the Democrats? We hear the Trumpling on NPR, Fox News, all the commercial news channels play him sounding the alarm.
But where is the voice of derision? 
Who is ridiculing President Heel Spurs when we need a warrior to challenge him?

In fact, the bigger question, who do we have who even sounds like a warrior?
The Democrats have Adam Schiff, a Casper Milquetoast if ever there was one. 
They have old men: Bernie, Steney, Biden, Patrick Leahy, Weeping Chuck Schumer.

They are the party of the compassionate crowd, of sympathy, people who thank women for sharing their stories of abuse, people who nurture, who promise programs spending money earned by tradesmen, garage owners, machinists, men and women who do not approve of government "give-aways."

How is it in a nation of over 300 million people we cannot find a Democrat with brass balls?

Where are the men who watch "Game of Thrones" and "The Last Kingdom" and love these shows?

We have Democrats who watch "Modern Family" who love "The Big Bang Theory" and "Friends." 

We have warm and fuzzy. They have blood and guts. 
The knights in the musical "Camelot" at long last cannot take too much goodness. They erupt with "Fie on Goodness! Fie!"
And what is wrong with men being men? 
Donald Trump has done America a service in this regard: He is unable to play to the Bible Thumpers for very long. It's clear he is no angel. And that has got to be okay for any other President from now on.
He is a sinus clearing phenomenon. 
After him, we don't have to pretend to be men of honor. 
We can be men of appetites and conquest.

You've Got to See This to Believe It; Then Don't

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/opinion/deep-fake-technology-democracy.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage






Buried in the NYT website page is a quiet little article about "Deep Fake Technology" (DFT) which I overlooked the first few times I scanned this site.


Now that I have seen it, I do not believe what I have seen.


Which is exactly the point:  We can no longer, in man's long history on earth, believe what we see with our own eyes or hear with our own ears.


The implication is we can only trust the news we can trust.
And who is that?
For me it's the NYT, the New Yorker and PBS.


But who knows?

The Harvard Suit and The Failure of Meritocracy

Within my lifetime, the Ivy League schools admitted students because of birth right, aristocracy and wealth.
Then the idea of denying admission to the feckless fortunate sons and daughters took hold and the glittering prizes of admissions to "elite colleges" which were thought to be where individuals could "get your ticket punched" to a life on easy street, with jobs in banks, brokerage houses, the medical profession, the higher reaches of the legal profession.

The idea was the cream would rise to the top and the weak children of wealth would have to either swim or sink.
It was the idea of being fair.

But then the University of California at Berkeley instituted a ruthlessly "merit based" system and they found their campuses filled with 43% students of Asian immigrants and white students dropping to 28%.

Oops--not what the scions of Harvard University wanted to see.

You read articles like the one in a recent New Yorker, describing a 17 year old applicant who sounds like a the ultimate in achievement and merit: A grade point average of 4.67, which sounds like, as the author notes, a typo, exceptional college board and ACT scores, accomplished musician, community service--turned down at Harvard, Princeton and Yale and wait listed at Stanford. 
What more could H/P&Y have wanted?
Well, it turns out Harvard has a score for personality, kindness, courage and amiability and this ultra competitive--ASIAN--kid must be a grade grubbing grind, focused on beating the system. In short, undesirable.

So, if he excels, he's the modern version of the Jew--must be despicably unsocial. If he fails to excel, no dice. Catch-22.

The real problem is, of course, Harvard clearly has a quota, just as Yale, Princeton and Harvard once had quotas for Jews, who in their time out competed the entitled, titled and complacent sons of WASPs.

What this does on the macro level is evident, but consider the micro effects. When I was applying to college, in 1964, a classmate had all the attributes that rejected Asian kid had, but none of the disadvantages: He was not a Jew, not Asian, not Black. A white bread kid who got rejected from Yale. The kids who got in scoffed at him saying, "Well, obviously Yale knew something about him."
And I thought, no, obviously Yale did not know enough about him.
There was this magical thinking that the Ivies, god like from Olympus, passed the ultimate judgment and kids we thought we knew were either far superior to our assessments or far worse.

Such faith in the process of meritocracy.
As it turned out, I snuck into the Ivy League myself and spent 10 years at Brown, Cornell and Yale.
Most of the students (and faculty) I encountered at these ivies were bright enough. Not knock your socks off bright. Not intimidatingly bright. Some were hypercompetitive, cut throats who tried to do well by making you do poorly--the guy who cut out the assigned pages in the library book held for students so those after him could not complete their assignment. There were those rare students who were clearly functioning on a higher plane than everyone else--but they were as rare on those campuses as they were elsewhere.

What I'm saying is those elite institutions, those playgrounds of the gods, those playing fields of Eaton where the next generation of leaders were trained were not peopled with students (or faculty) any more meritorious than elsewhere.

In fact, when you look at where our stars of science, technology, art, literature were pullulated, it was no more likely they would spring from the Ivies than from lesser planets.
Current leading intellectuals are more likely to be like Jill Lepore, who did her undergraduate work Tufts, than to be from Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
Captains of industry, many innovators in science came not from the elites, but from state schools.

Even Gates and Zuckerburg, who were freshmen at Harvard, left after one year, apparently concluding those institutions had nothing more to offer them.
You may say, well, those institutions were smart enough to know talent in those two, but you have to say those two could have gone anywhere, chose Harvard and then rejected it.
For my money, I'd think a better way for the Ivies to pursue the best and the brightest would be to establish a lowish bar based on grades, test scores and then put all the names in a hat an draw lots.

That would be a meritocracy of the gods.