Author Archives: James Fillmore

About James Fillmore

I am a spy for MI-6 who recklessly sleeps with innumerable gorgeous partners, drinks like a madman, ruins expensive company equipment, and I get away with all of this because I save the world on a consistent basis. As my cover, I am a poor person living in Minnesota.

The X-Files And Conspiracy Irresponsibility

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The X-FilesThe sci-fi geeks among you are probably aware that The X-Files returned recently, for a limited-miniseries run on Fox. I loathe the current sequel trend, but not on general principle. It’s because the sequels tend to be enormously lazy cash grabs. It’s perfectly fine to redo or add to existing material, if you have something worth adding. (The first few seasons of Sherlock are true to the original in spirit, and well-liked by Holmes nerds even though the stories differ wildly from Doyle’s originals.)

Like many people, I enjoyed The X-Files when it first aired in 1993. Its leads, as FBI agents investigating UFOs, Bigfoot, and such, played their encounters with monsters so dryly they seemed more like accountants than law enforcement. Or: DMV meets Dracula. While the show’s hints of an overarching, the sinister plot to cover up “The Truth” about UFOs was fun, suggesting that kooks everywhere were right all along. Although this had been stolen from, and done better in, Close Encounters, it was enjoyable transposed into scary-show format.

X-Files Loses Its Spark

Also like many people, I drifted away as the Sinister Plot became more labyrinthine. It lost its air of spooky silliness and drifted into a tedious mix of pretension and sloppiness. The show’s creator, Chris Carter, seemed not to realize he was pulling together bits from earlier popular successes (Twilight Zone, Close Encounters) and believed viewers tuned in for his “vision.”

“If the conspiracy is really as powerful as Mulder thinks it is, only collective action can change it. Only some version of democracy can stand up against it.” —James Surowiecki

The Sinister Plot got away from poking (not entirely harmless) fun at UFO and Bigfoot conspiracy buffs (at times, the show’s depiction of such could be downright mean-spirited). And it moved into much more irresponsible territory. In addition to covering up Roswell, and lying about abductions, the Bad Guys also assassinated JFK. And Dr King. Seriously. That’s really reprehensible.

(The episode where this is revealed mentions actual historical facts about Hoover’s attempts to smear King, and how hard-right elements considered him a communist threat. Maybe in Carter’s mind this information justified working such a tragedy into his monster serial. If so, Carter’s mind is unhinged.)

Giving X-Files Another Try

But, I have high admiration for Gillian Anderson as a performer, and some nostalgia over seeing her recreate the role which started her fine career. Plus, I like miniseries. American TV shows tend to have seasons which are way too long (cable has begun figuring this out.) So, I thought I’d give it a try.

Oh, boy.

Our FBI agents and now retired from the UFO biz. They had a kid who’d been genetically altered with alien DNA, whom they had to give up and never see again for the kid’s own safety or something. They are contacted by a Glenn Beck type, who wants their input on a big story he’s planning to break. They’re hesitant, being good liberals, but the Beck fellow knows his UFO lore, so maybe he’s not entirely an opportunistic TV liar.

Turns out Beck has an honest-to-God alien spaceship (or working copy, anyway), stashed in a hangar. Why? Oh, herein lies a tale. Brace yourselves. This is Scientology, Story of Xenu-worthy stuff.

When we started exploding A-bombs, it attracted the notice of space aliens, who came to save us from destroying ourselves. But the Big Mean Earth Bad Guys kept shooting down alien ships and learning from their technology. They built replicas of those ships to abduct people and perform genetic experiments involving, again, alien DNA. Also, stories of alien abduction helped distract the public from these Mean Bad Guys’ master scheme, which involves environmental devastation, obesity, consumerism run amok, sparking wars, and blowing up skyscrapers. This is all to justify the buildup of a surveillance/police state which will finally be unleashed after the next manufactured catastrophe to take over the world. Starting with America. Bwahahaha!

Where to start with this? Wouldn’t any aliens who mastered FTL travel to stop us from using atomic warfare realize we were pretty violent primates and, I dunno, keep their ships from being shot down? But the illogic isn’t worth going into.

The Same Old Thing — But Newer

What I do find bizarre is how this equates both right-wing fantasies (the Beck type moans about gun confiscation), left-wing reality talking points (global warming, the military/industrial/security complex), and conspiracy stuff (JFK again, UFOs, the World Trade Center), mashing them into a giant pile of equal Woes Upon Ours.

And I guarantee you, as usual, our FBI heroes will never be able to solve. One more layer upon one more layer to uncover… The Beck character is shut down. The Great Truth can never be revealed. “They” won’t allow it.

What the hell does Chris Carter think he’s doing with The X-Files? Making some profound statement about our troubled times? I suspect he’s a reasonably left-leaning guy with a very large bank account from his overpaid cinematic work, who thinks he’s providing “fun entertainment” with “a little meaning to it.” I suspect this because this is what Hollywood types with slightly leftist sympathies who enjoy their comfortable lifestyles very often say they think. You know, the new Star Wars has an anti-Mean War message! In there somewhere. Amidst all the explosions.

