Quentin Tarantino's alternative reading of the Body Snatchers movies.

From his new book, "Cinema Speculation" (boldface added):

[T]he Pod People transformation is closer to a rebirth than a murder. You’re reborn as straight intellect, with a complete possession of your past and your abilities, but unburdened by messy human emotions. You also possess a complete fidelity to your fellow beings and a total commitment to the survival of your species. Are they inhuman? Of course, they’re vegetables. But the movies try to present their lack of humanity (they don’t have a sense of humor, they’re unmoved when a dog is hit by a car) as evidence of some deep-seated sinisterness. That’s a rather species-centric point of view. As human beings it may be our emotions that make us human, but it’s a stretch to say it’s what makes us great. Along with those positive emotions—love, joy, happiness, amusement—come negative emotions—hate, selfishness, racism, depression, violence, and rage....

"[T]o an almost comical degree, this revised version of the exhibition exemplifies a conflict between an old idea of art as an index to everything that is profound, slippery, enigmatic and unknowable and..."

"... a new conception of art museums as places peddling 'wellness,' promoting the appearance of wokeness and finding institutional purpose in the culture of therapy. 'Philip Guston Now' frames Guston’s profound and complicated oeuvre with patronizing wall labels. At the entrance to the exhibition and on the museum’s website, we are offered an 'Emotional Preparedness' statement by health and trauma specialist Ginger Klee, MS, LMFT, LPCC. Patrons are also offered an opportunity to exit the exhibition ahead of the gallery showing some of Guston’s cartoonlike images of crude, deliberately pathetic figures with Ku Klux Klan hoods.... Only on my second walk through the show, when I made a conscious decision not to read anything, did I remember how much I love Guston and his hectic, overbearing, goofy, maudlin, self-mocking, mute and reliably perverse view of the world. In a time of cant, where almost every cultural product is advertising something and defending preemptively against something else, Guston’s generous art is liberating."

From "In long-awaited Philip Guston show, great art comes with a warning The ‘Philip Guston Now’ exhibition, controversially postponed in 2020, has opened at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts" by Sebastian Smee (WaPo). 

Here's my post from September 26, 2020: "4 major museums have postponed a retrospective for a highly respected painter — Philip Guston — because some of the paintings have images of the KKK." My reaction at the time:

"But the people who run our great institutions do not want trouble. They fear controversy. They lack faith in the intelligence of their audience."

"And they realize that to remind museum-goers of white supremacy today is not only to speak to them about the past, or events somewhere else. It is also to raise uncomfortable questions about museums themselves—about their class and racial foundations. For this reason, perhaps, those who run the museums feel the ground giving way beneath their feet. If they feel that in four years, 'all this will blow over,' they are mistaken. The tremors shaking us all will never end until justice and equity are installed. Hiding away images of the KKK will not serve that end."

From "Open Letter: On Philip Guston Now" (Google docs), via "The Philip Guston Show Should Be Reinstated/An open letter, signed by nearly 100 artists, curators and critics, accuses four museums of 'hiding away' from controversy. A long postponement is an admission these institutions are not up to the job" (NYT). We talked about this controversy on the blog a few days ago, here.

The NYT art critic Jason Farago writes:

For as the artists suggest in their open letter, the reason to reinstate “Philip Guston Now” is not, or certainly not only, because he passes some anti-racist litmus test. It is to continue and accelerate the transformation of our museums into institutions that can do justice to the work of all artists and the experiences of all publics. A museum unequipped to exhibit Guston will never be able to show truly “problematic” artists like Paul Gauguin or Francis Picabia — but just as inevitably it will fail [Matthew] Barney’s mythopoetic melding of bodies, [Joan] Jonas’s culturally hybrid meditations on gender and climate, [Adrian] Piper’s exacting probes of self and stereotypes.

Barney, Jonas, and Piper are all signatories of the open letter. The NYT critic says, "Really, a museum unequipped to exhibit Guston is barely a museum at all, or else only a museum in the most derogatory sense: a dusty storehouse of dead things." And then he suddenly, in his last paragraph, talks about... can you guess?

4 major museums have postponed a retrospective for a highly respected painter — Philip Guston — because some of the paintings have images of the KKK.

I'm reading "Delay of Philip Guston Retrospective Divides the Art World/;Philip Guston Now' has become Philip Guston in 2024, after four museums postponed an artist’s show that includes Klan imagery."

There's no reason to think Guston liked the Klan. It's for the viewer to gaze on these painterly cartoons...



... and wonder what the hell is this supposed to mean? or just to think hmmm, there's that or whatever you think in a museum... those bastions of white supremacy!

Maybe you think, yeah, this is all cute fun or mysterious ambiguity for elite white folks but it's all made possible by an unexamined sense that black people don't matter.

Okay, but maybe Guston meant to say that — to draw you in and then challenge you to confront your impulse to accept the KKK when it's painted and in a museum.

From the NYT article:

This week, the directors of those museums released a joint statement saying that they were “postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.”...

Darby English, a professor of art history at the University of Chicago and a former adjunct curator at the Museum of Modern Art, called the decision “cowardly” and “an insult to art and the public alike.”

