Category Archives: Uncategorized

Dave and the Doctor

04 Thursday Mar 2021

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 18 Comments

Pandering pays!

Just ask Dave Rubin.

What am I talking about?

I am talking about one of the many wannabe-Rush-Limbaughs currently working the right wing ‘satire’ game for all of it’s worth. Rubin describes himself as a ‘classic liberal,’ and apparently holds some left-ish views, but none of them are important enough to prevent him from pandering to right wing extremists on his show, The Rubin Report. As with so many who feign political neutrality, Rubin’s right wing agenda grows ever more obvious.

I saw Dave Rubin at a comedy event hosted by John Fugelsang back during the 2016 campaign. One of the themes of the night was the mainstream news media pandering to Donald Trump by giving him more airplay (and more favorable narratives) than he deserved. It was Dave Rubin who noted, quite reasonably, that the comedians present that night were also giving Trump the limelight, just as others did. It was also Dave that stated quite clearly that his own show got more attention when he referenced Trump than when he didn’t, which is why he, and the comedians present, and the whole of mainstream media kept helping Trump by giving him more airtime than he deserved. I thought Rubin was right on target with those comments. What I didn’t realize at the time was just how prophetic these remarks would prove to be. Like Candace Owens or Diamond and Silk, Dave has discovered that right wing punditry pays more than any comparable options on the left, so he has drifted further and further to the right over the last few years. It’s a move seems to have been good for him.

Pandering pays!

***

What has me thinking about Rubin just now?

The Cat in the hat does.

Well, Dr. Seuss anyway.

Yesterday, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that they would cease publication of 6 titles from Dr. Seuss over concerns about racial stereotypes contained in them. The works are; And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer.  Dr. Seuss Enterprises stated had consulted with a number of experts over concerns about a number of his books, and concluded that these 6 books would be best left unpublished from this point forward. As they put it; “These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

So, naturally the echo-chamber burst out bubbling mad!

Dave Rubin is just one of the many right wing hacks to weigh in on this decision. Apparently, Glenn Beck thinks it’s all fascism, but then again Glenn Beck thinks compassion if the first step to fascism. …which is probably giving Glenn Beck too much credit, because I have yet to see a shred of evidence that Beck thinks at all. …about anything! Dave Rubin? Well, Dave should know better. He really should have.

Still, Rubin came out against the decision.

…because of course he did.

From about the :44 to the 7:20 mark on this episode of The Rubin Report, Dave Rubin weighs in on Dr. Seuss. What fascinates me about this is the way that Rubin talks about the controversy without ever addressing any of the concerns about the books in question. (You may read about the actual concerns here, here, here, and here. A defense of Dr. Seuss from his stepdaughter may be found here.)

Early, in the segment, Dave names each of the 6 books in question, making up a few faux-criticisms (highlighted in red) as he goes. Here is a transcript of the segment from Youtube;

i’ve got all 02:18 six of them for you here 02:19 scary titles each one of them 1937’s 02:23 mulberry street nano getting rid of that 02:25 one 02:26 in 1947 he published mick elgat’s 02:29 pool we’re getting rid of that mick 02:32 elegance pool i suppose that is 02:34 1950s if i ran the zoo you can only 02:37 imagine what racist stuff was happening 02:39 there over at the zoo 02:40 uh 1953 he had scrambled egg 02:43 super where did the eggs come from who 02:46 what how many villages did you have to 02:48 destroy to get those eggs 02:49 this one is fairly obvious why they had 02:51 to get rid of it 02:52 1955’s on beyond zebra 02:56 you can imagine with the black and the 02:57 white with the zebra something something 02:59 wasn’t right 03:00 and of course in 1976 his truly racist 03:04 manifesto 03:05 the cats quizzer these will no longer 03:09 be published by random house children’s 03:12 books 03:13 anymore uh because you know 03:16 tolerance and stuff because we’re 03:18 becoming so evolved 03:20 in 2021 that we’re erasing books of 03:23 1937. 03:24 duh

Just to be clear, not one of the faux arguments Rubin attributes to Dr. Seuss Enterprises comes from Dr. Seuss Enterprises or the people they consulted with. Each is a flippant remark made up by Dave Rubin himself in order to make fun of their decision. To be fair, Rubin doesn’t really suggest that these are real arguments, but also to be fair, he makes no effort whatsoever to address any of the actual concerns anyone has raised about Dr. Seuss. This kind of sarcasm is all you get, leaving the entire segment devoid of any effort to engage the actual substance of the issue in any way.