Collective Action and Conspiracy

As to the annoying persistence in our culture of how people with marginalized positions believe “if only I could make people understand this one truth, they’d realize I’m totally right,” let me refer you to almost every chat thread on the internet. (Not here! We’re quite civil when we disagree. Mostly…) Or The Atlantic review of The X-Files from 1997 by James Surowiecki, from which I take this fine quote: “If the conspiracy is really as powerful as Mulder thinks it is, only collective action can change it. Only some version of democracy can stand up against it.”

Exactly. And by turning real fears, genuine abuses of power, into plot material for a monster show, Chris Carter mocks the very notion of democracy. He says, in effect, “It’s all just another form of entertainment… but that’s OK, since it has a little meaning to it.” So, too, did Indiana Jones defeating the Nazis.

Star Trek and Doctor Who have more bite. And Terry Pratchett would eat this weak social commentary for breakfast.

But I still love Gillian Anderson.

Stunning Petulance from Minneapolis Police Officers

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Lynx forward Maya Moore - Minneapolis PoliceOn Monday night, four off-duty Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officers were moonlighting as security personnel for the Lynx WNBA game at Target Center.

The officers wore their Minneapolis Police Department uniforms while working the security job (as permitted by the department).

And in an act of stunning petulance, all four walked off the security job because Lynx players wore t-shirts like the one Lynx forward Maya Moore is wearing in the photo on the left.

On the back of these shirts are the names of Philando Castile, killed by police in Minnesota last week, and Alton Sterling, killed by police in Louisiana. And beneath the names is a Dallas Police department emblem — remembering the five officers killed by a sniper in Texas.

Not Just Shirts

The MPD officers were reportedly also offended by a pre-game news conference Lynx players held. It included seemingly universal comments such as Rebekkah Brunson saying the shirts were meant to “honor and mourn the loss of precious American citizens and to plead change for all of us.” And Maya Moore saying, “We are highlighting a longtime problem of racial profiling.”

The Minneapolis police officers should not have been surprised. Last Saturday, the Lynx wore the exact same shirts and made similar statements before a game against the Dallas Wings. Several of the Wings teammates expressed gratitude for the show of support. In that instance, Moore declared, “If we take this time to see that this is a human issue and speak out together, we can greatly decrease fear and create change… Tonight we will be wearing shirts to honor and mourn the losses of precious American citizens and to plead for change in all of us.”

The Police Union Joins In

“We don’t support law enforcement murdering civilians and we don’t support civilians murdering law enforcement.” —Lynx player Simeone Augustus

Commenting on the officers who walked out, MPD union head Lt Bob Kroll said, “I commend them for it” and “if [the players] are going to keep their stance, all officers may refuse to work there.” Then, in an act even more petulant than the walk-off, Kroll said, “They only have four officers working the event because the Lynx have such a pathetic draw.”

The Lynx have won three of the last five WNBA championships, and average about 8,000 fans per game. That’s roughly half the size of a typical NBA crowd, and far larger than a rock concert at nearby venue First Avenue. (A rather well-known rock club, where Prince filmed scenes for Purple Rain.)

Minneapolis Police Have a History

You may recall the story from 2014, when Minneapolis Police Department union members duped a local TV station into claiming Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges was flashing a “gang symbol.” The slander was almost certainly a response to Hodges’s attempts at reforming the department.

A Longtime Problem

And such attempts are nothing new. During most of the 1980s, Anthony Bouza was head of the MPD and deeply unpopular with the force because of his reform measures. Later, Bouza described those reforms in Police Unbound: Corruption, Abuse, and Heroism By The Boys In Blue. Bouza wrote that “temptations to abuse are everywhere, and practically irresistible.” He found some officers so dirty and so unfireable, he would pay them to sit at an empty desk rather than poison new recruits with their attitudes. Bouza said officers refer to such attitudes as thinking of themselves as “meat eaters”: tough guys; ones who don’t ever back down from a confrontation.

MPD: To Protect and Serve… Themselves

Most hated of Bouza’s reforms was a reduction in two-person shifts. Officers claimed this reduction would make them unsafe, and pointed to an inevitable officer death as proof. (Police work is dangerous, although not so dangerous as fishing, farming, logging, driving, and many other occupations.) The real cause for officers’ hatred of this policy was the very reason Bouza initiated it. A two-officer crew has virtually unlimited power. In rare cases where an officer’s actions are investigated by prosecutors, witness statements from another officer will always be given more weight than testimony from suspects or bystanders.

Bouza took on the MPD job after previous experience as police commander in The Bronx. But that didn’t seem to matter to the “meat eaters” at the MPD.

Shame on the Minneapolis Police

In any case, shame on the petulant MPD officers who walked off their jobs in a huff because of the principled statements made by Minnesota Lynx athletes. But don’t expect the MPD to make desperately needed changes anytime soon.