And Mark Godfrey, a curator at Tate Modern in London who co-organized the exhibition, posted a searing statement on Instagram saying that the decision was “extremely patronizing” to audiences because it assumes that they are not able to understand and appreciate the nuance of Guston’s works.

Nuance! I saw people in my town tear down a statue of a young man who died in battle fighting against slavery, and Godfrey is criticizing the museums for failing to credit the public with high-level discernment! Of course, it's irksome for museums to over-explain the works of art, but the museums are rightfully afraid of destructive attacks on the paintings. I know the official statement is that the works need to be presented more "clearly" — what? with lots of wall cards saying the artist opposed the KKK? — but the real motivation must be a fear of violence and destruction.

"I think if they want to start trouble they should do it in their own town. We didn't ask for 'em, we ain't never done nothing to them. And I don't really see what the reason is for them being here."

Said Zinc resident Kenny Devore, quoted in "BLM protesters troop through 'America's most racist town': Demonstrators march to entrance of KKK national director Thomas Robb's private Arkansas compound as armed local residents watch them file past" (Daily Mail).

Sunday's protest was organized by Bridge the Gap NWA and also promoted by Ozarks Hate Watch.... Once in Zinc, the group posted pictures of armed men - some in military-style fatigues - standing in front of cars blocking a dirt road to Robb's compound....

There were no reports of any violence during the protest.... On Sunday night, after the protesters left Zinc 'All safe and secure,' Ozark Hate Watch member said that the protest had taken two months to plan amongst different activist groups.

They said that despite claims, 'our plan did not involve setting one foot on Lead Hill Road or making advances toward Tom Robb's property. We kept it close to the chest to give ourselves a tactical advantage for sake of security.'

'What happened in zinc today was history,' Aaron Clarke said in a Facebook Live video. He added that the group was not run out of town 'with their tails tucked between their legs. We went down there and nobody's been down there, nobody's ever protested in that community. ... We literally went and threw a barbecue in the KKK's backyard. We came down there to bridge the gap...what we did was we went into the community that has basically operated by the Ku Klux Klan and we extended our hand. We came down there with food for anybody who wanted food, they were able to get food,' Clarke said.

So did they "bridge the gap"? Are they declaring victory because they were not  "run out of town 'with their tails tucked between their legs'"? Isn't that a victory for the locals, who neither hid from the outsiders who marched into their town nor resorted to anything like violence or hostility? But the protesters are boasting about their 2 months of planning and their "tactical advantage" after walking into a town where nothing happened.

Is Zinc, Arkansas "the KKK's backyard"? I don't know, but I wanted to get a Google maps "street view" of the place, and it was not available. I could see that the place is very small. Here's the Wikipedia article for the town. Population 103. 37 households. Median household income: $20,036.

The last store closed in Zinc in the late 1960s and the post office closed in 1975. Zinc, in the 21st century, became the headquarters of a chapter of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).... The "Christian Revival Center" near Zinc belongs to a preacher who is also the leader of the Knights of the KKK. The center hosts events connected with the KKK, including in 2013 a "Klan Kamp" called the "Soldiers of the Cross Training Institute" to instill "the tools to become actively involved" in the "struggle for our racial redemption."

There are 2 National Historic sites in Zinc: the Zinc Swinging Bridge and the Elliott and Anna Barham House:


CC Auntiepookie91

"A growing chorus of economists is seeking to dislodge the editor of a top academic publication, the University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig, after he criticized the Black Lives Matter organization on Twitter..."

"... and equated its members with 'flat earthers' over their embrace of calls to defund police departments.... Mr. Uhlig’s Twitter posts criticized demonstrators.... 'Look: I understand, that some out there still wish to go and protest and say #defundpolice and all kinds of stuff, while you are still young and responsibility does not matter,' Mr. Uhlig wrote. 'Enjoy! Express yourself! Just don’t break anything, ok? And be back by 8 pm.'... Mr. Uhlig, a 59-year-old German citizen, also faced scrutiny over past writings on his blog.... Those included a 2017 post in which he asked supporters of National Football League players kneeling to protest police brutality, 'Would you defend football players waving the confederate flag and dressing in Ku Klux Klan garb during the playing of the national anthem?' Mr. Uhlig also wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 2016, complaining about calls for greater diversity in the motion picture industry at the Academy Awards. 'This whole "diversity = more American blacks in Hollywood movies" thing?' he wrote. 'So so strange. Really.' Janet L. Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chair, said in an email on Wednesday that 'the tweets and blog posts by Harald Uhlig are extremely troubling' and that 'it would be appropriate for the University of Chicago, which is the publisher of the Journal of Political Economy, to review Uhlig’s performance and suitability to continue as editor.'"

From "Economics, Dominated by White Men, Is Roiled by Black Lives Matter/The editor of a top academic journal faces calls to resign after criticizing protesters as 'flat earthers' for wanting to defund the police" (NYT).

ADDED: "Would you defend football players waving the confederate flag and dressing in Ku Klux Klan garb during the playing of the national anthem?" That's a perfectly phrased Socratic question, so let's raise a glass for Professor Uhlig.

Some people are taking the Democratic women's wearing of white and connecting it with the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan.