Rubin moves on to read passages from; “Oh, the Places You Will Go.” He tells us this volume is far worse than the others, because it advances the notion of individual empowerment which the social justice cowd will surely want to censor. Finally, Rubin adds that the book has no page numbers which lefties would love because apparently we hate math. Thus, Rubin alludes to two completely different elements of the culture wats, neither of which has a damned thing to do with the concerns over Dr. Seuss. In both cases, his narrative is gratuitous in the extreme, enabling Rubin to present himself and his fans as proponents of self-reliance, and math, which his political enemies (and those of Dr. Seuss) evidently oppose.

In the end, Dave’s criticism of Dr. Seuss Enterprises fails to address ANY of the actual controversies associated with the Dr. Seuss Books. What he does instead is to present social justice criticisms in caricature while advancing a narrative having nothing to with the decision in question. Of course, the sarcastic tone enables him to do this without actually making making any false claims about Dr. Seuss. So, it’s all sarcasm, right?

Or satire?

This juvenile approach to the subject enables Rubin to bypass the actual issues entirely while generating a narrative flattering to his own audience, and to the politics they support. Add Rubin to the chorus of other right wing hacks howling about this and you have the echo chamber re-enforcing a message that condemns Dr. Seuss Enterprises without ever addressing the actual reasoning behind this decision in any meaningful way. You have a deceitful narrative that invites bigots and bullies to fancy themselves defenders of free thought and free markets, and even math. That sounds a lot better than describing them as people who insist that children’s books promoting racial stereotypes continue to be published, even over the objections of the objections of the man’s own estate.

***

Dave Rubin could have raised questions about the standards used to make this decision. He could have suggested alternatives to discontinuation. He could have addressed inconsistencies such as the fact that “Cat in the Hat” is still in publication despite also being the subject of similar concerns about its content. If Dave Rubin objects to the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, he could have addressed the issues squarely on his show. Instead, he chose to make snide remarks and tell stories he knows his ever more deplorable audience audience will love to hear.

Pandering pays!

Master and Commander Kinda Queered

16 Friday Oct 2020

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 8 Comments

Today, I want to talk about my all-time favorite relationship movie.

No, I’m not talking about Pretty Woman, nor Titanic. (Blech!)

Not Leaving Las Vegas either!

I’m not even talking about that flick about a cabin on a lake or the one where somebody in Portland or thereabouts has a bad case of insomnia. I don’t even care when Harry met Sally, not at all! (Okay, maybe a little in that case.)

No.

I like Master and Commander.

Yes, that’s right.

My favorite relationship movie is a war movie.

Don’t get me wrong. This film has everything you would want in a war movie. The battle scenes in Master and Commander are intense as Hell! During the very first engagement I was seriously afraid I would get hit by grape shot, or that some debris from the ship would come flying out of the screen and leave me with a terrible scar. I could even imagine telling the story later. If I survived! Anyway, the point is that this movie doesn’t scrimp on the battle scenes. Master and Commander definitely makes a good war movie.

It also makes for an excellent relationship movie.

The central story line of the film is a quest to sink or capture a French privateer that was playing havoc with British commerce during the Napoleanic Wars. So the main question in this film is whether or not Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal British Navy (played by Russell Crowe) will succeed in finding and defeating this offending French commerce raider, the Acheron. To say that the Acheron will prove a challenge is putting it mildly. The vessel has superior a design and its Captain clearly knows what he is doing. Aubry’s own ship, the Surprise, is badly damaged in their first engagement and his own officers quickly come to the conclusion that they should abandon the chase and limp back to England.

Aubrey of course will have none of it!

Aubrey makes plans for repairing the ship of the coast of South America and giving chase to the vessell that clearly outclasses them just as soon as he possibly can. And of course Aubrey is the Captain, so he can do that.

The rest will have to do as he says.

