Posted on 01/06/2015 9:41:34 AM PST by Brad from Tennessee
Before I came to dislike the movie “Selma,” I was deeply moved by it. Twice it brought me to tears. A crane shot of Martin Luther King Jr. leading thousands of demonstrators over the Edmund Pettus Bridge was one such moment, and so was the vicious attack on John Lewis — bravely, steadfastly walking into the beating he knew was coming. Today, Lewis is a member of Congress. Forever, he’ll be an American hero.
Too bad, though, that the movie had to go Hollywood on Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, as if from the grave, has bellowed his protest. In its need for some dramatic tension, “Selma” asserts that King had to persuade and pressure a recalcitrant Johnson to introduce the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The movie also depicts Johnson authorizing FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to smear King and — as King himself suspected — try to drive him to suicide. It is a profoundly ugly moment.
But a bevy of historians say it never happened. It was Robert F. Kennedy, the former attorney general, who authorized the FBI’s bugging of King’s hotel rooms. Yet, for understandable reasons, Kennedy appears nowhere in the film. By 1965, he was no longer the AG and, anyway, he remains a liberal icon. But LBJ — Southern, obscene and, especially when compared to the lithe Kennedy, gross of speech and physique — was made the heavy. He should get a posthumous SAG card. . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
You still haven’t answered my question. Lets say you were black, and lived in Selma, or anywhere else in the deep south in the 60’s. And you’re not allowed to vote. Can’t even register to vote. You’d do nothing? Shrug your shoulders and go home?
No, I’m not being sarcastic at all. I see nothing wrong with having a peaceful march across a bridge. Those people couldn’t foresee what was going to happen in 50 years. They were just trying to get the boot off of their neck.
I also believe that is their intent.
Agree. Carter made me ashamed and humiliated to be an American. He simply could not have been a bigger P***y.
That 'peaceful march' led to Trayvon and all his nasty little buddies. Unintended consequences suck.
It is one thing to act out the Elizabethan [Tudor] fiction of history on a stage, knowing quite well it is a fiction. It is something else altogether to claim it is historically valid. Under your position, the Ricardians have no brief against Shakespeare, since he was writing drama, not history. This is nonsense. He was writing both. He was a propagandist for the Tudor dynasty.
So, too, was Thomas More. Are More's blatant historical falsifications more egregious than Shakespeare's because he was a scholar and Shakespeare a dramatist? I do not think so. For hundreds of years people who knew little or nothing of the dynastic wars and silly Tudor claims to legitimacy took Shakespeare's version of Henry VII's ascendancy as gospel. Many of them had no idea who More even was. Shakespeare's impact on the deliberate falsification of history was orders of magnitude greater than More's.
Yet you, for altogether mysterious reasons, give the artist a pass.
No.
Conservatives cannot "stand athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'" if history has been destroyed in its correct understanding by the popular culture.
The Crucible is pure propaganda, and propaganda can never be art. We cannot ignore that Miller was a socialist and advanced socialist themes anymore than we can ignore that to the extent that Shakespeare was advancing Tudor propaganda, the a[nti]historical parts of his plays were not art. Unlike Miller, Shakespeare was a great dramatist. Unlike Miller, Shakespeare's plays were primarily about entertainment and not politics, and his great plays were not his "historical" plays.
A part of you should rebel at the depiction of untruth as truth. And yes, a part of you should be noting the parts of Anna Bolena which are fabrications, and be asking why.
The Selma filmmakers are interested in presenting a number of aspects of recent contemporary history which are untrue. True artists do not accept untruth as truth, and do not portray it as verisimilitude.
And true conservatives do not excuse liars in the name of "art."
In terms of his impact on the country, I don't believe there is anyone who is even a close second to Roosevelt. Carter was a nonentity, with a very small effect on American values, understanding of government, or life. If anything, he clarified [for the better] America's understanding of those things by contrast with what he stood for.
And actually, I think Nixon pushes Truman off the bottom of that list. Thanks to him we got the EPA, OSHA, Ford, Carter, Soviet appeasement, wage and price controls, ..., to say nothing of a general discrediting of conservative ideas for nearly a decade, even though Nixon himself was not one.
I’m not claiming this film is *any* sort of history. Adherence to history is not an important aesthetic criterion. The artistry of Shakespeare’s plays has absolutely nothing to do with how closely they adhered to actual history. Nothing at all.
Once again, the distinction that you’re drawing on between fiction and history did not exist in the Greco-Roman world. It did not exist in the Medieval or Renascence world. The Romantics wrote sweeping historical novels with no account for what *really* happened. People who want to know what really happened should look into it with the tools of a historian. Not look for it in another medium. I’m not rebelling because I do not see a scripted dramatic film as ‘truth’ in the historical sense so I do not regard the lack of it as any sort of lie. The information about this period is plentiful and perfectly available for those who wish to explore. I haven’t even seen this film and probably won’t. It’s the principle that’s at play here. Fiction never lies. Even historical fiction.
By your logic, freeing the slaves led to Trayvon and his ilk.
Going to dodge the question again? NorthMountain is a black man in Selma in 1965. You’re prohibited from voting. What do you do?
You have your opinion; you may keep it. It is nonsense.
No, he's not, so it's a stupid question.
NorthMountain is an American, who has lived in several of these United States, and participated in more than "protest march", for causes any member of this forum would champion.
Like it or not (and you seem to have trouble understanding this), the so-called "civil rights" movement which exploded in the 1960s had its roots in black racist socialist agitation in the very early XX Century. It directly led to the welfare state, the formation of a persistent parasite class, and the violent antics of St. Trayvon, Pants-Up-Don't-Loot Brown, and the current attempts by black racist socialists to ignite a race war.
I agree. Our adolescent son went with us to see the semi-fictional biography of the 17th century Dutch painter Vermeer, Girl with the Pearl Earring, only to be grossed out by a scene in which the young girl who worked for the Vermeers and was the model for the painting was depicted as lifting her skirts and having sex in the alley with her boyfriend. I highly doubt that in the strict middle-class Dutch Reformed environment of the day that a young woman with no other means of support than Vermeer's Roman Catholic family would take such a risk to her reputation and survival. Nor was Vermeer likely to have risked a scandal by having a wild girl in his employ, in that he was barely able to support his wife and 11 living children, having buried four other infants. In actual life, the young girl in Vermeer's painting was most probably his daughter, not a serving girl. The scene was gratuitous, based on nothing of record, and meant to shock.
Carter was the indirect causation of the deaths of 1 million people. (Iran/Iraq war, which would never have happened but for Jimmy Carter.)
He opened the door for Nuclear Iran. Carter may eventually be responsible for the deaths of many more millions of people because of the bumbling he did between 1976 and 1980.
You are right, it is often difficult to classify them in accordance with ranking as to importance. Also causality is not always easy to follow either. For example. Would you think Harry Truman ought to be on the list of worst?
I have long had a theory that Democrat Presidents ALWAYS screw up the world in such a way as to be horrible disasters in the long run. I had one glaring hole in this theory; Harry Truman. For the longest time I couldn't think of anything he did that ended up being a horrible disaster for Mankind until I ran across this one piece of information.
After World War II, The Chinese Nationalists were battling with the Chinese Communists for control of the nation. The Chinese Nationalists Led by Chiang Kai-shek Had the upper hand at the time but Mao had gone on his "Long March" through the backwaters of China. Chiang asked Truman for surplus allied transport aircraft so he could fly his forces to these remote parts of China and continue fighting Mao. He felt that he could wipe him out if he could only get his forces to a point where they could intercept Mao before his army gained strength.
Truman said "no". On that one decision may have hinged the entire future of China and the lives of 80 million people who might not otherwise have died by the hands of Chinese communists.
Truman. Said. "No." "No" to the use of planes which we no longer needed and weren't going to use and which ended up mostly on scrap heaps.
If you are looking for a momentously bad decision by Truman, one with a huge body count and far ranging negative consequences for the entire world, that one was it.