For example, at Instapundit:



I don't like this, taking clothing that people put on in an upbeat positive mood and turning it into something ugly.

But that's the move made by Democrats against the Americans who thought they were expressing something optimistic with their MAGA hats. Democrats have worked hard at rebranding the clothing so it would mean racism. They wanted to deprive the hat wearers of the powerful visual form of expression they'd found. They want the message to be: If you wear that hat now — now that we've shown you want we say it means — you must want to be identified as a racist.

I don't like that KKK flip on the Congresswomen's homage to women's suffrage. But if turnabout is fairplay, it's not unfair.

I'd rather call us to a higher level, but you know that I think that in politics, all calls for civility are bullshit. I'd like to be outside of politics, merely observing, from that position I've called "cruel neutrality." So maybe I'm not a hypocrite if I say, don't tie the suffrage expression to the KKK. But I completely realize that if you go along with me about that, it's not going to stop the Trump-haters who are dead-set on stamping the MAGA hat with the meaning RACISM.

Should we try to understand Governor Northam or demand that he Al Franken himself?

Is the Democratic Party the party of no forgiveness? Does it need its own guy to kill himself because they want to be able to kill other people? Unquestionably, if a picture like this...



... had shown up from President Trump's old yearbook, Democrats would yell that he must resign. How can they retain their credibility to ruin Republicans if they don't destroy their own? I see Kamala Harris jumped right in to lead the pack. Harris is to Northam what Gillibrand was to Franken. Instant death. No pausing to reflect on human frailty. No empathy for the the imperfect judgment of young people. No contextualizing, even so soon after people misread what they saw in the photograph of the Covington Catholic boy and the Native American elder.

What was the context? Is asking for the context extending white privilege and contributing to the ravages of racism? I want to read Northham's own statement. Does that make me complicit in historical evil? The Democratic frontrunner for President, Kamala Harris, didn't sound interested in context, understanding, or empathy. She performed snap judgment. Northam must resign.

But let's read. Let's see what Northam gives us to think about.

Earlier today, a website published a photograph of me from my 1984 medical school yearbook in a costume that is clearly racist and offensive.

So we know that is him in the photograph... but which one is he? And why isn't he telling us?! Maybe if I could figure out which costume is worse, I'd know why he isn't telling. The KKK character is the evil one, but the other one is blackface, and everyone knows that a white person must never, ever put on blackface. I mean, Ted Danson didn't know in 1993 (and Whoopi Goldberg dared him to do it (he said)) but young Ralph Northam was supposed to know in 1983.

What was the occasion? A costume party of some sort? Is there anything to be said about the apparent camaraderie between the Klansman and the black man? Some vision of the peaceable kingdom: "The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together..."



But a white man put on blackface and another white man put on a KKK outfit and that's all the there is: Northam's statement, adding nothing but a confession that he was inside one of those costumes, implicitly says, there is no context to consider. To contextualize would be to minimize guilt, when he wants to take on full guilt... except for the little detail of costume was his. (Is he waiting to hear which costume is worse? Which one does he want to be, given that he has to be one?)

The statement continues:

I am deeply sorry for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo...

You mean as a Klansman or as a black man? I'd like to know, even as I'm unsure which is worse.

... and for the hurt that decision caused then and now. This behavior is not in keeping with who I am today...

But who were you then? What did the costume mean? Were you actually a racist at the time? I'd like to know what he remembers thinking and what other people said. Maybe he isn't talking about it because there was some garish racial foolery or even bigotry, but I suspect he's keeping it short because he's been advised that any attempt to explain will be taken as a failure to take racism seriously. You'll be making it worse.

... and the values I have fought for throughout my career in the military, in medicine, and in public service. But I want to be clear, I understand how this decision shakes Virginians’ faith in that commitment. I recognize that it will take time and serious effort to heal the damage this conduct has caused. I am ready to do that important work. The first step is to offer my sincerest apology and to state my absolute commitment to living up to the expectations Virginians set for me when they elected me to be their Governor.

The elements of an apology are thus firmly in place. Must he also resign? This isn't the Senate. He can't be expelled by a bunch of Senators like Al Franken. But Al Franken ousted himself when the Senators banded together against him. Will Northam take himself out? If he does, what will it mean?

Let's look to Kamala Harris as a source of meaning. Her tweet:

Leaders are called to a higher standard, and the stain of racism should have no place in the halls of government. The Governor of Virginia should step aside so the public can heal and move forward together.

Northam did something 30 years ago. How is his presence in the "halls of government" the presence of the "stain of racism"? This is grandiose and severe language. And yet it purports to give priority to healing and moving forward. If we really cared about healing and moving forward, wouldn't we believe that a man may have moved forward over the course of 30 years and not insist that he is stained forever?

If we are stained forever by what is in the past, then there is no healing, no moving forward — ever, no matter what. So how could Northam's resignation help us do what cannot be done? And, most absurdly, how are we moving forward "together" if the main thing that must be done is to leave one of us behind? There is no "together," no "healing," no "moving forward," just relentless stain, rejection, and punishment.