While hunting the Acheron, Aubrey falls into conflict with his close friend, the ships doctor, Stephen Maturin (played by Paul Bethany). Maturin thinks Aubrey’s pursuit of the Achoron is reckless, and says so. (Big mistake!) When they end up on the Galapagos Islands, Maturin has an opportunity to learn a thing or two and possibly advance the science of biology. The film hints at the possibility that Maturin might have, with sufficient time and support, played a role in history comparable to that of Darwin, but of course the Ancheron calls and Aubrey if of course eager to answer. So, the two end up losing their trust in each other even as they find themselves at odds over their best course of action. Maturin really wants to stay and study and Aurbey really wants to go and find the ship that’s probably going to kill them all when he does.

This conflict between Aubrey and Maturin over their respective priorities threatens to break their friendship apart just as Aubrey’s own priorities threaten to tear the ship apart in the pursuit of a vessel clearly out of their own league. So, there we have it! A nice tight little story about a relationship sitting smack dab in the middle of a story about fighting a war and defeating the big bad evil guy in battle.

This relationship between Aubrey and Maturin follows much the same course as your average romance story. The man in this relationship is clearly Aubrey as he places the pursuit of war at the top of his priorities which of course makes him a manly man at his manliest. (Stereotypes happen!) Maturin’s own interest in the study of bugs, and birds, and what not clearly feminizes him in relationship to his more belligerent friend. (Next to a poet or a literary scholar, maybe Maturin would prove the man in the relationship, but next to Captain Jack Aubrey, Maturin clearly occupies the role of a woman. The question of whether to stay on the Galapagos and study the wildlife or go out in search of a battle they are likely to lose threatens to tear this happy couple apart. It provides the obstacle to their relationship which is of course a staple in such stories.

So, can our lovely couple overcome that obstacle and regain the bliss they once found in each other’s company, or will go their separate ways once and for all in the end?

All of this of course assumes our star-crossed lovers survive the war in the first place, because that pesky war-movie intrudes upon the love-story whenever it wishes, as one might expect of a war movie forced to share the screen with a softer narrative like this. The larger plot here can be such a bully!

This of course bothers Maturin more than it does Aubrey.

***

Okay, so tongue-in-cheek humor aside, this isn’t really some homo-erotic love story. Far from it! My point is simply that the story line actually does make use of some of the same mechanics we are used to seeing in relationship movies. It even evokes much of the gender-based stereotypes that guide so many relationship movies, not because there is anythig about the film which deliberately plays to these stereotypes, but because patterns of significance have a way of intruding even where they are not wanted. Once you see it in this film, the sense that you are really watching a romance is hard to avoid. We end up with two serious questions in this film, one about whether or not these two will somehow repair the damage to their friendship and one about whether they will win the battle. What makes it a great film is just how well these two questions are bundled up together in the overall story.

***

WARNING: Half-spoiled spoilers ahead!

***

The actual resolution of the conflict works just fine for me, at least when the question is do I enjoy the story. It also leaves me wondering about the ultimate significance of the story line. Once you see the gendered themes in the film, it’s tough not to read the relationship in those terms, not because anybody is playing their role with a limp wrist, but because warfare is typically thought of as a manly pursuit, and because the doctor’s priorities align more closely with what would be those of the woman in just about most any other relationship movie. Of course the decisions each will make are set in the background of a story line rendering each of their actions quite plausible, and the ultimate resolution of the conflict certainly makes sense on that level. But this leaves me with a lingering fear over what priorities we are to take away from the film itself. Which, in the end, really does matter more?

Science or warfare?

Perhaps without intending to, I cant help thinking this film answers that question. It does so by answering another question, one about how out lovely couple resolves their own conflicts?

Who gives up more for the relationship?

A Happy Memory

28 Saturday Sep 2019

Posted by in Gaming, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Andy at Majestic Mold Making

Andy at Majestic Mold Making

The campaign itself was beyond epic. Twenty-plus years of First Edition AD&D, all played in the same imagined world involving mostly the same group of players had left us with quite a cast of recurrent characters. By now, each of us had some that were old enough to get a driver’s license. My old high school friend, Andy, and I each had characters old enough to buy beer …legally. It was a rich world we had built up over the years. Somewhere in there, we had the idea to round up our biggest and best bad-ass characters and run the campaign to end all campaigns with them.