Photo cropped from one by Timothy Nwachukwu of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Minneapolis Cops Working Lynx Game Walk out over Player Comments, Warm-Up Jerseys, licensed under Fair Use.

Yanosuke Hirai and the Heroism of Unreasonableness

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Yanosuke Hirai

You may be thinking, “But it wasn’t the earthquake that caused plant failure, it was the tsunami!” You are a clever soul. Nuclear power plants are designed to shut down in the event of an emergency, and Fukushima did. However the fuel in a nuclear reactor does not stop emitting radiation after a reactor is shut down. They need coolant to prevent a chain reaction which can result in great damage.

Cooling Nuclear Plants

This coolant is usually water, which is why nuclear plants are usually near a major water source (ocean, lake, river.) The coolant needs to circulate through the fuel, and it does so through electric-powered pumps. Should electricity fail, the pumps stop working.

Of course, power plants have backup systems for this, and so did Fukushima. When the severe earthquake interrupted power service, backup generators kicked into operation. They would have been sufficient to keep coolant flowing. But the tsunami which followed, ruined most of these backup generators.

The plant had a seawall, which was at the legal height mandated by Japanese regulatory agencies. And the tsunami completely overran the wall. The power company was eventually found liable for insufficient emergency protocols. However, a tsunami wave higher than ever seen before can’t be predicted, right?

Wrong.

Yanosuke Hirai

North of Fukushima (closer to the quake’s epicenter) was the Oanagawa nuclear plant, operated by a different power company. It faced a similar tsunami wave; its sea walls held, and the plant was not dangerously harmed. In fact, several nearby residents whose homes had been destroyed by the tsunami stayed at the plant site as a refugee center.

The hero who saved that plant was a long-dead man named Yanosuke Hirai.

Hirai was a senior engineer with the power company. As a boy, he visited the town of his birth, and in this town was an ancient Shinto shrine. Legend had it that the shrine was affected by tsunami flooding in a terrifying 869 CE earthquake. Supposedly, Yanosuke Hirai never stopped thinking about that visit.

Demanding More Than the Minimum

When the Oanagawa plant was built, Yanosuke Hirai insisted on a higher elevation and higher seawall than other engineers thought necessary. The design team at Fukushima actually lowered the plant’s elevation during construction, for the logical reason that closer to the ocean meant less cost pumping the water uphill.

“Corporate compliance is different from compliance. Just being ‘not guilty’ is not enough.” —Tatsuji Oshima

After the 2011 disaster, a Portland Oregonian reporter who’d lived in Japan for years, read about the Oanagawa plant, and tracked down Tatsuji Oshima, Yanosuke Hirai’s former underling. Oshima said Hirai’s obsession with safety was always a huge battle he fought against institutional inertia, and Hirai considered bureaucrats to be “human trash.”

The reporter, Richard Read, wrote that this would be almost unheard-of in Japan, a “society known for pounding the nail that sticks up.” And Read has lived among our friends on those lovely islands, so I defer to his judgement.

But I’d be surprised if it’s a Japanese issue. As Oshima said to Read, “In your country, too, there are probably bureaucrats or officials who never take final responsibility.” What a gentleman! “Probably” is quite the polite understatement.

Going Along, Getting Along, Catastrophe

Humans are tribal, and I believe it to be a flaw of confirmation bias. We are learning creatures by nature. When an infant finds that some shiny thing hurts (a candle flame), they try it another time or two, then tell themselves a story: “candles hurt.” These stories, by which we identify patterns and try to rationalize them, are how we avoid unpleasant experiences in the future. And some patterns are well worth identifying. (This is how science works.)

But it can lead us into confirmation bias. We tell ourselves a story about what we experienced — a unexpectedly rude stranger, a bad coworker, a toxic relationship, whatever. And we look for a pattern which confirms our story about why that experience happened. When you look for examples that confirm your suspicions, you will find them!

Perhaps the oldest trick in magic is the “cups and balls” routine. Most magicians do it and everyone has their own version. Penn & Teller’s version involves doing the trick “straight” and then using clear plastic cups and having Penn explain exactly what they are doing as they are doing it. The trick still works because we look where it is natural to look. We look at the big man juggling the little balls, not the the little man placing a big ball under a cup.

People see what they expect to see.

Dangers of Confirmation Bias

In institutions, confirmation bias tends to create environments where the “right sort” of people are welcomed and given enormous leeway. The “wrong sort” are seen as untrustworthy, scrutinized for examples of “not being a good fit.” Which naturally confirms the bias! The “wrong sort” leave that unpleasant work environment, the “right sort” stay where they’ve found a place. This is largely why a problematic institution — say, a hospital with a history of patient neglect, or an energy company that pooh-poohs safety concerns — can be exceedingly difficult to change.

Clearly, Yanosuke Hirai was the “wrong sort.” He was unquestionably brilliant, but a pain in everyone’s neck. He was not a “team player.” And yet the company hiring him got someone who would ultimately save them billions of dollars. And the company without him is now liable for billions in damages.

