» Fringe Blog – Writing on Film, Culture, and Things on the Fringe

Little White Sambo

jelewis8 — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 01:43:23 +0000

It’s quite alright for leftist bloggers to reference ugly racial imagery when it suits their party cause. I mean, clearly, it’s perfectly within their rights, because they also bear the same skin tone as the person they are racially lampooning. It’s the height of ludicrousness to think otherwise.
So I’m assuming this picture of Arnold as “Little Whitey Sambo” won’t raise any hackles. I was thinking of going with the Nazi theme, but I just like the name “Sambo” so much, I had to use it. It reminds me of this time I read this story about this kid named “Little Black Sambo” and he had to get some butter for some pancakes his Aunt Jemima made for him, but he got chased around this tree by a bunch of tigers, but then the tigers started eating each other and then they went around the tree so fast they turned into butter. Then Little Black Sambo had all the butter he could eat for his wheat germ pancakes.
Mmmmm, them’s good eatin’.
See, if Arnold was a huge black man, I couldn’t call him “Little Black Sambo” because not only would it be inaccurate, it would be racially insensitive. But, since he is a white man with a funny accent, I can call him whatever racially insensitive thing I want, and because I’m a right-wing blogger, my views are unquestionable.
In conclusion, if you are upset at a gubernatorial or senatorial candidate because he has betrayed you and your kind (read: abandoned your peoples, you know, racially), then it’s okay to call them Sambo (or some variation thereof). But only if they’re your colour. And only if you’re (not) a racist.

Revisiting Old Vile Claims Once More

jelewis8 — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 03:15:16 +0000

I’ve stopped reading Instapundit on a daily basis, instead hitting his site about once a week to get the latest on whatever blogging fad he’s linking at the moment. So I missed a post from last Thursday in which he addresses the leftist fallacy that freeing Iraq and making way for democracy in that country is/was a bogus claim/reason made by the Bush administration and war supporters after the fact of the war and the WMD that failed to surface in Iraq.
He brings up a few links that I missed when I addressed this issue back in…oh, January. The money quote, from Ian Hamlet, and which I wholeheartedly believe is true: “The reason a large block of the country doesn’t recall Bush’s speeches calling for Iraqi liberation is that they simply were not listening. After all, they had already decided that they knew what Bush “really” meant, so they ignored what he said.”
I can think of at least one person who thinks that our inaction in Darfur, Sudan is indicative of this administration’s true foreign policy, our arrogance as a nation, and the depths of lies to which the government has sunk AND to which the “loyal guard” of Republican supporters have fallen in stubbornly refusing to see the truth.
What I find interesting about that mindset is how it mirrors the selective memory Hamlet talks about in the preceding paragraph. It does not matter to the anti-war left that the Bush administration spent over a year and a half working with the international twinkletoes operation known as the United Nations to resolve the Iraq situation in a peaceful manner. More than just the two major, news-making UN resolutions were passed authorizing force to be used in ousting Hussein from leadership. And the world did seem at the brink of some collective agreement that action needed to be taken.
The wheels of power move slowly, they do. It isn’t surprising that an already hamfisted organization like the UN would take as long as it has to collect its scattered head and decide to take action in Sudan. But look at the timetable. It mirrors what began in the early months of 2002, after the world began to breathe again after 9/11.
Yet once again, we are hearing the familiar refrain. Is Iraq a simple matter? Is there reason to suspect that the recent optimism coming out of Iraq is the result of “bogus” reasoning on the part of the Bush administration?
The fevered imaginations of some people who seem to think that their wild claims make any sense when paired against a comprehensive Google search–does that matter?
I thought not too.