I'm concentrating on Kamala Harris, because she seems to be the Democratic Party frontrunner for President and because her call for Northam's resignation is the first one I've heard, but others have followed the same path of no forgiveness. The candidates for President look desperate not to be left behind. They see which way things seem to be going and they rush to get there too. Julian Castro, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Sherrod Brown,  John Hickenlooper,  Eric Swalwell (who?), Terry McAuliffe. I see why they have to do it, to preserve the Democratic Party brand, and yet I think it's an awful brand — relentless, unforgiving, without context, without careful consideration.

And (most ironically) it makes it harder to say that racism is pervasive and runs throughout humanity. We're stuck in a shallow ritual of identifying scapegoats and imagining that we could emerge from that ritual stainless and whole.

What a terribly bad week it's been for Gov. Northam.

Today, there's this:

BREAKING: Gov. Ralph Northam yearbook page shows blackface and Klan photohttps://t.co/6A89ejp5Ho

— The Virginian-Pilot (@virginianpilot) February 1, 2019

And earlier this week, a lot of people heard him saying he'd accept infanticide, though I myself gave him a charitable reading and never took it that way.

As for the blackface and Klansman photo, what's the charitable reading? He's not responsible for his yearbook page? Remember last September how seriously Democrats took Bret Kavanaugh's yearbook page?

"Today, in the internet age, anyone can be a Nigerian prince. In Mr. Abel’s time, however, the hoaxer’s art — involving intricate planning..."

"... hiring actors, donning disguises, printing official-looking letterheads, staging news conferences and having the media swallow the story hook, line and sinker — entailed, for better or worse, a level of old-time craftsmanship whose like will almost certainly not be seen again.... Mr. Abel’s first major hoax, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, or SINA — which sought 'to clothe all naked animals that appear in public, namely horses, cows, dogs and cats, including any animal that stands higher than 4 inches or is longer than 6 inches' — began in 1959.... Over the next few years, the organization’s activities (including a 1963 picket of the White House by Mr. Abel, who demanded that the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, clothe her horses) were faithfully reported by news organizations, among them The Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and CBS News.... Then there was Omar’s School for Beggars, a New York City institution founded amid the recession of the 1970s, which claimed to teach the nouveau poor the gentle art of panhandling.... the subject of credulous coverage by many news outlets, including The Miami Herald and New York magazine.... There were also the Topless String Quartet, with which, Mr. Abel said, an unsuspecting Frank Sinatra wanted to book a recording session; the Ku Klux Klan Symphony Orchestra, which, he said, the failed presidential candidate and former Klan grand wizard David Duke briefly accepted an invitation to conduct; Females for Felons, a group of Junior Leaguers who selflessly donated sex to the incarcerated; the mass 'fainting' of audience members during a live broadcast of 'The Phil Donahue Show'; his 'discovery' (he posed as a former White House employee) of the missing 18½ minutes from the Watergate tapes; Euthanasia Cruises ('For people who wanted to expire in luxury,' Mr. Abel’s website recounted); Citizens Against Breastfeeding....  To some observers, Mr. Abel’s antics were a Rabelaisian delight. To others, especially members of the news media who had been taken in, they were an unalloyed menace."

From "Alan Abel, Hoaxer Extraordinaire, Is (on Good Authority) Dead at 94" (NYT).

"'No one is disputing how the courts have ruled on this,' john a. powell, a Berkeley law professor with joint appointments in the departments of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies, told me."

"'What I’m saying is that courts are often wrong.' Powell is tall, with a relaxed sartorial style, and his manner of speaking is soft and serenely confident. Before he became an academic, he was the national legal director of the A.C.L.U. 'I represented the Ku Klux Klan when I was in that job,' he said. 'My family was not pleased with me, but I said, Look, they have First Amendment rights, too. So it’s not that I don’t understand or care deeply about free speech. But what would it look like if we cared just as deeply about equality? What if we weighed the two as conflicting values, instead of this false formalism where the right to speech is recognized but the harm caused by that speech is not?'... In the nineteen-seventies, when women entered the workplace in large numbers, some male bosses made salacious comments, or hung pornographic images on the walls. 'These days, we’d say, That’s a hostile workplace, that’s sexual harassment,' powell said. 'But those weren’t recognized legal concepts yet. So the courts’ response was Sorry, nothing we can do. Pornographic posters are speech. If women don’t like it, they can put up their own posters.' He drew an analogy to today’s trolls and white supremacists. 'The knee-jerk response is Nothing we can do, it’s speech. ‘Well, hold on, what about the harm they’re causing?’ What harm? It’s just words. That might sound intuitive to us now. But, if you know the history, you can imagine how our intuitions might look foolish, even immoral, a generation later.'"

From "How Social-Media Trolls Turned U.C. Berkeley Into a Free-Speech Circus/Public universities have no choice but to welcome far-right speakers seeking self-promotion. Should the First Amendment be reinterpreted for the digital age?" by Andrew Marantz (in The New Yorker).

Is "self-promotion" a special right-wing motivation? Is there some idea that a left-wing speaker promotes his ideas, but a right-wing speaker promotes only himself — that left-wingers are earnest and sincere and bring substance to the campus milieu but right-wingers are demagogues who belong in the hinterlands, braying to some mob?

There's a lot about Milo Yiannopoulos in that article, by the way.