And actually, I think Nixon pushes Truman off the bottom of that list. Thanks to him we got the EPA, OSHA, Ford, Carter, Soviet appeasement, wage and price controls, ..., to say nothing of a general discrediting of conservative ideas for nearly a decade, even though Nixon himself was not one.
LBJ started the fire which I think is going to kill us. "Entitlements" are what is sucking us dry financially right now, but worse still, "Entitlements" have been what has been powering the Democrat vote machine for the last fifty years, and all subsequently enacted Democrat policies were the result of the fact that these people got elected rather than their opponents who presumably would not have done such things.
LBJ created that vote machine.
Then you are stuck in the past, when cultured people educated to understand the finer points of entertainments that only they could afford, such as stage plays or print literature. Today, with media saturation reaching down to the consumers of the lowest forms of social and historical ignorance, deliberate distortions of history or fact trotted out in the media serve as political propaganda and violence porn. They yell "fire!" in the proverbial crowded theater.
You seem incapable of answering a question. Lets assume you didn’t have the right to vote. Would you just accept it? Or fight back? You see, that random black guy in Selma in 1965? He was an American too. As much as you hate to admit it.
The Black community has totally squandered the benefits given to them by those who protested in the 60’s. That is not the fault of some poor schmo who decided to walk across a bridge in 1965.
But, I know. Everything would have better off if they had just stayed in their place, right?
Yes so the focus of concern should be with educating the ignorant people you described. Attacking dramas or novels for various inaccuracies is actually pandering to those people - playing off of their assumption that what they see in a given ‘entertainment’ should have an expectation of historical truth. I used to know a girl who went to see 1999’s ‘The Mummy’, a piece of escapist CGI-addled junk with Brendan Fraser, because she was interested in ‘Egyptology’. The fault there was with her for a ridiculous expectation not with the filmmakers for making a piece of CGI-addled junk that bore no relation to actual Egyptology.
You misunderstand. I refuse to play your stupid games. That is all.
As much as you hate to admit it.
Hmmm ... that's what we call bearing false witness. As in you bearing false witness against me. Don't do it. It's not nice, and makes you look bad. I say this in order to help you. You're welcome.
The Black community has totally squandered the benefits given to them by those who protested in the 60’s.
The so-called benefits "given" to the so-called "black community" (a thoroughly racist concept) were designed, by black and white socialists, to create the persistent parasite class of which St. Trayvon the Deceased was an exemplar. The marches and riots of the 1960s served primarily to promote the idea that social progress was to be achieved only by demanding goodies from the government, and that the way to get such goodies was to threaten or commit violence. That is the legacy of the 1960s and the so-called 'civil rights movement'. It is entirely poisoned.
That some people in the 1950s and 1960s had legitimate grievances is almost irrelevant. The end does not justify the means. Asking for Danegeld, and threatening violence if one does not get it is an evil act. That the one(s) asking for it may have legitimate grievances does not mitigate the evil.
It all seems to have spun out of control for the younger half (or so) of the population, perhaps globally.
How the heck did I miss that?
Do you actually believe in the existence of "spontaneous demonstrations"?
Plantation owners were businessmen, in business to make money. When a grown male cost upwards of $2,000 in the money of those days, which would be many thousands more than that today, an owner would no more beat a man to injury than he would a prized racehorse. Be realistic. The harsher the conditions, the more likely he would have a slave rebellion and would be asking for his own murder or the rape of his wife and children on his own remote property.
In whatever conditions they find themselves, human beings normalize, and money and value have a great deal to do with normalcy. A trained worker with good output was just as expensive to replace then as he or she is today. Most plantations contained highly skilled workers who were valued for their tradesmanship in producing nails, lumber, wire, bricks, carpentry, all aspects of food production and preservation, horticulture, clothing manufacture, soap and candlemaking, wagon and wheelwrighting, boatbuilding, animal care, first aid and nursing care and all manner of trusted errands. Troublesome workers would be sold off. Cooperative workers were however grudgingly respected, and retained by reasonably good treatment, by the family they worked for.
Still not answering the question I see.
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