There’s an inherent problem with capitalism here. The company which tolerated Yanosuke Hirai’s squeaky wheel didn’t see benefit from the decision until decades after his death. And I don’t know how to solve that problem. Companies always claim to want “outside the box” thinking, currently fashionable corporate gibberish. What they want is someone who’s creative, without being really creative — disruptive without actually disrupting anything.

So let’s salute a man who never quite belonged, who considered the closed-minded to be “human trash,” and who took heroic stands ultimately benefiting thousands of lives. Thank you, Yanosuke Hirai!

Image of Yanosuke Hirai by Zsefvgyj (own work), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikipedia.

New Patriotic Sports Salute To “All Our Heroes”

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Target Field Salutes Other HeroesWith every professional sporting event becoming a tribute to the heroes that keep the American Empire running, the Minnesota Twins have announced that they will be hosting “Salute Our Additional Heroes Nights” this season.

Previously, the team and many others in American sports have honored military veterans with in-game ceremonies, camo-themed caps, and napalm sticks for the kids.

Twins GM Terry Ryan said, “We want to acknowledge how keeping America safe from constant threat to corporate profits isn’t merely the work of men and women and men in uniform. It’s time for millions of unrecognized heroes to get their due.”

Accordingly, the promotional theme will involve tributes to several different aspects of protecting Our Homeland.

A special feature will be “Building, Then Destroying, Then Building, Then Destroying Tomorrow.” It will involve Twins players wearing uniforms fitted with military-contractor logos.

As a shout-out our men and women and men in intelligence agencies, the “Kiss Cam” will eschew live video for recorded intel of couples copulating when they thought the camera eye on phone, tablet, or laptop was turned off. As General Keith Alexander described the hilarious concept, “Your devices are never really turned off, and your love for a great partner can always be turned on!” When questioned about the legality of the practice, he responded, “Freedom!”

A special feature will be “Building, Then Destroying, Then Building, Then Destroying Tomorrow.” It will involve Twins players wearing uniforms fitted with military-contractor logos. Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and six other prominent patriotic corporations will each have one Twin guiding a remote-controlled drone aircraft hovering around fans in the stands to contribute whatever they can afford. The contributions and mini-drones will converge on the pitcher’s mound, be doused with lighter fluid, and burned, during a rousing sing-along to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless The USA.”

Finally, there will be a tribute to popular military-themed video games, where enthusiastic gamers can roam Target Field’s outfield wearing virtual-reality headsets and experience, for the first time, the thrill of being shot in the face by actual guns. Twins president Dave St Peter would not confirm or deny a rumor that a dozen members of Gamergate will attend via video to cheer on the spectacle, safe from any women who might hurt their feelings.

Fans who paid money to watch skilled entertainers perform feats of incredible precision are predicted to sit through this promotion and mutter, “That’s just how we are now.”

The Twins plan to “Salute Our Additional Heroes” on every day not already allotted to customary military tributes such as Memorial Day, 4th Of July, Veterans Day, April Fools, Labor Day, Arbor Day, National Dentists-Want-You-To-Floss Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and days of the week ending in the letter “y.”

Answering criticisms about how professional sports teams were inadequately celebrating America and Goodness and Stuff, Ryan said “We’re working on it. We can always do more to honor those who protect us from dirty, filthy, inhuman… you know who I mean.”

See Also

Seagullible
Ayman al-Zawahiri at TED
Miracle Reagan Toast Discovered
Zombie Reagan 2016

Image cropped from original by Randy Stern. Originally posted to Flickr as The Show Has Begun, CC BY 2.0, via Wikipedia.

The CIA’s Website Has A Kids’ Zone

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CIA Kids ZoneI was wondering aloud the other day, “What does the CIA actually do?”

We know what the NSA does. It spies on everybody! If this serves any purpose, well, I can’t even fathom how they could begin to process all the data they collect. They have a ginormous satellite dish in Africa used for catching signals bounced off the moon.

(Does that sound silly? It certainly does. It sounded silly to me when I read about it in James Bamford’s Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, first published in 2002. Would you like a heavily redacted NSA PDF about this satellite dish? You’re welcome.)

So we know what the NSA does. And we know what the FBI does, or used to do. The FBI was, for decades, America’s KGB. The internal security service, protecting us from one Jackie Robinson or Martin Luther King at a time. Thanks, J Edgar!

Now it seems the FBI is basically in charge of sting operations targeting Islamic terrorists. Except, they can’t apparently catch many terrorists. No worries; what you can’t discover, you can always make up. The FBI has a fantastic track record of entrapping poor miserable suckers into terror plots the FBI creates, goads the suckers into joining, then busts them and notches another Crime Solved on its belt. It’s a dirty job, but nobody has to do it.

(You could believe me on this. Or you could believe Arun Kundnani’s fine book, The Muslims Are Coming. Or Human Rights Watch and the Columbia University Law School. It’s up to you.)