As for john a. powell, he's saying things that are scarcely new. They were standard fare in the legal academy a quarter century ago. That is, it's already "a generation later." His sarcasm at "It’s just words" sounds straight out of "Only Words," the book Catharine MacKinnon published in 1994, and "Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, And The First Amendment (New Perspectives on Law, Culture, and Society)" a collection of essays some Critical Race theory lawprofs put out in 1995.

These ideas have been pushed for a very long time, and there's still an intense effort to clear the campus of competing ideas about freedom of speech. I was utterly surrounded by those left-wing views back in the early 90s, and I find it wonderful that they're still so outré that a lawprof today presents them as intriguingly new. What a miracle that Americans still believe in freedom of speech!

ADDED: The NYT has a very similar article today, "The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience" by a philosophy professor, Bryan W. Van Norden. He wants elite institutions to embrace forthright viewpoint discrimination — justified by portraying the ideas he finds offensive as "ignorant":

Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has complained that men can’t “control crazy women” because men “have absolutely no respect” for someone they cannot physically fight. Does this adolescent opinion deserve as much of an audience as the nuanced thoughts of Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, about the role of “himpathy” in supporting misogyny?...

There is a clear line between censoring someone and refusing to provide them with institutional resources for disseminating their ideas... What just access means in terms of positive policy is that institutions that are the gatekeepers to the public have a fiduciary responsibility to award access based on the merit of ideas and thinkers. To award space in a campus lecture hall to someone like Peterson who says that feminists “have an unconscious wish for brutal male domination”...  is not to display admirable intellectual open-mindedness. It is to take a positive stand that these views are within the realm of defensible rational discourse, and that these people are worth taking seriously as thinkers.

Neither is true: These views are specious, and those who espouse them are, at best, ignorant, at worst, sophists. The invincibly ignorant and the intellectual huckster have every right to express their opinions, but their right to free speech is not the right to an audience. 

Who would spray paint "Tear It Down" on a statue of Joan of Arc in New Orleans?

I'm reading this story at PJ Media  — which misquotes the graffiti in the headline and makes it sound as though the graffiti was on the statue when it's actually on the base. So let's switch to The Times-Picayune (which is linked at PJ Media):

The phrase "Tear it Down" was hastily sprayed in black paint across the base of the golden Joan of Arc statue on Decatur Street in the French Quarter sometime earlier this week. It has since been removed, with only the vaguest traces of the paint remaining.

The "Tear it Down" tag would seem to relate to the debate surrounding the city's ongoing removal of four Confederate monuments. But the statue of Joan of Arc, a 15th-century military leader, martyr and Catholic saint, hasn't been mentioned in the controversy to this point.

Now, wait a minute! This article is from last May, and the PJ Media article went up yesterday and doesn't mention that the defacing of the Joan of Arc monument predated the current uproar over the removal of Civil War monuments. But there was a "Take Em Down NOLA" movement at the time that — as the Times-Picayune tells us — aimed at the local Confederate monuments (and this group denies targeting the Joan).

Anyway, who would spray paint "Tear It Down" on a Joan of Arc monument? Do you leap to assume that some idiot believes that Joan of Arc has to do with the Confederacy? Maybe that's how you have fun. At PJ Media, the author (Tom Knighton) does not assume it was ignorance about Joan of Arc. At the end of his piece he says:

It's also possible that this was the result of someone being intentionally ridiculous. After all, while removing statues of Confederate leaders is the big thing, there are also movements to remove a Thomas Jefferson monument from outside of Columbia University and a Teddy Roosevelt from outside of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. So maybe someone is just trolling these lunatics.

Yes, that theory fits the facts better than the theory that some idiot thought it was a pro-Confederacy statue.

But it could also be anti-Catholic. Speaking of ignorance of American history, it's ignorant not to know that the KKK and other nationalists have been virulently anti-Catholic. Here's a Wikipedia article, "Anti-Catholicism in the United States."

Here's some KKK artwork from 1925:

You see the tear-it-down enthusiasm.

There are people who would want to take down a statue of a Catholic saint. Quite aside from the KKK, what about people who want the strict separation of religion and government? Why is there a religious monument in the public square?

"18-year-old Keshia Thomas protects a fallen man, believed to be associated with the Ku Klux Klan from an angry mob of anti-clan protestors."

"Ann Arbor, Michigan USA. 1996 By Mark Brunner."

A popular new post — with an old photo — at Reddit.

Top-rated comment:

Something like that happened to John McCain when he was captured. The lynch mob was held back only by a North Vietnamese nurse who protected him.

And here's a link to a 2016 article following up on Keshia Thomas:

"We all have a conscience and it was my responsibility to do what I felt was right," Thomas said in a phone interview on June 23, the day after the 20-year anniversary of the incident....

Thomas remembers appearing in opposition to the KKK group in an effort organized by the National Women's Rights Organizing Coalition outside Ann Arbor's city hall on June 22, 1996. At one point, a woman with a megaphone shouted, "There's a Klansman in the crowd!"

Thomas, who was still in high school, turned and saw McKeel Jr., taking off away from the crowd. It wasn't long before mob mentality took over and the crowd had McKeel on the ground.