Each of us chose a bunch of our favorites to add into the small army we would be using and we decided to alternate the job of running the game. Each game would essentially be a one-off which we would loosely fold into a larger plot ending with some scale of bad-assery we had never gamed before.

The whole thing fizzled of course, as campaigns often do, but not before furnishing us with a few great sessions.

***

Andy ran this particular session. He set up the scenario as we put together out a take-out order and someone set up the stereo with a couple choice CDs. We began placing our characters in the setting and getting ready for the challenge. Straight to initiative! Andy wasn’t messing around, but just before we began the hack & slash, he announced an odd twist. There would be a single modifier of -5 to +5 on all die rolls that would apply to each of the characters belonging to one player for an indefinite time during the course of the game. Andy would assign the modifier whenever it proved appropriate appropriate. We received no explanation, and that was that.

Okay, sounds like fun!

I think Mike got the first modifier. It was a small bonus of +2 or +3, and it helped him a bit with whatever challenge we had for the day. Soon, the modifier changed and I received a -1. Then my penalty was upped to -3 or so. Later Mike got a penalty, and then I got a bonus of +3, followed by a penalty of -5. (That hurt!)

…and we had no idea where this was coming from.

Generally speaking, Mike was doing better than me. He got mostly benefits. Chuck had few modifiers (mostly small penalties), and this modifier never seemed to apply to Andy’s characters at all. I think we once went an hour or so with no modifier to anyone. I was the only player in the entire game to receive the maximum penalty.

The timing wasn’t consistent. It changed at close to an hour, but not quite, and not always at the same time interval anyway. It fell almost in between rounds, but not quite. On an exceptionally long round (we had lots of characters on the table), it might change half way through, but at least once it had lasted 2 rounds, and we even checked. Andy insisted that it wasn’t time to change the modifier.

We thought about actions taken by different players. Was it a response to certain specific spells? Success or failure in attacks? Something to do with alignment? Could it be the enemy? Was there some object on the table that made the difference? Perhaps movement of characters into different parts of the game surface? There were moments when we thought we might have seen a pattern, but then something always happened to debunk our thoughts on the subject. We played the entire game without figuring it out, and it was a very long game, long enough to get a call from another friend’s wife wondering when he was coming home. Not till it’s over (of course!), but we never did figure out the basis for the modifier. The whole challenge ended without resolving that one troublesome question.

I remember this had been a particularly satisfying game. We were still laughing and smiling as we packed. Andy had run a great scenario, enough that we actually said so. Compliments were a rarity in this crowd (except for the back-handed kind of course). Oh there was the occasional ‘fuck you!’ or ‘asshole!’ delivered right after someone did something exceptionally well. That was what usually counted as praise in our circle. But ‘good game’ and ‘I enjoyed this’ were not phrases that rolled often off of our tongues. Still, Andy got a couple of those remarks at the end of the session.

And then we asked.

“The modifier? What was it?”

“Oh, it was based on the music. I gave bonuses if I liked the disc you put on and penalties if I didn’t.”

(The hour with no modifier to anyone had been the one time Andy put on a disk himself. It was The Reverend Horton Heat, as I recall, that earned me the full penalty of -5.)

I don’t think I ever stopped laughing about that.

***

Andy Sneed introduced me to RPGs way back in our freshman year of high school. He asked me if I’d ever payed Tunnels and Trolls before, and after hearing me say ‘no’, Andy promptly informed me that I was playing the game with him and his brother that coming Saturday. ‘Who the Hell is this guy’ I wondered? But I agreed to come try it. To say that I was hooked from the first game session would be putting it mildly. It was the beginning of a lifelong interest and a long-standing friendship.

Andy and I lost touch with each other in recent years, but I had always hoped we would one day end up back in the same room, tossing playful insults back and forth at each other and fighting over what music we’d listen to as we slew another dragon.

…probably in some old folk’s home!

Sadly, no.

Andy’s funeral was yesterday. His passing has me thinking of this story and countless others like it. I will miss my friend.

Rest in Peace, Andy.

R.I.P. Fido

20 Monday May 2019

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 12 Comments

027.JPGThis is Fido (front) and Junkmail (back). They are of course brother and sister and they’ve been together their whole lives. Some cats don’t really seem to care about their siblings, but these two really do.