What’s the CIA Up to These Days?

The last we heard from the CIA was a long while ago. CIA analysts (so not a Freudian term) were warning the Bush/Cheney administration “do not start the Iraq War; it’ll be a disaster for the human species” and being told in response, “go screw yourself, Frodo.”

It has a logo featuring something like the Soviet spy “Natasha” from Rocky & Bullwinkle. If you click on K-5, you get to meet “Aerial, the ace photography pigeon.” If you click on 6-12, you get this nugget of 100% not creepy-culty wisdom…

Clearly the CIA is still around. Although I’m not exactly sure why we spend money on an intelligence agency whose information we ignore when it’s inconvenient. The US could just give me a few billions dollars. I’m fully capable of saying “War dumb wrong stupid! No do wrong stupid war!” The government already ignores me, so there would be no learning curve. It’d be cheaper, and I’d get to fly around the world in jets. I like jets.

So. What’s the CIA doing these days?

I wondered, and then I realized — well, they probably have a website.

Indeed, they do have a website. Because, why not? Everyone loves websites. They’re so friendly.

It features a top story about the CIA’s diversity training, which makes me think of a Larry Wilmore bit. It has an appropriately evasive FAQ. Want to know how much money the CIA wastes on “go screw yourself, Frodo” every year? Alas, “neither the number of employees nor the size of the Agency’s budget can, at present, be publicly disclosed.” Gosh, that’s a shame. Yet you expected as much.

CIA Kids’ Zone

What you didn’t expect was the CIA Kids’ Zone.

Yes. This is on the CIA’s website. It exists. And it’s awesome.

It has a logo featuring something like the Soviet spy “Natasha” from Rocky & Bullwinkle. If you click on K-5, you get to meet “Aerial, the ace photography pigeon.” If you click on 6-12, you get this nugget of 100% not creepy-culty wisdom: “We figure you probably know a little something about the CIA or you wouldn’t be here. Right away, we like your curiosity and your ability to find information. In fact, our employees know how to access information.”

Do the Brits have a “Kids’ Zone” on their spook agency websites? Hell, no, they don’t! Because America rocks, folks.

One criticism of the CIA’s “Kids’ Zone.” Most of the games you can play are way too hard or way too easy. Cryptography is impossible (although if you think it’s not, feel free to try.) “Aerial Analysis” of drone photos, now that’s just easy. Duh, if there’s a ski lodge in the picture, the local economy is based on tourism. Anybody not planning to institute a neocon utopia by conquering a country they know nothing about could get this immediately.

The game I liked best was the “Photo Analysis Challenge.” Spot the differences between two pictures a guy snapped under his raincoat! Annoyingly, if you don’t get the differences right, you’re just forced to retake the test, and it doesn’t tell you where the ones you missed were. But I got all of them until the last test. That one was super-tricky.

I deeply loathe the American intelligence agencies. I wish they didn’t exist. I think we could spend far less money on them, catch the occasional crook, and avoid wars our experts told us we would be foolish to start.

Isn’t it quintessentially American, though, to have a military agency we spend gazillions on, which has a deep history of horrible actions, whose brightest minds we dismiss when powerful people want to dismiss these things. And it has a Kids’ Zone on their website?!

Sometimes it’s just impossible not to love this country.

Minnesota Advice for Those Suffering the Cold Weather in the East

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Cold Weather in St PaulWhen I moved to Minnesota, it got below 30°F or so. I called my mom in Oregon, to complain about the cold weather. But she was a Wisconsin native and did not take my discomfort all that seriously. “The day will come,” she told me, “when you think of zero as warm.” I did not believe her. But she was absolutely right.

As it gets below zero, and lingers there like God has a grudge against you, your best friends are layers. Lots of layers. Put on warm clothes. Then put warm clothes on over your warm clothes. Then put on a coat.

Real Cold Weather

My first winter in Minnesota, I was standing at the bus stop. A group of attractive women were across the street lined up to get into a happening bar. Most wore pantyhose. It was perhaps 5°F outside. I commented to the other person waiting at the stop, “I don’t care how great my legs look, I would not wear pantyhose in this cold weather.”

The other person responded, “Seriously? You’re not from here, are you? They’ll wear that when it’s 30 below!”

And, indeed, this is so.

The worst thing about cold weather is living in a ratty, broken down apartment building. My building dates back to 1908. It’s charmingly archaic — the first hotel in Saint Paul to feature electricity. Alas, this doesn’t mean quite as much as it did a century ago. And that means the storm windows also exhibit the high tech efficiency of the Edwardian period.

Every winter, I have to caulk up the windows and apply a layer of plastic film over them. It’s quite the process. For some reason, you need to run a hair dryer over the plastic film until it shrinks so every last plastic wrinkle is gone. This makes it warmer, I am told.

It’d be better if I lived in a newer building, of course. But apartments in the Twin Cities are crazy expensive. So, if you get an affordable one, you hang onto it for dear life — from 1908 onward, if necessary.

Cold Sweat

You can compensate for this with very thick blankets. That’s how the pioneers did it. Unfortunately, you start to sweat underneath those warm blankets, so now you’re wet. If there’s one state of being that you don’t want to inhabit when getting up and getting ready for work, it’s wet and cold.

Maybe that’s why pioneers all died from dysentery.

Oh, well — could be worse. I could own a car. Warming up a car in awful cold weather takes forever, it never gets comfortable. Compare this to the bus, which is perfectly nice the moment you step on board. I tell car owners how sad my life is, walking in lots of layers to a bus stop. And I am completely lying. I’m fine walking.

But my apartment is still cold! And don’t I deserve a little sympathy for that?! All you on the east coast will be warm soon enough.

A wintry February day in St Paul by Appraiser at English Wikipedia – Transferred from Wikipedia to Commons. Licensed under Public Domain.

Jackie Robinson Story and Other Anti-Racism Films

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The Jackie Robinson StoryThe Jackie Robinson Story came out in 1950, and, as a selling point, starred the actual Robinson. It’s dated now, largely because it was pretty low-budget, but you have to consider what the movie was for its time.

Naturally movies were made by and for African Americans. Most were independently financed. The major movie studios didn’t want anything to do with addressing racism (today, they give themselves awards for movies which do address it, only 100 years or so after those movies should have been bankrolled.)

Other Anti-Racism Films

There was Fritz Lang’s 1936 Fury, starring Spencer Tracy as a white guy attacked by a lynch mob. Lang was a German whose films impressed Hitler so much, the Führer asked Lang to be his personal #1 filmmaker. Lang got the hell out of Germany. Fury was his first American movie, and while it’s technically about a white guy getting lynched, there are so many African American performers in background roles that audiences knew what was being discussed.

You had The Ox-Bow Incident in 1943, along the same lines. Then 1947 gave us Gentleman’s Agreement, about antisemitism. (You know the old Groucho Marx line “I’d never want to belong to a club that would have me for a member?” Groucho was talking about all-Jewish clubs, because even famous celebrities like him couldn’t join the racist ones.) And Broken Arrow, about the mistreatment of Native Americans, the same year Jackie Robinson came out.

“You’re not only wrong, you’re wrong at the top of your voice.”

The best of all old-Hollywood movies about racism is Bad Day At Black Rock, from 1955. Spencer Tracy — Again! — is a one-armed war veteran who uproots some desert railroad stop by asking questions about what happened to his Japanese-American war buddy. In a great scene, he’s bullied at a lunch counter by a local thug (play by Ernest Borgnine), and delivers one of my favorite-ever lines: “You’re not only wrong, you’re wrong at the top of your voice.”

The Jackie Robinson Story

The Jackie Robinson Story in 1950, broke some real ground. It didn’t only depict Robinson being abused by bigot fans and resented by bigot teammates. It mentioned how African Americans, even those with college degrees (a big deal in those days!) couldn’t get decent jobs. It showed segregation, which movies at the time just didn’t do.

Is Robinson an actor? No. But he doesn’t embarrass himself, either. He’s a little wooden, but that’s not unusual for low-budget movies. His laconic delivery works well in context, since the player Robinson obviously had emotions he wasn’t permitted to express.

What dates the movie more than anything is, surprisingly, how the baseball scenes are directed. They’re terrible. Apparently due to budget constraints, most are shot from the same few angles. So you watch Robinson swing over and over and it becomes snooze-rific. Near the climax (which cheats time and space a little by inventing a pennant-clinching final game) there’s a shot from behind the catcher, showing Brooklyn in the background, and it’s jarringly exciting.

Jackie Robinson is in the public domain now, so you can watch it for free. Here’s one copy via the Internet Archive:

Afterword

In the film, , Robinson is invited to speak before Congress because of his inspiring life story. This was not the case; he was asked to testify before the HUAC on whether singer Paul Robeson was a communist.

HUAC — the House Un-American Activities Committee — was responsible for a series of show trials in the 1950s, instituted as political props for several fear mongering politicians. The commies are gonna get us, see, so elect me! The most notorious of these fear mongers was Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, who headed the Senate’s version of the HUAC — the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Robinson gave testimony, and did not turn over on Paul Robeson. Instead, he berated the anti-communist headhunters for demeaning the African American experience of constant racism. You can read part of Robinson’s speech here.

That same site has links to Robinson’s FBI files. Back when, if you said or did anything which offended FBI director J Edgar Hoover’s idea of pure patriotic 100% not-gay Americanism, the FBI would start surveillance on you. To prove that these dark days are over (!) you can now see some creepy FBI files on the Bureau’s website.

A longer version of this article will be posted over at SB Nation, “The Jackie Robinson Story” & “42.” WHICH ONE WINS.