Thomas, horrified to see the man being kicked and beaten, threw herself on top of McKeel to shield him from the blows.

The anti-Trump Festivus pole, installed next to the 100-foot-tall Christmas tree in Delray Beach, and the Satanic pentagram in the park in Boca Raton.

It's interesting reading about these 2 displays the morning after my last law school class — which was about how sometimes the government gets itself into the position where it has to accept displays like this. (There's a Supreme Court case that said the city of Columbus, Ohio violated freedom of speech when it refused to allow the KKK to put up a cross on the statehouse grounds.)

The pentagram display in Boca Raton doesn't seem to be from an actual Satanist:

The man behind the display is Preston Smith. The city of Boca Raton gave him a permit to put up the display and the Freedom from Religion Foundation provided a Bill of Rights banner that accompanies the pentagram. In a statement, Smith said in part, "Love trumps hate. The First Amendment must be protected, including the freedom to offend."

Local "interfaith clergy" put out a statement saying they believe in freedom of speech but:

The use of satanic symbols is offensive, and harmful to our community’s well being. We find it a shameful and hypocritical way to advocate for freedom from religion. 

I think what we need here is for some real Satanists to step up and object to the hate speech against them. Why is their tradition being appropriated by nonbelievers as a symbol of hate? The proponents of non-hate seem to be hating on a minority group that has traditionally been marginalized and subjected to opprobrium. How is kicking this group around a call to love? Twisted thinking!

Meanwhile, in Delray Beach — a quick 9-mile drive — you've got your Festivus pole — wrapped in an upside-down American flag and topped with a "Make America Great Again" hat and stuck with a safety pin. The man behind the pole, one Chez Stevens, characterizes the pole as an anti-Trump statement.

Unsurprisingly, the hat has been stolen. The pentagram, for its part, has attracted spray paint.

Random skirmishes from the Florida front of the war on Christmas.

Can Bernie help Hillary?

Look at the body language in this photograph (at the NYT). The chairs are set on the stage with room between them, so that the candidates could sit squarely on the seats and be close enough without touching, but both candidates sit off center. Bernie is quite far over to the side, and he's also crossing his leg away from her and high up on the knee to create a barrier which is fortified by his arm stretched all the way out across the leg. His other hand is in his pocket. Hillary, for her part, is turned away from Bernie, and she has her ankles crossed and her hands clasped in her lap.

The accompanying article, published today, is titled "Presidential Election: Any Surprises Left?" The political preference of the NYT is hilariously highlighted by the 2 headings: "Will the stars align for Mrs. Clinton?" and "Will the K.K.K. return to front and center?" As to the "stars"* aligning, the "surprise" for Hillary is that Pharrell Williams, Jay Z, and Katy Perry are performing at rallies, "working hard to drum up interest among millennial voters." And the political stars, Obama, Biden, and Bernie are doing events.

Judging from the photograph, Bernie is withholding his full and open support. Perhaps he knows that the passion and heightened consciousness that he inspired cannot simply be handed to Hillary Clinton. Or perhaps Bernie had recently read that newly leaked email:

In February, longtime Clinton adviser and Democratic insider Joel Johnson had sent an email to Clinton campaign head John Podesta, emphasizing, “Bernie needs to be ground to a pulp. We can’t start believing our own primary bullshit. This is no time to run the general. Crush him as hard as you can.”

Just after Salon reported Johnson’s message on Thursday morning, however, the whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks released another trove of emails to and from Podesta. In this new batch of messages appeared Podesta’s response to Johnson’s advice.

“I agree with that in principle,” Podesta wrote in reply to Johnson’s “no mercy” email.

“Where would you stick the knife in?” Podesta asked....

Johnson proposed portraying Sanders as an “Obama betrayer,” noting that the White House would help affirm the talking point. He also said Sanders should be depicted as a “hapless legislator,” which other members of Congress would help affirm; a “false promiser,” which “policy elites” would affirm; and as someone who is unable to win, which “black people will affirm.”

_______________________

* Did you know that when you're a star, they let you do anything?

Ken Burns uses his commencement address to tell Stanford students they must oppose and fight against Donald Trump.

Here's some very heavy-handed rhetoric — ironically against another man's heavy-handed rhetoric — that shouldn't be imposed on the captive audience of a graduating class and the guests who want to celebrate them, but I can see that he thinks it's such an emergency that the normal rules do not apply — which, again ironically, is why Donald Trump must think he's got to talk the way he does.

So before you do anything with your well-earned degree, you must do everything you can to defeat the retrograde forces that have invaded our democratic process, divided our house, to fight against, no matter your political persuasion, the dictatorial tendencies of the candidate with zero experience in the much maligned but subtle art of governance; who is against lots of things, but doesn’t seem to be for anything, offering only bombastic and contradictory promises, and terrifying Orwellian statements; a person who easily lies, creating an environment where the truth doesn’t seem to matter; who has never demonstrated any interest in anyone or anything but himself and his own enrichment; who insults veterans, threatens a free press, mocks the handicapped, denigrates women, immigrants and all Muslims; a man who took more than a day to remember to disavow a supporter who advocates white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan; an infantile, bullying man who, depending on his mood, is willing to discard old and established alliances, treaties and long-standing relationships. I feel genuine sorrow for the understandably scared and—they feel—powerless people who have flocked to his campaign in the mistaken belief that--as often happens on TV--a wand can be waved and every complicated problem can be solved with the simplest of solutions. They can’t. It is a political Ponzi scheme. And asking this man to assume the highest office in the land would be like asking a newly minted car driver to fly a 747.