Vera Drake

jelewis8 — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 18:18:03 +0000

Vera Drake floats along an ephemeral plane of the unconscious. It is at once a tale of good intentions (and you know where those lead), and a veiled (and vague) social drama that plays out like yesterday’s politics.
Writer/director Mike Leigh doesn’t put a whole lot of spin on what could have been a tightly wound spool of leftist rhetoric. And he places the story at a comfortable distance–England in the 1950′s–so that its controversial subject can be digested with as little burping as possible. Leigh barely engages these issues to the audience though, settling for a dark cinematic expression of objectivity. Instead of a pro- or anti-abortion film, it is rather an intimate portrait of lower class life in the 1950′s Britain. Character performances overcome the limitations inherent in the stereotypes, though not enough to make Vera Drake the highlight of Leigh’s career.
Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton) is a kind, caring woman in her upper fifties with a loving family–wonderful, hardworking husband Stan (Philip Davis), Sid (Daniel Mays), her responsible son, and a grown daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly). Besides serving oceans of tea and carrying a perpetual smile, Vera cares for her sick mother and other disabled residents of her tenement, and also works as a domestic during the day. Cheerfully, of course. Secretly though, she also “helps young girls out when they can’t manage”–manage having a baby, that is. Her pro bono abortion work is as illegal as it is well-intentioned, and when one of her patients nearly dies from the procedure, Vera is soon caught, and her family and their happy little lives begin to unravel.
Whilst the film wavers between critiquing social mores and exposing the nature of illegal abortion as a measure of goodwill on the part of a few dedicated and caring older women, it never fully reaches any definitive conclusion about either matter. The latter, a one-sided, if little seen, aspect of abortion in the 1950′s overall, is at least tempered with a gentle, even understanding portrayal of anti-abortion sentiment. The social mores aspect is a little fuzzier, and Leigh doesn’t delve into the legal structures and social traditions that constructed anti-abortion laws. Thus Vera’s case seems, when all is said and done, to be a simple matter of a woman who breaks the law willfully, and whose actions eventually affect her and her family. Are we meant to sympathize with a woman who contravenes the law, at the expense of young girls’ lives?
Leigh seems uninterested in formenting an explicit and open opinion in favour of or against abortion, but rather in showing the effects of anti-abortion laws on common people. What is more important, and perhaps unintended, is the way in which class differences are shown, and how abortion fits into the scheme of society. For some, the route is a way greased by money, class, and a knowledge of how to skirt the legal problems. For others, it is a way secured in the small rooms and common cafes, bought with guineas and a promise not to tell.
Most important is Leigh’s representation of family and friendship, the bonds that draw people together that must be strengthened from time to time through trial and trouble. Vera is a well-meaning woman whose actions threaten her family, but they survive through love, forgiveness, and encouragement. This is a powerful message.
Imelda Staunton is not especially nuanced. She spends the first half of the film smiling and the last half in tears and brokenhearted glances; surely someone as cheerful as Vera could handle a felony arrest with a chipper smile and her favourite catchphrase “I’ll just put the kettle on”. More impressive are the performances by the excellent ensemble acting crew, whose portrayals are both genuine and touched with the humanity and sympathy of good, common folk.
The writing is good, even if the story itself seems less than complete and tinged by stereotypes. Except for Staunton, none of the other actors knew the film was about abortion until their character finds out. This is typical of Mike Leigh films, where often the plot and its windings are improvised; in this case the result is an extraordinary image of the depth of human emotion and response to trial brought to life by authentic performances.
Some things don’t quite add up, however. It is a little odd that Vera never once, in her twenty year career as a weekend abortionist, accepts money for her work (or even brings the question of money up). It’s even odder that she manages to keep this double life a secret from her family (though perhaps they were blinded by their enthusiasm for being working class commoners).
Despite the weaknesses of the story and Staunton’s character and performance, the film succeeds. Instead of typical, heavy-handed Hollywood politics, Vera Drake gives two sides of a debate, long since amplified, the respect and objectivity they deserve. Whilst there could have been more explored here, this film stands out as an excellent character performance piece and examination of British class systems in the 1950′s.
Fringe Rating: out of 5

A Slight Fisking of Pollitt

jelewis8 — Fri, 18 Jul 2003 19:07:43 +0000

Katha Pollitt comments on the abortion poll posted here. I only read through about half of this before I got completely turned off by her blatant misuse of numbers. Polls, it seems, are only useful when they favour leftist thinking. Here, Pollitt somehow manages to nix the numbers while simultaneously supporting them. Here, she attacks the poll?s reliability:

You could argue that the very act of conducting a lengthy poll by telephone skews the response pool. What sort of person bares her soul to pollsters for upward of an hour–and during the holiday season yet? The sort of person, apparently, who has never heard of Roe v. Wade, which only 43 percent could identify.

And then a little further into the column she writes:

Respondents were slightly poorer than the national average, and more likely to be married (56 percent versus 52 percent); wives tend to be more conservative than single women. Most controversial, 45 percent identified themselves as “born-again or Evangelical Christian,” in line with the Gallup poll but substantially higher than some others (a July 2001 ABC poll came up with 37 percent). Perhaps an overrepresentation of marrieds and born-agains helps explain the abortion responses, which are on the anti-choice end of the current spectrum of polls.

Apparently Pollitt doesn?t consider poor, married, and Christian women to have as much weight as wealthy, single, religiously unaffiliated women in the feminist movement. This is one of the most damning reasons why feminism has been proclaimed as a dying movement. The hypocrisy of the movement are its claims of universality, yet offer only exclusivity and partisanship. Sounds like a political ideology that starts with ?L?.
The rest of her column is fairly typical liberal claptrap, occasionally glossing over important facts of the poll in order to strengthen her case. She finally ends with a call for feminists and activists and other ‘ists’ to take action, since the poll reveals that “[they've] let the grassroots education and activism slide.”
Hmmm, but I thought the poll was completely unreliable?