When they were younger, Fido used to get out of the house a lot. If I left the door open for just a moment, or even a window, Fido would be out in no time. That cat would tear the screens off my windows if he had to. I even got cat proof screens so we could enjoy a breeze without an escape attempt, but Fido just tore the screens out of the frames, at least until I nailed them all in place. Then he found a way out through a hole behind the washing machine, and another in a closet. Fido was always good at getting out of the house.

Really good,

What did Fido do when he got out? Well, sometimes he liked to climb a tree right beside the house, or another one right in front of the house. He’d get up as far as he could and then start crying. Usually he’d come down after awhile. Once or twice I had to come get him. Other times he’d sneak about the neighborhood as I walked around looking for him. Many times, I turned around to see him shooting across the street behind me. I could practically hear him laughing as he did so.

Asshole!

Sometimes Fido would let me catch him. Other times, he’d let me keep trying until I gave up. After an hour or so, I’d find him outside the door waiting for me to let him back in.

The thing is, it was usually Junkie who told me when Fido was out of the house. She did so by mugging me beyond all tolerance, demanding attention, and getting in my face until I ran out of affection and then ran out of patience. More than once, I mumbled at Junkmail; “what the Hell is wrong with you cat!?!”

Then “…oh!”

Junkie always loved Fido.

Today, Fido got out one last time, so to speak. Junkie is mugging me of course, but her brother won’t be coming back, and I think we both know it. Fido has had a rough time lately, and I reckon he has at last found some peace. He was with me for 17 years, I think, and his time in my life was a great treasure. I’m not sure if I was the best mother a cat could have, but Fido was sure as hell the best of cats an adoptive mother could ask for (along with Junkmail and Auto-Kitty of course).

Fido hasn’t been gone long, but I already miss him terribly, as does Junkie.

So long Fido!

I love you.

When Good Gods Go Bad

12 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in atheism, Religion, Uncategorized

≈ 13 Comments

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Chick Tracts

The God of Chick Tracts always struck me as something of an asshole.

It’s a common assumption in religious polemics at least, that you can’t really hate someone you don’t believe in. You see this assumption appearing arguments for and against belief in God. Christian apologists often claim that atheists hate God, and that this hatred is proof positive we really know he exists after all. Atheism is little other than rebellion against God, at least according to this view. For our own part, atheists often respond to the accusation that we hate God by pointing out that we actually don’t believe in him. We can’t possible hate God, so the argument runs. We don’t even believe in him. Each of these arguments seem to rest on the assumption that to hate God implies that one must believe in him. At least we we have that in common I suppose, believers and unbelievers. We agree that it doesn’t make sense to hate a being you don’t really believe in.

Except I don’t agree with that either.

To those who insist on this assumption, I have two questions:

Do you watch Game of Thrones?

How do you feel about Joffrey?

Admittedly, this gambit loses a little force when the answer to the first question is ‘no’. Still, t think those familiar with the HBO series or the books it’s based upon will get the point pretty quickly. This hateful little brat prince is hardly unique in fiction. Felix Unger and Frank Burns used to get pretty deep under my skin. I didn’t believe in them either. I certainly don’t believe in Lucy from Peanuts, but when she pulls the football out from under Charlie it makes just wanna reach right into the screen and throttle the little two dimensional mini-troll. Can’t stand the Police Chief in most detective shows or the principle in countless school settings. The list of fictional villains, nitwits, jerks, and outright assholes goes on and on. None of these characters are real. But yeah, I hate them!

(Here, I can practically hear my mother saying; “no, you dislike them intently,” but no, I hate them.)

I really don’t think my feelings about these characters are all that unusual. Joffrey, at least, seems to have inspired quite a few haters out there. Hell, I reckon that’s something else believers and unbelievers can generally agree on. The little bastard was awful. Got off with an easy death!

Anyway, the point is that you can have a strong emotional reaction to a being you know very well isn’t real. People ought to keep that in mind when they opt to battle it out over the existence of God.

I should add that this point can flow in both directions or even (I suppose) at a tangent to the usual stakes. I can love Jesus when he’s preaching tolerance and compassion just as I can be outraged at a God who would tell Abraham to kill his own son. The inconsistently might bother me if I actually believed either story to be true. As it stands  these are just emotional reactions to a being I don’t really think is real, as described by different narrators with different messages at different times in history. Maybe if I expected a degree of literal truth from these stories, I would feel the need to work out my feelings about the big Guy In the Sky, but I don’t. I can accept that stories about this being will trigger different feelings at different times, and no reaction at all in many instances. Consistency might be a desirable property of arguments and theories, but it a square peg to pound in the round hole of emotions.

What makes the difference between a vision of God that inspires me and one that pisses me off may be an interesting question, but the answer to that question is, for me anyway, essentially a function of story-telling.

I suppose a Christian too could acknowledge some role for the story-tellers in his feelings about God in different parts if scripture. There is a certain flat-footed evangelism that runs contrary to such an approach, but not every believer checks their sense at the church door. I’ve known quite a few who could handle such questions with subtlety and care.

I realize this may not be the most serious theme in debates over the existence of God, but it certainly does seem ubiquitous. I think to some degree this is a reflection of the debate-camp subculture that has developed around people interested in haggling out the issue. I’ve certainly engaged in my share of such matters, but one does not live by polemics alone, and not everything that people think or feel about the topic in question comes prefigured for purposes of argumentation. We can argue the rational merits of any given position, but nobody should really be surprised to find that participants in these arguments also have an emotional reaction to the topic.

We’re allowed to be human.

So are they.

***

I know I’ve made this argument before. I just wanted to take another crack at it.

Black k Klansman

05 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Justice, Movies, Politics, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

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BlacKkKlansman.pngThere are moments (mostly the innocent ones) in Black Klansman where the movie seems to be telling us something about the 70s. There are other moments (as in references to “America First” or allusions to the Trump administration) when the movie is clearly telling us something about today. Most of the time, however, the movie seems to be telling us about both at the same time. What’s missing from this movie is the period in between, a good three or four decades, depending on how you count them, when many of us might have thought race relations were getting better. Perhaps that thought was never more than naiveté, a mere fantasy, but if so the fantasy was certainly a part of the world erased in this film. I’d like to think Spike Lee is wrong to erase those years in this film, but he isn’t.

That erasure, it seems, is precisely the point.

The hope of those intervening years between the end of segregation in America and the present rise of white nationaism is in fact well well represented in Black Klansman. It’s repreented by Ron Stalworth (played by John David Washington), the central character in Black Klansman, a story inspired by events in the career of a real life police officer. We meet Stalworth as he becomes the first black officer on the Colorado Springs police force. It’s a step forward, some might have said back in the day. “Selling out” might be how others would have put it. Stalworth lives in the tension between these two ways of looking at his career, one which envisions police authority as consistent, at least in theory with the possibility or racial justice, and one which sees it as an explicit tool of white supremacy. For his own part, Stalworth is clearly trying to make the former outlook work, but he’s torn from all sides, both by racism within the police force and by those who see police as an essentially racist institution.

To hear him talk, Stalworth could pass for white, which probably says as much about those in the movie (and those of us watching it) who think he sounds white as it does about the man himself. Whatever the reason, this feature of Stalworth’s character has an obvious utility; it will enable him to pass, at least on the phone. Stalworth is also willing to cut his fro if the Police Chief wants him to, but no, that’s not necessary, The Chief likes it. At the same time, Stalworth fights a never ending battle against the casual racism of his fellow officers. What to do about the overt bigots whose racism is far from casual, he isn’t sure, at least not at the outset of the film. Stalworth is picking his battles. Fair enough! But is the trade-off equitable? One gets the impression no-one is quite happy with the arrangement, least of all Stalworth himself.

It’s this awkward effort to find an acceptable accommodation between social justice and institutions which have historically enforced racism that makes Stalworth a great symbol for the intervening years between the seventies and the modern era. He is a back man trying to make America work. for his own people along with the rest of us. Some might consider that a fools errand, but Stalworth lived in an era when it seemed almost possible.

The Police Chief takes Stalworth’s discomfort up a notch by asking him to go undercover to attend a speech by Stokely Carmichael so he can keep track of the radical students who sponsored the event. There Carmichael is known by his new name of Kwame Ture. Ture speaks of police abuse, even the murder of African-Americans. He also urges his audience to prepare for violent revolution. Stalworth is surprised to find that he likes Ture’s speech, and the fact that he likes the speech is a big problem. It’s a problem because Stalwort is there to spy on the man and the black radicals listening to him. From the snadpoint of the police department, he’s not supposed to like the speech at all. From the standpoint of the student radicals, he isn’t supposed to be there at all, at least not for the reasons he has come.

…and certainly not wearing a mic.

It doesn’t help matters that Stalworth knows people in his own police department guilty of the very racism Ture was talking about. It also doesn’t help that he is falling rapidly in love with Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), President of the Black Student Union. She is arguably the main subject of his investigation, and she herself certainly would not approve of his undercover work. It REALLY doesn’t help that she was pulled over by racist police officers after the speech and sexually assaulted during the stop, confirming everything Ture said in his speech while underscoring Stalworth’s inability to do anything about it.

So, how is he going to explain Ture’s promotion of revolution to the Police Chief? How will he explain his role in the police department to the love interest who sees police as the enemy? It’s a problem.

All of this comes before Stalworth’s infiltration into the Ku Klux Klan.

If there is any ray of hope to found in these initial scenes, it comes in the form of a night spent dancing in the wake of Ture’s presentation. Whatever Ture’s rhetoric, the radicals who brought him were content to spend the evening peacefully enjoying themselves on the dance floor. This gives Stalworth an angle, so to speak. He decides that these radicals are just talking about the violent revolution. They aren’t actually planning to kill anybody. It’s not the easiest message to sell. The Police Chief doesn’t buy it any more than Patrice and her companions buy the notion that police are meant to serve the community.

If there is a way to make police-work consistent with racial justice, Stalworth hasn’t found it when the larger plot kicks off, when Stalworth stumbles upon the opportunity to open up an investigation into the Klan with the help of Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver). If the black radicals he’d been investigating at the start of this film weren’t really violent, the Klansman certainly were, at least enough of them to pose a threat. Of course this investigation is the real focus on the film. It’s also where the film departs most from the actual events of the real events in question. The real investigation led to the transfer of Klansmen within the military away from sensitive security positions; the movie investigation leads to a real crime.

What interests me about the story most is the larger racial politics of the film itself, and of the society it comments upon. One gets the impression Stalworth isn’t in the most tenable position to begin with. He knows very well the laws he is charged with enforcing hurt his own people, and he also knows anyone seeking to change that poses a real threat to the institutions he represents. Stalworth is caught in the middle of many forces he cannot controle; he has set himself up for a life-time of pushing back in all directions. The main plot seems almost to rescue him from the ambivalence of his position at the outset of the film.

…which brings us back to the political history of the film. Its final moments aren’t about the tricky life Stalworth has set up for himself so much as the rise of violent white nationalism with the advent of the Trump administration. Here Spike Lee drops the fictional story-line entirely and shows us real footage of  real white nationalists at work today. It’s a fitting shift, of course. Like the Klan in this story, Trump’s America has fallen on the nation like a great big old boot stomp on the many conflicts that used to plague our politics, conflicts that now seem subtle by comparison. Like the Klansmen in this film, the present administration and its supporters aren’t really all that interested in figuring out the details of social justice; they are happy to promote a clear and obvious vision of white supremacy. If the crime Stalworth thwarts in this move is fictional, the threats posed by a political regime wedded to the likes of the Klan is real. If justice eludes us, the present regime certainly ought to inject a degree of clarity into political questions of our own day.

If it isn’t entirely clear how we should handle racism in police practice, the sort of problem Stalworth is dealing with at the beginning of this film, it ought to be very clear that the present President couldn’t care less. Neither could those who support him. If it isn’t entirely clear how the rest of us should live together, it ought to be very clear that a good number of Americans no longer mean to do so at all, and that they have help at the highest levels, help they are using to undermine every means at our disposal for forking out any equitable solutions to the nations problems. The nation as a whole seems ripped away, like Stalworth, from the tricky problems about racial justice. What we have now is a problem much like that he faced in this film; how to stop those consciously working to ensure no such answers will ever be found.