As a student of history, I recognize this type. He emerges everywhere and in all eras. We see nurtured in his campaign an incipient Proto-fascism, a nativist anti-immigrant Know Nothing-ism, a disrespect for the judiciary, the prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies, African Americans again asked to go to the back of the line, voter suppression gleefully promoted, jingoistic saber rattling, a total lack of historical awareness, a political paranoia that, predictably, points fingers, always making the other wrong. These are all virulent strains that have at times infected us in the past. But they now loom in front of us again--all happening at once. We know from our history books that these are the diseases of ancient and now fallen empires. The sense of commonwealth, of shared sacrifice, of trust, so much a part of American life, is eroding fast, spurred along and amplified by an amoral Internet that permits a lie to circle the globe three times before the truth can get started.

We no longer have the luxury of neutrality or “balance,” or even of bemused disdain. Many of our media institutions have largely failed to expose this charlatan, torn between a nagging responsibility to good journalism and the big ratings a media circus always delivers. In fact, they have given him the abundant airtime he so desperately craves, so much so that it has actually worn down our natural human revulsion to this kind of behavior. Hey, he’s rich; he must be doing something right. He is not. Edward R. Murrow would have exposed this naked emperor months ago. He is an insult to our history. Do not be deceived by his momentary “good behavior.” It is only a spoiled, misbehaving child hoping somehow to still have dessert.

"Everyone mistook a priest for a KKK member last night."

"Last night around 9:15 PM, social media became a furious storm of confusion regarding a man in white robes roaming along 10th St. and purportedly armed with a whip...."

ADDED: Preparing for class today, I ran into exactly the material I was trying to call to mind as I was writing this post. I'm teaching the same-sex marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges, and I was rereading the post I wrote last June as I was encountering Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion for the first time:

In a straining-to-be-memorable passage, Justice Scalia says the majority hides its usurpation of power "beneath the mummeries and straining-to-be-memorable passages of the opinion." (A "mummery" is a "Ridiculous ceremony (formerly used esp. of religious ritual regarded as pretentious or hypocritical).") That's from the OED, which gives an example of the word from Frederick Lewis Allen's 1931 book "Only Yesterday/An Informal History of the 1920's": "[The Ku Klux Klan's] white robe and hood, its flaming cross, its secrecy, and the preposterous vocabulary of its ritual could be made the vehicle for all that infantile love of hocus-pocus and mummery, that lust for secret adventure, which survives in the adult whose lot is cast in drab places.")

Nothing like a priest.

Despite student protests, the Princeton board of trustees has voted to keep the name Woodrow Wilson on its various buildings and programs.

The NYT reports.

Wilson has been a much-loved figure at Princeton, but in September, the Black Justice League, a student activist group, distributed posters around campus that revealed his views on race, including his comment to an African-American leader that, “Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”

As president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson reintroduced segregation into the federal work force, admired the Ku Klux Klan and did not believe that black Americans were worthy of full citizenship.

The board also rejected a demand that faculty and staff submit to cultural competency training and that students take a course on the history of a marginalized people. The demand for a place on campus dedicated to black students was, ironically, met.

Why wouldn't Donald Trump "unequivocally condemn David Duke and say that [he doesn't] want his vote or that of other white supremacists in this election"?

I'm seeing the news stories about Donald Trump's inability/unwillingness to distance himself from white supremacist groups. Let's take a closer look at the key dialogue, which took place on "State of the Union" with Jake Tapper:

TAPPER: I want to ask you about the Anti-Defamation League, which this week called on you to publicly condemn unequivocally the racism of former KKK grand wizard David Duke, who recently said that voting against you at this point would be treason to your heritage. Will you unequivocally condemn David Duke and say that you don't want his vote or that of other white supremacists in this election? 

That's some strong language. Trump might want to distance himself from these people, but Tapper is asking him to condemn an individual and to reject the votes of a vague set of persons. That's hard to do, but a politician is normally expected to step right up and do it, lest he give his antagonists any raw material to use to depict him as a racist. Of course, Trump is already used to people depicting him as a racist, and he already knows he can withstand their attack and even get benefit from it. And here's Super Tuesday coming up, with all those southern states. Who knows how many voters he's being asked to tell not to vote for him? Maybe Trump actively wants to signal to these people that he's their guy, and maybe he wants to signal to a much broader group that some slick media character isn't going to lure him back toward that place known as political correctness.

Trump responds:

TRUMP: Well, just so you understand, I don't know anything about David Duke. OK? I don't know anything about what you're even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So, I don't know. I don't know, did he endorse me or what's going on, because, you know, I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists. And so you're asking me a question that I'm supposed to be talking about people that I know nothing about. 