Three Liberal Movies From 2006

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James Fillmore is a regular reader and a prolific commenter around here. I am pleased to present his first guest post. He lives in Minnesota. Despite an exhausting job, he somehow manages to write so that the rest of us may benefit. He told me he “enjoys writing reviews of movies/books on occasion” and while his “minuscule audience tires of reading him, they secretly know he is always right.” Such arrogant self-deprecation makes him a perfect fit at Frankly Curious! —FM [Update: James e-mailed me regarding this introduction, “The intro was fine, though I’d lose the noble-sounding-job shit. You’ve taught; you know as well as I do that people do difficult, useful jobs because people find them challenging and interesting. We ain’t ‘heroes.’ We just deserve a living wage and financial speculators deserve, well, I’ll halt myself at ‘severe chastisement.'” So James isn’t a hero. In case you were thinking that he is, cut it out! -FM]

V for VendettaIn 2006, three movies were released that had very noticeable leftist leanings; that made 2006 a fun year to watch movies. Hollywood, no matter what the imposing Bill-O or your local AM radio lunatics say, isn’t generally leftist, except on social issues. Movie executives want to live in a world where their children are free from prejudice based on race, religion, or sexual orientation; they tend not to mind a world where they make gazoodles of money and their Mexican housemaids are paid quite a lot less.

So movies which suggest society is broken and could stand a serious upgrade are fairly rare. This is distinct from the more customary “society could use some tolerant enlightenment by those of us who make movies for lots of money” variety. Yes, John Sayles and Spike Lee are still alive, but they don’t count; they make their politically significant movies with duct tape and lemonade-stand funding. I’m talking about three movies with wide national releases (or two, and one that had wide release in Minnesota, a cold place you wouldn’t like) that had, as their point, “Yer cuntry iz boned! Press ‘restore.'”

In March came V For Vendetta, which is the most entertaining “Zorro blows up Parliament” film ever made. It was produced by Joel Silver (of the Lethal Weapon series, in which Mel Gibson and Danny Glover take on apartheid and exploding toilets), written by The Matrix creators the Wachowskis. The Matrix movies, at least until they stopped making any sense whatsoever, had a political undercurrent about “waking up” to tyranny. The first movie features a song by super-liberal Tom Morello called, literally, “Wake Up.” And when Joe Pantoliano’s character makes a deal with mean robots to betray humankind in return for getting his happy brainwashed state back—saying “ignorance is bliss”—the mean robot makes a point of calling him “Mr Reagan.”

In V for Vendetta, the undercurrent is made explicit. It’s 1984, or close enough with John Hurt—who was Winston Smith in the unseen movie version, playing Big Brother here—and everyone’s in a miserable daze. Enter V and humanity presumably lives happily ever after. It’s a damnably enjoyable piece of anti-Bush propaganda, with terrific performances by Hugo Weaving (the mean robot of The Matrix turned hero/savior here), Natalie Portman, Stephen Rea, and Stephen Fry (maybe Fry’s best film work), alongside others less famous and just as good. (Roger Allam, playing a Fox News-type, looks so much like Christopher Hitchens it’s spooky.) You want your demonization of “terror” as a means to enact sweeping social controls? You got it. You want an anthrax scare? You got it. The tyrants also oppress gays (the most powerful subplot in the film, for me, the Wachowskis, and Karl Rove’s 2004 election strategy—if you’re keeping score)? You got it!

The movie has affected a lot of people. V wears a Guy Fawkes mask and FedExes copies to everyone everywhere, inspiring revolution. There are a lot of protesters who wear these masks in real life today. Personally, I find the “if people wake up, they’ll riot in the streets and solve all our woes” message simplistic. Rioting in the streets makes for good television but doesn’t really get you anyplace; you need to educate and organize citizens in the old, tedious, door-to-door way. That’s what the civil-rights movement did, and it took decades of buildup before it was able to make effective large-scale demonstrations. When I saw protesters outside my front door wearing those Guy Fawkes masks during the 2008 Republican convention, I wanted to slap the kids; get out of the movies and go sign up some poor people already. But their hearts were in the right place, and that’s something.

Alan Moore, who wrote the V For Vendetta graphic novel (which I have not read), didn’t like the film. In an AV Club interview, he said that he regards both capitalism and socialism as ways to organize industrial societies which probably won’t be around much longer. On the “not much longer” front he may be right. A segue to:

In September you had Children Of Men, based on a novel by PD James, and directed by visual maestro Alfonso Cuaron. (You may have puked in your space helmet seeing his Gravity.) The novel, as far as I could tell, was about the sterility of academic leftism in the face of real-world issues; the movie is about sterility as a metaphor for all the horrible stuff each of us feels powerless to fix, like global warming or the humanitarian disasters in Iraq or Gaza or wherever the next one is.

It’s a stunningly effective exercise in visualizing, “Oh God we’re doomed!”—featuring some long takes (like the opening one in Gravity) that would make Orson Welles proud. (His line about movies being the “biggest toy-train set any boy ever had” applies to Cuaron, who digs the technical challenges of filmmaking.) Watching it, I was alternately depressed into a coma and blown away by the sheer virtuosity of the thing.

Children of MenPolitically, the movie isn’t a rouser like V; there are no easy solutions offered. There are no solutions offered, period; the best efforts of well-meaning people break down into factional leftist squabbling, which anyone who’s read an internet BDS debate (or anyone who’s seen Life Of Brian) will recognize. Clive Owen is a cynical public employee who drinks to numb his disillusionment. Michael Caine, in maybe his finest performance (Like Fry! It’s a trend!), plays an ex-activist living in the British equivalent of Northern California who is focused on growing killer strains of weed. The always magnetic, always unpronounceable Chiwetel Ejiofor makes a crazy factional leftist terrifying and sympathetic. And the great Julianne Moore gets the Janet Leigh part, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

If you watch the film (few did), many things stick in your memory, but one remains with me especially. Warring soldiers see a baby, the first baby anyone’s seen in 20 years, and the fighting halts; basic humanity overcomes hatred and ideology, for a moment. Then somebody shoots at somebody and everyone goes back to murderous mayhem. Yeah, that’s just about right.

The DVD of Children Of Men has an hour-long Cuaron documentary featuring the likes of Naomi Klein, James Lovelock, and Slavoj Zizek talking about the end of the world, and it’s well worth watching. Zizek in particular charms me; he has a goofy accent that makes his incredibly overbearing, pretentious use of the English language seem quirky rather than domineering—like Werner Herzog, but in a better mood. And, finally, speaking of barely decipherable Euro accents…

In December, you had Sweet Land. I can’t write about the film without tearing up; it might have been the most intense experience I’ve had at a movie theater in my adult life.

The film takes place in post-WWI Minnesota. The Swedes and Norwegians loathe each other but are attempting to put these petty differences aside to unite for a nobler cause: loathing the Germans. A Norwegian farmer (Or a Swede; I get them confused.) brings over essentially a mail-order bride from Germany, and all hell breaks loose. All heck, actually; it is Minnesota.

Sweet LandSweet Land is a very difficult film to watch for the first 30 minutes or so. It seems like nobody is speaking the same language and it’s impossible to figure out what’s going on. That’s because the movie is about the immigrant experience, where nobody speaks the same language and it’s impossible to figure out what’s going on. Gradually, you get a sense of the story, and you realize the confusion was intentional; it’s meant to give you a sense of what being an immigrant in these isolated farming communities might have felt like. The movie’s very effective at bringing an isolated farm community to life. You will never take heated indoor plumbing for granted again.

The only actors you’ll recognize are Ned Beatty, as a town burgomaster, and Alan Cumming (the guy who hosts Masterpiece Mystery) as a farmer who just can’t stop screwing his wife and so has a zillion kids he can’t feed. Neither actor has had too many opportunities to really take a part and run with it in films (Beatty getting raped in Deliverance doesn’t count, as good as he was in that). So both have one of their best-ever scenes (Trend!) in a dinner sequence, where Beatty gives a bored speech obviously aimed at Cumming about the Virtues Of Thrift And Temperance or some such. Beatty’s character is insulting Cumming’s without coming out and saying it (that’s sometimes called, in these parts, “ScandiLutheran passive-aggressiveness.”) The point isn’t to dispense helpful wisdom; the point is for the powerful to demean the weak and seem noble in doing so. It’s a great scene, played beautifully by both.

Eventually the Norwegian farmer and his German mail-order bride come to the aid of Cumming, because in a tiny farming community, you’ve got to knuckle under to the burgomaster or stick with your neighbors; they choose to stick with the neighbors out of what appears to be more “American Gothic” sheer stubbornness than any political drive. (Socialism is mentioned in the movie, but the characters have more pressing concerns than dreamy ideology. Knowing your Marx won’t pay off the landlord.)

The writer/director, Ali Selim, has a German-heritage parent from Minnesota and a Muslim-heritage parent from Egypt. So the themes obviously meant a lot to him; he battled for 15 years to get Sweet Land made. He hasn’t made a feature film since, but he works a lot in TV.

When I saw Sweet Land, in a small independent theater in Saint Paul, we were a bit early and the previous showing was just ending. In the lobby, a young couple walked out, complaining that the movie was slow and boring. I assumed they were possibly right, and that’s why they were the only attendees. Then, a few minutes later, the rest of the audience came out—all older, and all wiping their faces. If you see the film, you’ll understand why: the final shot knocks you into an Old Yeller-level of absolute helpless bawling. But they are happy-sad tears.

So That’s The Year In Lefty Movies, 2006. V for Venddeta was about riots fixing stuff, Children of Men was about stuff being unfixable, and the one nobody outside Minnesota has ever seen, Sweet Land, was about how fixing stuff actually happens, by resisting one burgomaster at a time. You can watch them on the standard pay services, or get them for free from your local library. You already pay taxes to get movies from your library for free, and unless you are a colossal jerkhead you don’t mind paying these taxes, so why not actually use your local library to watch a few DVDs? Honestly, you can do this; and it’s pretty awesome.