That's 7 times he said I don't know. There's something weird about that. Why not say it once, twice, or even 3 times and then stop? He could have said: You're asking me to condemn a particular individual and I don't know him. I don't know what he said. I don't condemn people without knowing the details. That's not fair. I'm a very fair guy. Something more like that. Saying I don't know 7 times is going to make us start thinking — maybe around the 5th or 6th time — that you do know, you're denying, and you even want us to know that you know.

Tapper continues:

TAPPER: But I guess the question from the Anti-Defamation League is, even if you don't know about their endorsement, there are these groups and individuals endorsing you. Would you just say unequivocally you condemn them and you don't want their support? 

Tapper sticks to his question form. He wants Trump to condemn people (not just distance himself from them) and to say he doesn't want votes from a whole, large, undefined group. That makes it hard to say "yes" to Tapper's question, but a good communicator knows how to ignore the verbatim question and frame an answer to say exactly what he wants. That's what Trump does:

TRUMP: Well, I have to look at the group. I mean, I don't know what group you're talking about. You wouldn't want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about. I would have to look. If you would send me a list of the groups, I will do research on them. And, certainly, I would disavow if I thought there was something wrong. 

Tapper is hot for the kill:

TAPPER: The Ku Klux Klan?

Suddenly, for the first time, he's naming a group that you can't say you don't know. Only an ignoramus doesn't know the Ku Klux Klan, and it seems obvious that anyone with any pretense to the American mainstream would want to make sure the KKK name doesn't get stuck on him. Does Trump spring into self-protection mode? He keeps calm:

TRUMP: But you may have groups in there that are totally fine, and it would be very unfair. So, give me a list of the groups, and I will let you know.

He's steadfast in his position that fairness demands more detail, and — to be more cynical — gives the subject a push to float it past Super Tuesday — after all the Southern voters — who knows their precise affiliations? — have cast their votes.

TAPPER: OK. I mean, I'm just talking about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan here, but...

Tapper strives for the sound bite... or maybe he's genuinely perplexed that Trump won't react in the self-protective mode that normally works in interviews like this. Trump has one more line before Tapper gives up and goes on to the cooler topic of who'd be Trump's veep.

TRUMP: I don't know any -- honestly, I don't know David Duke. I don't believe I have ever met him. I'm pretty sure I didn't meet him. And I just don't know anything about him. 

And that's how it peters out on camera. But the media have picked it up and are playing it for what it's worth today, the day before the big primaries. And for all I know, that's what Trump wants, the media virally spreading his message to disaffected white people: Unlike everyone else, Trump won't shun you.

ADDED: Scott Adams — who's devoted months to explaining Trump's genius — reacted very strongly to this interview and posted yesterday to say "I disavow Trump." Disavow, eh? Or does he condemn?

Later — I don't know quite when — he added 2 updates.

First, he said what he was doing was "getting out of the splatter zone." What's splattering is racism, and Adams wants Trump to deal with it on his own, not with the help of any more of Adams's explanations of how it's all genius.

Second, he kind of needed to disavow the disavowing:

In the 2D world of reason it makes no sense to disavow someone I never avowed in the first place for not disavowing someone else when in fact the person I disavowed did disavow that other person. 

Ha ha. But, see, Adams is beyond that, beyond the 2D world where it doesn't make sense. That's why there's something to disavow. Unsaid things are very real in his dimension — the dimension where Trump's speech operates and that Adams has seen and explained — and therefore must be unsaid. His explanations have created the feeling of an endorsement and he needs to break you of that feeling.

AND: Trump is blaming the "lousy earpiece." That may sound feeble, but let me tell you. When I was watching the show on my own yesterday, before any of this story went big, I was saying to Meade,  "I think there's something wrong with the earpiece," and: "You know they could really screw with him by messing up the sound." Here's what Trump is saying today:

"I'm sitting in a house in Florida with a very bad earpiece that they gave me, and you could hardly hear what he was saying. But what I heard was various groups, and I don't mind disavowing anybody, and I disavowed David Duke and I disavowed him the day before at a major news conference, which is surprising because he was at the major news conference, CNN was at the major news conference, and they heard me very easily disavow David Duke.... Now, I go, and I sit down again, I have a lousy earpiece that is provided by them, and frankly, he talked about groups.... He also talked about groups. And I have no problem with disavowing groups, but I'd at least like to know who they are. It would be very unfair to disavow a group, Matt, if the group shouldn't be disavowed. I have to know who the groups are. But I disavowed David Duke.... Now, if you look on Facebook, right after that, I also disavowed David Duke. When we looked at it, and looked at the question, I disavowed David Duke. So I disavowed David Duke all weekend long, on Facebook, on Twitter and obviously, it’s never enough. Ridiculous."

France drops hate speech charge against Bob Dylan but not because it doesn't think his speech was a crime.

The charges were only dismissed because Dylan was speaking to the U.S. edition of Rolling Stone interview to the U.S. and did not expressly agree to publication in the French edition.  Prosecutors may go after the publisher of the French edition. [NOTE: I read this as news. First I'd noticed, but it's from April 2014.]

I blogged about the charges, here, back in 2013. Dylan was responding to the question "Do you see any parallels between the 1860s and present-day America?" And he gave the following answer, within which I've boldfaced the words that led to the complaint: