From Emmett Till to George Floyd

Title: The Blood of Emmett Till

Rating: 4 Stars

I’d guess that most people know the story of Emmett Till. 14 years old, living in Chicago, his mother, Mamie, sent him down to visit relatives in Mississippi. From Mississippi herself, she explicitly told him the Mississippi rules that a black person must abide by.

In Mississippi, at a small local store, Till may or may not have made an inappropriate comment to the proprietor, Carolyn Bryant. Bryant went out to get her gun. Till may or may not have whistled at her then. Till and his relatives quickly ran off when they saw her gun.

Several nights later, her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam pulled up to the house where Till was staying. Till was taken out to a truck. Days later, his body, horribly bruised, battered, and mutilated, was found in the Tallahatchie River.

Till’s body was sent back to Chicago. Mamie Till insisted on an open casket viewing. Tens of thousands of people passed through to see the body. Nationwide news coverage ensued. After the funeral, civil rights became Mamie Till’s mission in life.

Back in Mississippi, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were arrested and brought to trial. Everyone expected them to get off. No one really expected the prosecution or the judge to try too hard to bring justice. In fact, the judge, by all accounts, proved to be fair. The prosecutor put on a case and offered a powerful summation. Black witnesses, never expected to ever testify against a white man, were called and, during their testimony, they bravely identified the defendants by standing up and pointing to them. One of them, an eighteen year old, was immediately whisked out of Mississippi due to the very real threat on his life.

To no one’s surprise, after an hour of deliberation, the all white male jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Afterwards, they claimed that they could have returned much faster but they wanted to drink the Coca Cola’s that they ordered and they wanted to make it look like they at least tried to deliberate.

Those are the basic facts. What new did I learn from this reading?

Twelve years later, someone interviewed the members of the jury. To a man, they all admitted that they knew that the defendants were guilty but had acquitted them because they believed that Emmett Till had it coming to him. In Mississippi, a black man committing the crime of ‘smart talking’ to a white woman deserves death.

This is interesting because the jury didn’t even hear Carolyn Bryant’s testimony. In fact, there was no reason for the jury to hear it. After all, the crime on trial was murder. There is no legal mitigating factor that would require her testimony. The judge disallowed it, but the defense team insisted on putting Bryant on the stand, out of the jury’s hearing, just to send out the message that Till had it coming to him.

Years later, Bryant admitted that she lied on the stand. On the stand, she said that Till placed his arm around her waist. She said that he used sexual obscenities (that she was so embarrassed to repeat that she wouldn’t even say the first letter of the obscenity during her testimony). In her later years, she admitted none of that was true.

Although no witnesses saw the murder, several did see Till while he was kidnapped by the two men. They saw possibly up to three black men holding Till captive. They were suspected to be in Milam’s employ. What a statement this makes regarding the power structure in Mississippi. Black men forced to watch, if not tacitly participate, while a black child is tortured to death for talking to a white woman sends a powerful message regarding the unchallenged power that whites held in Mississippi.

Thanks to the efforts of Mamie Till, bringing the bright spotlight of publicity to her son’s death had wide repercussions for the future civil rights movement. Later in 1955, when she was asked to move to the back of the bus, Rosa Parks said that she was thinking of Emmett Till when she refused. Only a year older than Till, the great civil rights leader and long time Congressman, John Lewis, was directly inspired to action from the murder and trial.

I’ve written about this before, but the US started taking action on civil rights not because it was the right thing to do but because the negative publicity from such events as the murder and trial was having an impact upon the Cold War. The Soviet Union was able to use this atrocity in its propaganda to get an upper hand when dealing with Asian and African nations. The message was that, if the US treated its own citizen people of color like this, then why would they care about you? Having to answer this propaganda was a driving force to encourage the adoption of civil rights at a national level.

In the civil rights history, there is a lot of discussion about LBJ’s fighting for civil rights legislation even while knowing it would probably doom his party in the South. There is a lot of talk about the Supreme Court decisions that forced the South to change.

What you don’t hear much about are the black heroes. You do hear about  martyrs like Martin Luther King or Medgar Evers. There were many black people in Mississippi that put their lives and their livelihoods on the line. Some of them were former WWII veterans who were sent overseas to fight for the Four Freedoms but then returned home to a land lacking in those freedoms. Having fought and won a war, they were not going to passively accept their lot. Amzie Moore and Dr T.R.M Howard were two such figures featured heavily in this work. Acknowledging such black leaders in the civil rights movement is critical to understanding how the fight for equality was led by black people.

In 1955, Bryant’s and Milam’s actions were considered normal. They expected no repercussions from their acts of murder. It was the spotlight of publicity that brought Till’s torture and murder into view and made it heinous.

Similarly, when Derek Chauvin placed his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 8:46 while Floyd begged for his life and pleaded for his mother (witnesses heard Till also plead for his mother), Chauvin expected no ramifications. The look on his face while eyewitnesses filmed and yelled, if anything, seems bored.

The title of this post is inaccurate. It didn’t start with Emmett Till and it doesn’t end with George Floyd. If there is a connective tissue between the two, besides a horrific murder, it is that systemic behavior is changed only by constantly shining the spotlight of publicity upon it.

The system must change.

America Loses Its Safety Valve

Title: The End of the Myth

Rating: 2 Stars

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize this year, this book tries to establish a through line from America’s past to its present that explains how we got to where we are now.

I believe that Grandin’s main thesis is that our country has a long overdue social reckoning with itself. To a great extent we’ve not had to do this because we’ve always had room to expand. This is in contrast to most other countries. Most of them have well described and fairly fixed borders. Therefore, when social issues arise, these countries must address them.

Especially in the early days of US history, our borders were barely even defined. Even before the Louisiana Purchase, there was great wilderness waiting to be populated.

Of course, that’s not really a true statement. In fact they were populated, but by non Europeans. Even before the revolution, King George III issued a decree preventing the colonists from invading the Native American lands. It was, depending upon your point of view, either unenforceable or not enforced. After the revolution, the newly formed national government also tried to stem the tide of settlers, to no avail.

Once the Louisiana Purchase was concluded, it seemed that a nearly infinite amount of land was now available for Americans to settle. Once again, this was at the expanse of the Native Americans. Presidents from Andrew Jackson on no longer even gave a pretense of dealing with the Native Americans with fairness.

When the purchase was completed, Thomas Jefferson thought that there would be enough land for at least a hundred generations. He dramatically underestimated American appetite for land.

The next big land grab was the Mexican-American War, which the American government instigated by having its army knowingly occupy Mexican territory. When the Mexican army responded to the invasion, the American government immediately made a hue and cry and war fever swept the nation. Beating up on a much weaker government got the American government what it wanted, which was another huge chunk of land.

All of this available land served as a safety valve. When social pressures seemed to be building, the government could make land available. Large numbers of people would then leave to settle on the new land with the promise of individual freedom from state interference, thus relieving the pressure.

Having all of this land ultimately caused other issues. Whether or not these soon to be states were to be free or slave became a critical issue. Despite various attempts at compromises, the fear that one or the other side would gain dominance in the country ultimately became a main trigger of The Civil War.

In the decades after The Civil War, the US had accomplished its manifest destiny of crossing the continent. There was no new land to take. The frontier was fixed. There was the additional problem of integrating the Southern rebels back into the country again.

A neat solution to this problem was the Spanish-American War. By encouraging the active participation of Southern soldiers, they were once again considered full Americans. By defeating the Spanish, the US was able to increase its territory once again, this time by taking over far away territories. Filipino rebels that helped the US defeat Spain had no interest in switching from one colonial master to another. This led to the Philippine-American War. This tied the US Northern and Southern soldiers even tighter together now that they were unified in battling soldiers of a different color.

The New Deal and World War II fueled a US economic expansion. This was a frontier beyond land borders. By using its economic might, the US was able to dramatically grow into a financial powerhouse. This economic growth served as another safety valve to tamp down social issues.

Continuing with this theme, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) greatly expanded US economic frontiers.

The US has now reached the point where there appear to be no new frontiers left for it to discover. There appear to be no new safety valves to relieve pressure on issues like racism or classism. US policies have left broken countries in Central America. Desperate for a better life, millions of people from this area are now heading North.

Instead of looking outward for new frontiers, the US now seems only interested in protecting its existing frontiers. Hence the call to build a wall.

At some point, the US will have to understand that it needs to face up to its internal social issues. The rugged individualistic “Go West, young man” can no longer be our myth. We need to start working together in, if not a more socialist manner, at least like a social democracy.

That, at least as I understood it, is the thesis of the work. I didn’t actually see the entire through line that he was trying to achieve. It seemed as if the work was in two parts. The first part was standard manifest destiny. The second part seemed to be more of a screed against the dying of the liberal movement in the ashes of The Vietnam War and the rise of modern conservatism and all of the issues that it brings.

Both parts were well written and informative. I just didn’t get the connective tissue between the two, so for me, the argument broke down.

Theater During A Plague Year

During William Shakespeare’s time, London experienced serious plagues in the years 1582, 1592, 1603, and 1607. All London theaters closed during each of these years.

Similarly, during our current COVID-19 pandemic, all social activities have essentially come to a standstill. Restaurants, movie theaters, concert halls, and yes, play houses have been shut down.

However, living in the year 2020, there are possible alternatives to attending live stage performances.

The Seattle Shakespeare Company put on a one night only staging of Twelfth Night. This was part of their Ruff Reads program. Most of the players had previously performed the play as part of their outdoor Wooden O series way back in 2012.

The play was live streamed over youTube. All of the players performed their roles from their respective remote location (eg their apartment or house) via Zoom.

For each scene, the actor’s window would pop up when they entered a scene and then they would close it when they exited. There were a few title cards to set the location of each scene.

The actors were operating under severe constraints. In the Q&A that followed the play, it was explained that they only had six hours of rehearsal. Considering that the play is about 2 1/2 hours long, that’s pretty crazy. Also, since Seattle only entered Phase 2 of the reopening today, the day after the play, there were very minimal opportunities for costuming.

So, given all of that how did it go? I’d have to say that it was a fine effort. Twelfth Night is a very silly play and it was quite amusing. Seeing how it’d been months since I’ve seen anything approaching live entertainment, this was a welcome relief.

On the not so great side of things, you could certainly tell which of the actors had good internet service. A couple of them had quite laggy video. One actor, for a time, had very poor mike quality. He apparently switched because later it was fine. In fact, one of the comments from the actors was the challenge, since each had to do their own setup, of having to not only act but also be the director, the sound person, the props person, etc of their own environment. One actor forgot to unmute herself. It was amusing that her fellow actor, in character, told her. She unmuted herself and all was well.

The actors did outstanding work considering their very limited rehearsal time. Given that, there were a couple of hiccups. There were times when clearly the actors were reading their lines. There was an awkward moment when five actors looked uncomfortable until one of them figured out that it was his turn to talk. Again, given the circumstances, none of these are big deals.

As I said, the play itself was quite amusing. This is a strong play particularly for the female characters, and they all did outstanding work. In particular, the actor playing Maria was excellent. Maria is always scheming, thinking circles around her fellow schemers Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

I’ve seen Twelfth Night several times. Olivia is kind of a cipher. She discourages Duke Orsino because she’s in mourning for her brother. Turning on a dime, she immediately drops mourning and falls in love with Cesario, the disguised Viola. At the end of the play, she effortlessly and instantly transfers her love to Viola’s brother, Sebastian, when he appears on the scene. Her motivations can be confusing. In this staging, Olivia is positively luminous. She lights up her, um, Zoom window. She made it all seem believable and natural.

On the comic side, the actors playing Belch, Aguecheek, and the insufferable Malvolio all make good use of their characters. Toby Belch, in particular, seems to be channeling a 1970s era Foster Brooks in his drunkenness.

I’ve never really seen an interesting performance of Viola’s love interest, Duke Orsino. He just seems to be kind of a bore. Viola is so full of life and love that you wonder what she sees in him. At the conclusion of this staging, I’m still at a loss. Since I’ve never really understood it, maybe this is just a more basic issue with the play.

Obviously, probably the biggest drawback with a play in this format was any real interplay amongst the players. There were awkward attempts to do things like exchange purses and the such. One of the actors in the Q&A mentioned that, as an actor, you need to look in the eye of the actors that you’re in the scene with. Needing to look at the camera while also trying to find the Zoom window of your scene partner was disconcerting.

While that was understandably tough on the actors, having each actor with their own window and camera made for a weirdly intimate performance at times. Especially during a soliloquy, the actor is looking straight at the camera. Therefore, as a viewer, it appeared that the actor was up close looking straight at me. I’ve never had such an up close look at a live performance.

Would I do it again if they offer up the opportunity? Most assuredly yes. It was a different way to experience a live play. It’s certainly no substitute for a stage, but in these times it was a novel and entertaining experience.

A Pandemic Pre Postmortem

This is not one of my typical posts. This isn’t about a book. This isn’t about a film. This isn’t about some slightly odd historical event that I find interesting.

It’s about today. It’s about what we’re going through right now. It’s about over two million infected Americans and coming up on 120,000 dead ones. We are four percent of the world’s population and twenty-five percent of the COVID-19 deaths. South Korea (population fifty million) reported its first case on the same day as the US. It’s had (as of this writing) about 280 deaths.

How did this happen? With the most expensive health care system and being the world leader in medical research, how did the US fall so flat on its face? Leaders are talking about whether or not we can avoid a second wave without apparently understanding that we’re still deep into the first. Make no doubt about it, this is a failure of almost unimaginable magnitude.

One thing that I can guarantee you is that, with an election cycle coming in November, these events will be spun in every way imaginable and in many ways currently unimaginable. And the sad thing is, the spin will work. Just like in 1984 when Winston Smith was able, if even momentarily, to be convinced that 2 + 2 = 5, months from now people will have their own hardened beliefs of what went down that in all likelihood will barely little resemblance to reality as understood today.

I’m not immune to spin. Therefore, I thought that I’d write down where it all seemed to fall apart. It’ll be interesting for me to re-read this in a year and see how much of this will surprise me.

CDC

Disease control is literally in its name. This should have been its shining moment. What happened?

First of all, even though other countries had existing tests, it insisted on developing its own. When sent out to be used, the tests turned out to be contaminated and unusable. It then wasted weeks developing a new test. That delay was bad enough, but that delay led to further delays in scaling the testing process up to a country of our size.

Even well into the pandemic, test processing was quite limited. The first step in a pandemic is to be able to identify those who were sick, and we couldn’t even do that.

Secondly, the CDC actively discouraged mask use for the general population. They did so primarily to make sure that medical personnel had access to masks, but that was extremely bad messaging. I distinctly remember reading articles that suggested that masks really don’t do anything (ie “the jury is still out”). The fact that COVID-19 is known to be an aerosol virus and that masks did prove to be a good strategy in the Far Eastern countries during the SARS epidemic would seem to be very good evidence that masks would be useful.

By discouraging mask use, when the CDC later switched messaging because mask supplies became adequate and recommended everyone to start wearing masks, this gave an opening to those who had some natural aversion to wearing masks and/or an already fundamental distrust of science to decide that they didn’t need to.

Finally, it is simply an old, tired agency that still relied, in the year 2020, on technology like fax machines. It simply wasn’t equipped to deal with a fast moving disease and a population used to instant service.

FDA

With the CDC failing, several independent companies saw that, in the first crucial moments of a pandemic, that the US was flying blind in terms of understanding how severe and how fast spreading the infection was. Wanting to help, they stepped into the breach and were willing to mass produce / process tests. The FDA treated this like any other drug trial.

Forms that require a 100 hours to fill in were required. Forms that could be sent electronically had to be printed out and mailed. Data that could be sent electronically had to be burned to an external drive and mailed.

Just like the CDC, it’s an old, tired agency that was simply incapable of responding in a nimble fashion.

Donald Trump

You didn’t think that I’d leave him off of the list, did you? Both the CDC and the FDA is part of the federal government. As the leader of the federal government, he bears ultimate responsibility for its failures. However, even though I’m certainly not a fan of him, it’s not like he was down in the CDC trenches designing tests.

We can start with the fact that he disbanded the pandemic response team. Especially during the early days of the pandemic, having an integrated coordinated federal team could have been invaluable.

He was told about the virus very early on during his daily presidential briefings. Trump is notorious for not paying attention during briefings and ignoring / disagreeing with anything that does not fit his world view.

He’s also notorious for not believing experts. He has an innate belief that somehow he has a unfailing gut instinct about subjects and/or that he has a genius level ability to figure out technical details that require years of expertise to master.

Trump chose to essentially ignore his briefings and experts. Granted, the one thing that he did was to institute a travel ban on China. Since he was actively engaged in fomenting a trade war with China, this was not a huge step. Even so, by the time he instituted the ban, the virus was already in the US, not to mention the fact that shutting off travel from one country when we live in such an globally interconnected world is ridiculous.

Similarly, when he instituted a European ban, for a while he inexplicably excluded the UK. Travelers from the continent just had to connect through Heathrow to land in the US. Even with the European ban, he allowed US citizens to fly home. In a way it’s understandable, but did he seriously think that US citizens in Europe wouldn’t also bring the disease back with them (spoiler alert, they did)? Also, the ban was implemented so incompetently that returning travelers were jammed together for hours at a time to ensure maximum opportunities for contagion and weren’t even so much as temperature checked.

Even as the disease spread through the US, he continued to minimize it. At one point, when infections were at fifteen, he claimed that they were heading to zero. He wanted to reopen the country by Easter. He promoted untested, possibly dangerous cures. After the CDC finally recommended masks, he didn’t take the recommendation seriously. His refusal to model good behavior set a poor example for like minded Americans.

To me, most critical was the moment that a reporter asked him if he assumed any responsibility and he retorted back that he took no responsibility at all. That is a shocking statement coming from the President. This strikes at the heart of Trump’s largest failure, which is a failure to lead. Every president has at least one moment where they are tested. This was Trump’s and he failed.

Post Truth Mass Media

Having read a lot of history, I’m under no illusion that there was some good old day in the far off past where media was always straight and true.

This is far from the truth. Starting with broadsheets and newspapers, there have always been biases.

The birth of radio and television brought about the rise of mass media. Instead of a local newspaper reaching at most an audience in a metropolitan city, media could now be reached nationwide. Of course, with the internet, the media reach is global.

I’m not sure why, possibly because they came of age during the patriotism of WWII, but the major network news felt a certain responsibility. Since media is produced by humans, it’s impossible for media to be free of bias. However, during the network television heyday, the news divisions were intentionally walled off from other parts of the network. The news divisions were thought of as a public service and not primarily as a source of profit.

All of that has changed. All of the networks are now part of larger conglomerates. News exists now to make a profit.

As such, news is no longer so much a search for truth as much as it is a source of advertising revenue. Ratings / clicks drive the news. Understanding this necessarily leads consumers to question the motivations of the news producers.

On top of that, we have political figures that accuse unflattering news pieces about them as being fake news, regardless of the actual veracity of the article. Such is the power of the accusation that well regarded, well sourced, well vetted news organizations are treated as equivalent to organizations that are nothing more than openly partisan organs.

This has led us to a post truth world. You find the news source that feeds your existing world view and you never need deviate from it. You want to find a news source that says that the virus is just like the flu and is no big deal, you can find it. You want to find one that says that it’s perfectly fine to reopen everything, you can find that. Whether or not it’s credible reporting is irrelevant.

Small Government

No one likes the federal government. I get it. It’s a trillion dollar bureaucratic monstrosity. It moves with all of the speed and grace of a drunk sloth.

People have been trying to tame it for years. This is true for both parties, but especially for the Republicans. It’s Grover Nordquist that infamously said that he wants to reduce the federal government down to a size that he can drown in a bathtub.

But hey, guess what? When an event strikes all fifty states simultaneously, this is exactly what the federal government is for. During WWII, it probably wouldn’t have gone quite as well if all fifty states individually declared war on the Axis powers.

If the federal government command and control is willfully left to atrophy and something like say, oh, a global pandemic, strikes, things are not going to go well.

Remember the national repository of medical supplies that the federal government was supposed to have precisely for this kind of emergency? It didn’t really exist at even close to the scale required. Jared Kushner tried to claim that it wasn’t the repository’s job to serve as a backstop for the states. When it was pointed out to him that the mission statement on the repository’s web site said precisely that, he solved the problem by changing the web site.

So, the states were left on their own. The results were predictable. Some states are better managed than others, so you better hope that you live in a good one. States got into bidding wars with each other. The federal government got into the action and actually started confiscating orders for its own use that a state had purchased. One state governor ordered supplies to be hidden from the federal government.

During the most critical time of the pandemic, there was effectively no leadership at the federal level.

Conclusion

The US knew that the virus was coming. We had time to react. Instead, the virus spread through the country at a time when there was a critical shortage of supplies, a critical shortage of testing, and virtually no capability to perform contact tracing.

So, here we are, having shut down large parts of our economy for months. Tens of millions are unemployed. Food bank stocks are dangerously low. Many Americans, who as a group has never been exactly known for their patience, just want the country to start up, even if it causes tens of thousands additional deaths.

All of that and we’re still in the first wave.

 

Once, Twice, Three Times A Psycho

Title: Psycho

Continuing my way through the AFI film list, a couple of days ago I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. I’ve seen it many times before. As I was half watching the opening credits, for the first time ever, I noticed that it was based upon a novel by Robert Bloch.

I was like, what? How did I not know this? Psycho seems like such an inherently visual horror experience that I just assumed that it was a straight to film screenplay. Not only that but Hitchcock must have immediately fastened upon it as a project. The novel was written in 1959 and the film was released in 1960.

Having just watched the film, I knew that I immediately needed to read the novel.

But why stop there? For those that remember, in 1998, Gus Van Sant made the audacious decision to create a virtual shot-by-shot remake of Psycho. It’s kind of a crazy story. Van Sant had recently received an Oscar nomination for Good Will Hunting. Big name actors wanted to work with him. He was hot.

Studio executives pursued him. Being the 90s, all they wanted him to do was to remake previous hits. That seemed to be the limit of their creativity. As a kind of fuck you to them, he agreed to remake Psycho, but only if it was a literal shot for shot remake. They thought he was kidding and just laughed. He continued to push it. His message was basically, if you want me to work at your studio, then that is the price that you must pay.

He was so hot that Universal said yes. He made a sixty million dollar picture that was virtually an exact remake of a film that cost less than one million.

Not exactly shocking, it was a critical and financial flop. I remember seeing it in the theater when it came out (I was probably one of less than five people in the showing). I actually enjoyed it.

So, this week, I decided to watch the 1960 film, the 1998 remake, and to read the novel.

My first thought was how close Hitchcock (and by implication, Van Sant) stayed to the source material. Whenever a film is adapted from a novel, the implication always is that the adaptation will be loose. Since the written word and visual imagery are so different, it’s not that surprising. I was expecting something like World War Z. I enjoyed both the novel and the film but pretty much the only connection between the two is a shared title.

In the novel, Mary (Marion in the film) is carrying on a relationship with Sam Loomis, a hardware store owner that can’t marry her because of his heavy debts. A wealthy, slightly obnoxious man comes into the real estate office in which Mary works and pays a large amount of cash to buy property. Her boss asks Mary to deposit the cash at the bank. Instead, Mary sees this as an opportunity for her to disappear with the cash and pay off Sam’s debt. She gets lost late on a stormy night and ends up at Bates’ motel. After having an awkward conversation with Norman Bates about his mother, she takes a shower and is killed by his mother. Later, Mary’s sister Lila shows up at Sam’s store looking for Mary, shortly followed by Arbogast, the man hired to find Mary and to return the money. Arbogast talks to Norman and gets a bit suspicious. He decides that he needs to talk to Norman’s mother. Arbogast is murdered by the mother. All evidence of murder is buried by Norman out in the swamp out back. Lila and Sam are now suspicious and visit the motel to talk to Norman’s mother. Sam distracts Norman while Lila pokes around the house, getting increasingly scared. She walks down to the root cellar where she sees Norman’s mother in a chair. She tries to talk to her and the mother turns out to be mummified remains. She screams as Norman, in women’s clothes, attempts to kill her. Sam disables Norman. The novel concludes with a psychological discussion about how Norman actually killed his mother many years earlier and, to assuage his guilt, would occasionally take on her personality. Norman has now been fully and exclusively been taken over by his mother. Her last thoughts are, as a fly buzzes near her, that the authorities will realize that she’s harmless because she literally wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Does any of that sound familiar? It is exactly the plot of the film Psycho. I don’t think that I’ve seen a film that was quite so literally adapted from the book.

There are a few differences. Because it is a novel, you do get to see a lot more of Norman’s interior thoughts. You learn about his interests in subjects like psychology and voodoo. He’s in his forties and is short and pudgy. It’s his drinking that causes him to black out while he’s in his mother’s persona.

Like the film, the novel hides its cards well. It still achieves a shocking moment of horror when Norman attacks Lila, but all along the way it gives hints. Norman has conversations with mother that, in hindsight, point to the fact that they are taking place in his mind.

Since it’s nearly a shot for shot remake, there’s not a lot of directorial differences between the two films. Since the later film was not made under Hayes morality code, nudity was shown. Sam and Mary are clearly naked in bed, having just had sex, during their opening tryst. There are some camera pans performed that just technically weren’t possible in 1960. The later film is in color. Since Van Sant used a VCR tape of the original while he was directing, that did not give him much directorial space to be innovative.

It boils down to the acting. I’ve seen three different stagings of Hamlet. In each, the actor playing Hamlet made bold choices that claimed the role for himself.

There’s no comparison between Anthony Perkins and Vince Vaughn as Norman. Although it undoubtedly ruined his movie career, Perkins gives an absolutely brilliant performance. Perkins’ Norman is boyish, edgy, nervous, frail, repressed, angry, and dangerous in a performance that changes from minute to minute. I’ve seen the scene where Norman attacks Lila in the root cellar many, many times. Even so, seeing it within the flow of the film is still scary as fuck.

Nothing against Vince Vaughn. He gives it his all. I think that his physicality works against him. He just doesn’t project the normal creepy that Perkins can. Apparently, Joaquin Phoenix was also considered for the role. That might have been a more interesting choice.

The two Arbogast’s, Martin Balsam and William H Macy, are a draw. They are both talented character actors doing what character actors do.

Here’s my hot take. I think Anne Heche is a better Marion than Janet Leigh. I realize that Leigh’s performance is nearly as iconic as Perkins. I just think that Heche does more with it. I don’t know if it’s related to the fact that method acting has become ubiquitous by 1998, but I see more thought and emotion in Heche’s performance than I do with Leigh’s.

Julianne Moore, playing Lila in the later film, is decidedly better than Vera Miles. Miles plays it pretty straight in the Hitchcock film while Moore took more chances and created a much richer character.

Even with some better performances, did the Van Sant film really need to be made? Probably not.

Given that, I think that it does make an interesting statement regarding the lack of creativity, the lack of risk taking, and rise of the culture of remakes, sequels, prequels, and existing universe films (ie Marvel, DC, and Star Wars) that still permeates the movie industry.

Changing The World By Changing Nothing

Title: Winners Take All

Rating: 4 Stars

A while ago I read The Rise and Fall of American Growth. It discussed the fact that after centuries of essentially no growth, the period between 1870 to 1970 was a time of very impressive growth. Since then, it’s all been minimal growth again. In that work, the author’s thesis was that, during that century of very impressive growth, there were certain key technologies developed (ie electricity, internal combustion engine, sewer, telephone, plumbing, automobiles, gas, infection disease cures) that fundamentally changed the productivity of everyone. Since then, although there have certainly been technical advances that on the surface seem world changing, ultimately they don’t have much of an impact upon worker productivity.

This book takes a swing at a similar subject. It states the question a bit differently. Since 1980, average income for Americans in the top 10% has doubled, the top 1% has tripled, and the top .001% has risen by a factor of seven. Meanwhile, the income for the bottom 50% of Americans is almost precisely unchanged.

Think of all of the changes that have taken place over the past 40 years. It’s almost unimaginable. For some 117 million Americans, all of this change has had essentially zero impact upon their pay. To make matters worse, if you’re born in the bottom 50%, you have at best a 35% change of climbing above your parents’ station. Rich American men live 15 years longer than poor American men (who now have a life span about equivalent to a man living in Sudan).

If all of this seems weird, think about one of the fundamental structural changes that have taken place in our country since 1980. With the election of Ronald Reagan, the year established the dominance of the modern conservative movement.

It was Reagan who famously said that government is the problem, not the solution. Even Democrats since then have, to a large extent, toed the line. It was Bill Clinton who said that the era of big government is dead. It was Barack Obama that refused to even consider a public option when proposing Obamacare.

Even though it was government that gave us Social Security, Medicare, took over the economy to successfully win World War II, re-built the world via the Marshall Plan, built up a world leading education system, and put a man on the moon, government solutions are now treated with derision as non-starters.

If there are social ills to be fixed, what has stepped into the breach? This need is being met by large scale philanthropic enterprises. Think the Gates Institute. Think the Clinton Global Initiative. Think the Ford Foundation. Those are just the big ones. There are many, many others that operate at much smaller levels.

What is a common denominator in all of these enterprises? Well, they are all funded by very wealthy people. They are people that have gotten very wealthy within the rules of the existing system. How receptive do you think these people will be to making necessary structural changes that, if implemented, would have a material impact upon their accumulated wealth? Given that, what kind of projects do you think that such enterprises would be willing to fund?

The answer is, of course, only the kind of projects that do not attempt to make such structural changes. They are only interested in projects that offer ‘win-win’ opportunities. They will fund any number of poverty programs that result in incremental improvements but are not at all interested in addressing the root cause of poverty, namely, the extreme wealth inequality that has risen over the past 40 years.

A classic example of this is a phone application called Even. For low wage people working gig jobs, unpredictable and uneven income is the rule, not the exception. The Even phone app will (for a fee!) automatically spread your income to simulate a predictable stream. That’s a good idea. I’m not exactly sure why there needs to be a charge for this service and wouldn’t it be a better idea to address the gig worker conditions that results in unpredictable and unsteady wages?

This application meets several criteria loved by the philanthropic elites. It’s a product, and everyone loves a nice, tidy product to solve a very specific problem. It’s a win-win, since the poor people get predictable income and the company makes money off of them. It also does absolutely nothing for the structural problems that cause a gig worker to live hand to mouth in a very unpredictable manner.

Philanthropists today follow the same model first started by Andrew Carnegie. His idea was that the goal, first of all, was to make as much money as possible as ruthlessly as possible. If you had to throw out unions, drive down salaries, force workers into unsafe conditions, all was well and good. Once you made your pile, then it was your duty to give it all away before you died. You gave away money completely at your discretion. The riffraff wasn’t capable of making their own intelligent decisions regarding good use of the money. It was the benevolent philanthropist that bestowed his riches upon a suitably grateful impoverished public. The fact that it was his previous ruthlessness that played a part in creating this impoverished public played no part in this thoughts.

This is still the pattern. Look no further than the Sackler family.  They became insanely rich by peddling addictive Oxycontin like they were breath mints. They then turned around and gave massive donations to get their name set in stone. This is philanthropy laundering cruelly earned money and converting it into social influence.

There are so many problems with this approach. Unelected leaders are setting future direction that have major impacts on governments. Those in charge are least incentivized to change the status quo (eg increasing the inheritance tax as a tool to solve inequality). Living in their own rarefied air, all discussions and decisions are made in an echo chamber with no diverse voices.

The author, Anand Giridharadas, has special scorn for the Thought Leaders. These are the pundits that serve the elites. These leaders earn their keep by giving the elites what they want to hear. They talk about win-win. They talk about products. They never talk about deep systemic / structural issues. You can recognize them from their ubiquitous TED talks. They are experts in their field that know system change is required but have sold their souls out to the elite by pandering simple solutions to them.

Check out the bio for Anand Giridharadas. He worked for McKinsey, that most elite consulting company. He was a writer for the newspaper of the elite, The New York Times. He is a fellow at the elite think tank, the Aspen Institute. And yes, he has a TED talk.

For the elite, is he Lear’s Fool? A man that they let comically waltz around and spout uncomfortable truths because he amuses them?

Revenge Is A Dish Best Served With Extreme Violence

Title: Medea

Rating: 5 Stars

OK, there is a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with Jason, of Jason and the Argonauts fame. He’s a great Greek hero that, among other things, went on a great voyage to successfully retrieve the Golden Fleece.

As he was pursuing the Golden Fleece, it turns out that he actually got a lot of help from a woman named Medea. As he was surmounting various challenges on his quest, Medea was there to whisper advice into his ears. Her words were instrumental to his success.

And she did more than just talk. She killed her brother to distract her father to allow Jason to escape. She tricked King Pelias’ daughter into murdering him. It was this trickery that forced Jason and Medea to flee to Corinth.

Much like the Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock characters in Speed, all of this action proved to be too much of an aphrodisiac for either of them. They fell in love and got married. They now have two young sons.

It’s at this point that the play picks up.

Jason has the bad combination of being ambitious and having a wandering eye. After all, he is a hero and boys will be boys.

Glauce, the daughter of Creon, the King of Corinth, has fallen in love with him. Jason does not exactly fight off the attention. Creon blesses the match. With this marriage, Jason will become part of the royal family. He intends to share this great benefit to Medea and his two sons.

Shockingly enough, Medea is not really having it. In fact, the idea of having to share her marriage bed with another woman drives her into fits of passionate rage.

Creon goes to her and basically tells her to simmer down. The deed is done, she’s just a woman, there’s nothing really to be done about it, and she should just suck it up.

Sucking it up is not exactly in Medea’s vocabulary. She rages at him. In response, Creon uses his power to exile her and her two sons from Corinth. This is a problem for Medea. Since she has committed murders in other parts of Greece, there is really nowhere else that she can go.

She swallows her pride and begs Creon to at least give her a day to prepare for her exile. Against his better judgment, he begrudgingly agrees.

Big mistake.

Jason later comes to visit her. He tries to explain to her that really, if you look at it from his point of view, Jason getting married to another woman was really for Medea’s and their two son’s sake. If anything, she should be thanking him.

Medea bites her tongue and pretends to submit. She agrees that she must leave. However, she asks that Jason talk to Glauce or Creon and try to convince them to allow their two sons into the court and let them enjoy the privileges of royalty. Jason seems dubious, but when Medea promises to make Glauce a gown and crown made out of gold, he agrees to try.

Really big mistake.

Medea uses all of her skill to make the golden crown and gown. She also poisons them. She sends her two children to present the gifts to Glauce.

Glauce loves the crown and gown. That is, until they start melting her face and body and bursting into flames. She dies a terrible, horrible, screaming death. Creon comes in. She is so disfigured by this point that only Creon can recognize her. Creon, in unimaginable grief and shock, cradles the dead Glauce in his arms. Yep, the poison is not done yet. Creon dies in a similarly horrible manner.

Not knowing what they’ve done, the two sons return back to Medea. Although their part in this plot is unwitting, Medea knows that they must die. She takes them (mercifully for the audience) back stage and proceeds to murder them. From backstage, you can hear them crying in pain and begging for mercy as she stabs them.

Jason arrives, understandably upset. Only aware of the death of his future wife and father-in-law, here he learns that his two sons have been murdered as well.

As he learns this, Medea, in a heavenly chariot (did I forget to mention that Medea’s grandfather is the sun god?), ascends from the house.

In a verbal fight that wouldn’t seem out of place in any divorce court (Jason: Yes – they know the vileness of your heart / Medea: Loath on! Your bitter voice – how I abhor the sound!), Jason cannot make sense out of what happened. After all, killing their sons hurt her at least as much as it did him.

Medea’s response? “But my pain’s a fair price, to take away your smile”.

To quote that great twenty-first century American philosopher, Dave Chappelle, “That’s some cold shit”.

Medea is someone that essentially has no power at all. She is backed into a corner with nowhere to turn. The power structure, Jason and Creon, hold all of the cards.

In fact, they hold so much power that they can’t conceive of her striking back. Creon lets her stay an extra day in Corinth. What can it hurt? Jason agrees to allow his children to present gifts to Glauce. What could go wrong?

That’s the blindness that power brings. When you can, to take a random example, place your knee on someone’s throat, then you become accustomed to wielding power upon the powerless and it becomes impossible to conceive that they can or will strike back.

However, in that powerlessness is power. This is true, even if in exercising it the powerless seem to lose just as much if not more than the powerful.

“But my pain’s a fair price, to take away your smile.”

In terms of being relevant to current events, that’s not bad for a play written by a Greek in 431 BC.

The Past Is Never Dead

Title: Requiem For A Nun

Rating: 4 Stars

Over thirty-five years ago, one day I decided to become a serious reader. I was at the university book store. I noticed that there was a set of books required for a class on William Faulkner. Having heard of Faulkner and knowing that he was one of those writers that one should read if one wishes to become well read, I bought the entire set for my own personal reading. I can’t remember all of the books now, but I’m sure that it included at least The Sound And The Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!

I sat down and commenced to become well read. I started with The Sound And The Fury. If you’re at all familiar with it, it will come as no surprise that it promptly kicked my ass up and down the street.

Thus started my long term relationship with William Faulkner. He’s written some 19 novels, of which by now I’ve probably have read about half. Pretty much every time I’ve first read each, it administered a similar ass kicking. Several times, I’ve persevered and have re-read one of them and picked up just a bit more from it.

Not having read a Faulkner novel for several years now, at a friend’s suggestion I decided to give Requiem for a Nun a chance. It’s a sequel of sorts to Sanctuary, a somewhat sordid tale of an alcoholic grandee of Southern aristocracy named Gowan Stevens who drunkenly abandons his date, the young college student Temple Drake. Temple ends up getting raped. In the ensuing very messy aftermath, the wrong man gets convicted and lynched for the rape and Temple herself quits college and ends up working at a bordello.

Requiem for a Nun takes up some eight years later. Gowan Stevens has sworn off drink. He has done what he thinks is the courtly thing by rescuing Temple from prostitution and marrying her. They have two children. At the beginning of the novel, we learn that the children’s nursemaid, Nancy, a former drug addict and prostitute, has murdered one of their children, has been sentenced to death, and now awaits execution.

Temple, the mother of the murdered child, is trying desperately to have the governor commute Nancy’s sentence. The plot of the story, as it were, is why she is trying to save the woman that murdered her child. Being a grand Faulkner novel, you can imagine that her motives are complex and gnarled.

The novel is structured as a play in three acts. Before each act is a prologue that is a history of a specific building. The first act starts in the courthouse and Nancy hears her sentence to die. The second act starts in the state house as Temple pleads with the governor to commute Nancy’s death sentence, and the third act is in the jail house, where Temple and Nancy talk in the hours before Nancy is to die.

The prologue for each act is classic Faulkner. There are long, florid, serpentine sentences that roll on for pages. As I read them, I found myself reading them aloud because of their poetic resonance. As oftentimes happens when I read Faulkner, I find myself falling almost into a dreamlike trance as the words seem to nearly take on a hypnotic quality. I find myself coming to with a start and having to re-read entire paragraphs to pick up the thread that I’d lost.

Even though the setting of the novel is only eight years after Sanctuary, this was actually written in 1951, some twenty years later. For those who know anything at all about Faulkner, you’ll know that most of his novels take place in the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. This won’t be the last novel that he’ll have written with this setting, but by now he has written ten or so novels or collections over a twenty year period that have taken place there.

By this point, Faulkner must have developed a fully realized vision of Yoknapatawpha County. Here, in all of the prologues, you hear, in great detail, a full history from the initial first settlers to the current day. Several events described in previous novels are referenced. Names like Sartoris, Compson, and Sutpen, all key families that have a multi-generational presence in Yoknapatawpha County, are called out. Reading these prologues feels like some culmination that Faulkner has been working toward for decades.

For those familiar with Faulkner, his most famous quote is “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This is a common theme across all of Faulkner’s novels. In the long and rich tragedy of Southern history, the past seems to always be whispering into the ears of those in the present.

This quote is from this novel and it especially rings true here. Both Gowan Stevens and Temple Drake are trapped by their past actions eight years ago. There can be no escape. By the end of the novel, the best that they can hope for is that they can somehow suffer along and make an uneasy peace with their shared past.

All Aboard

Title: Snowpiercer

Rating: 5 Stars

With all of the theaters being closed due to the pandemic, pretty much the only films that I’ve been watching have been ones that are on the AFI best films list (2008 edition). However, on occasion, I do watch other films. Even when I do, I don’t often write about them.

I first saw Snowpiercer many years ago. I might have even seen it in a theater. I don’t remember now. Netflix is usually very limited when it comes to good films available online. Given that I really enjoyed Parasite, Bong Joon Ho’s last film, when I saw Snowpiercer pop up as a recommendation, I thought it’d be worth another look.

Maybe it was the mood that I was in watching it. Maybe it was that I watched at a point in time when, with the death of George Floyd, the ensuing massive protests, and watching the occasionally violent police response to nonviolent protesters, the class struggles in this film really spoke to me.

The plot of the film is that global warming has become a crisis on the planet. Some attempted climate engineering goes seriously awry, plunging the planet immediately into an ice age. Apparently the only survivors have been loaded onto a train that is in continual motion on tracks around the world.

That all happened in 2014. It is now 2031. Children have been born on the train and know no other life. Even the adults on the train are starting to lose their memories of what life off the train was like.

The classes are strictly segregated. At the back of the train is the underclass. They are jammed together, dressed in rags, fed only a black gelatin, and are ruled over by armed guards.

Curtis (Chris Evans), mentored by Gilliam (John Hurt), plans an uprising to get to the front of the train so that the oppressed at the end of the train can get some justice. Once he notices that the guards’ weapons are unloaded, he sees an opportunity.

He starts his revolt and begins to make steady progress up the train. Ultimately his goal is to get to the front of the train to talk to Wilford (Ed Harris), the godlike figure running the train.

Just taking the film at this simple face value, it’s a superlative action film. It’s the classic struggle of a bunch of rebel upstarts taking on an evil system. The action sequences, taking place on relatively small and narrow train cars as the train moves in and out of tunnels, is intense and claustrophobic. Painful sacrifices are made. Beloved figures betray Curtis. He still manages to press forward in his mission to bring justice to the oppressed.

Beyond the action film, it also makes important social statements about class. While the riders in the back of the train eat black gelatin made from insects, the riders in the front dine on sushi. While the riders in the back live in darkness and dirt, the riders in the front have gardens, saunas, and parties.

This can happen because the riders in the front rely upon the security forces to brutally beat back any threat from the back. In fact, it comes out that the seeds of rebellions are intentionally planted among the back riders as a crude form of population control. To keep the train in stasis, some numbers of the back riders must be periodically eliminated. Failed rebellions are the excuse that the train leaders use to justify this murder.

As the back train riders move forward through the train, the front train riders treat them as nearly an invisible presence. The front train riders are so removed from the pain and suffering from the back train riders that they can seemingly not even perceive them.

One of the cars that the rebels move through is a classroom. There, the children of the front train riders are indoctrinated with propaganda regarding the wonders of the train and the perfection of Wilfred.

The poor struggle to survive and dream of moving up while those in the front just want to enjoy their time and preserve their station. The train is a closed system. However, what only one person seems to notice is that it appears that the outside weather might actually be warming up. The key to the future of humanity might not be just who ends up on top in some struggle for the train hierarchy but whether or not there is a better life to be led for all outside.

Again, this film might have struck home to me so strongly because of the current situation that our country seems to be in. Parasite, Bong Joon Ho’s last film, also made important and trenchant comments on class. It’s clear to me that whatever class issues that he’s seen in his South Korean experience has a pretty direct correlative to the US.

It’s an outstanding film that strikes a perfect balance between action, message, and dark humor.

Annus Horribilis

Is 2020 over yet?

Just as a reminder, even though it seems like, I don’t know, twenty years ago, earlier this year, there was an impeachment trial. Yeah, remember that?

Donald Trump was caught on tape talking to the president of Ukraine. In that conversation, he said that if Ukraine wanted desperately needed $400 million dollars in military supplies to help defend it against Russia, that had arbitrarily taken over the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine and was actively working to destabilize its government, that Ukraine should really start investigating Joe Biden. Despite its claims that it was just looking to root out corruption wherever in the world that it existed (conveniently overlooking corruption in, oh, I don’t know, Russia), in later conversations members of the Trump administration told the Ukrainian government that they really didn’t have to investigate anything but they really did need to announce that they were going to investigate Biden.

Moving with relatively lightning speed, the House investigated and by December of last year voted to impeach. After all, it’s really not a complicated case. If a President abusing his power by extorting a foreign government to dig up dirt on his future political opponent is not an impeachable offense, then what is?

Understanding the gravitas of this moment in history and their role to play in it, the Republican Senate took the findings from the impeachment process and promised to conduct a full and impartial trial to get to the truth.

Yeah, just kidding. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said without reservation that he was siding with the President. There was talk of not even having a trial. There would just be an up and down vote. With 53 Republican senators, there was no way that they’d get to the requisite 67 votes to convict.

Even this was too much of a kangaroo court for some Republican senators. Instead, there was allotted two days of arguments for the defense and prosecution. No witnesses were allowed to be heard.

The verdict surprised nobody. Senator Collins opined that Trump really learned his lesson this time. Trump demonstrated the lesson that he learned by immediately firing those that spoke truth under oath about his actions.

Next came the coronavirus. We first started hearing about a strange viral disease in the city of Wuhan in China. It seemed really bad but many people weren’t worried. After all, over the last fifteen years or so, the world had been hit with SARS, MERS, and ebola with minimal impact upon the US.

And then the first discovered case was found in the US. This was in January. Cases continued to grow. In the meantime, Trump continued to hold rallies and go golfing. In late February, he claimed that the virus was under control. He claimed that the infection count would shortly go to zero. He waited until March to declare a national emergency.

Also during this time, the CDC refused to use an already developed virus test and insisted on its own. The first tests were contaminated and were unusable. Precious weeks were lost developing a new test.

During this time, the virus spread like wildfire.

Now here we are in June. Large parts of the country have been in lock down for 2 1/2 months. When I walk the streets of downtown Seattle, it’s a ghost town. I do not go outside without wearing a mask. The CDC was very slow in recommending mask usage, but now that the evidence is pretty clear that wearing one does impede the spread of an aerosol based infection (duh), many Americans now think that wearing a mask is somehow a liberal socialist conspiracy to take away our freedoms.

Meanwhile, coming up on 2,000,000 Americans have been infected and over 100,000 have died. Epidemiologists now think that if the lock down had been started just one week earlier, some 30,000 lives could have been saved.

Another fun outcome of the pandemic is that we’re now apparently in another economic depression. Here in Seattle, businesses nearly immediately shut down. Sure, you could still go to grocery stores, hospitals, and things like that, but restaurants, gyms, hair salons, and most retail shut down.

Millions were immediately laid off. By now, there are some 40 million Americans that are unemployed. The unemployment rate is probably somewhere around 25%, a number not seen since the Great Depression. We should have a better idea of the actual rate, but since no states were prepared for the dramatic influx of applicants, and in fact some states (I’m looking at you Florida) intentionally made their unemployment system as frail and cumbersome as possible, many jobless people have still not been able to fill out an unemployment claim.

Considering the fact that, before this, 40% of Americans wouldn’t have been able to come up with $400 in the case of an emergency, and let’s face facts, a significant percentage of those work in the very service jobs that were most at risk of being laid off, this is really bad. Food banks are flooded, rents are not being paid, and bills are piling up everywhere.

The federal government did sent out a couple of checks to needy Americans, but hundreds of billions of dollars went to corporations with virtually no oversight.

Not to worry. Jared Kushner predicts that the country will be rocking and rolling by July. Professional economists are not quite as sanguine. Most don’t think that employment will recover until sometime in 2021.

You don’t have to look too hard to see how badly the economy is looking. After all, at one point, oil futures were selling at a price per barrel of less than zero. Yes, theoretically, people that were to assume possession of oil were willing to pay someone to take it off their hands.

After taking a thorough thrashing, the stock market has recovered remarkably. After being down in the vicinity of 30 percent, it now is down to something less than 10. Considering how bad the economy is, it makes me wonder if there’s another, possibly even more disastrous, crash looming in our near future.

And then, in case that’s not enough, a white police officer in Minneapolis decided to put his knee on a black man’s neck for nine minutes, even while the man was first pleading for mercy and then, later, while he was completely non-responsive. The man, George Floyd, died. He was suspected of a non-violent crime. He was handcuffed behind his back and laying on the ground.

For so many people in our country that have been sickened and/or been victimized so often by such examples of systemic racism (not to mention possibly having either been recently laid off with little support or forced to risk their lives with inadequate protective gear as essential low paid workers), seeing this white police officer so casually snuff the life of a helpless black man, this was a breaking point.

For the past week, there have been daily protests. Most have been peaceful, but some have not. In Seattle, not three blocks from where I live, police cars were set ablaze and stores were looted.

Police in riot gear, looking like nothing more than an occupying army, try to keep the peace. Most police are trying to precisely do that. Unfortunately, some have also been seen indiscriminately pepper spraying protesters, punching protesters, driving into crowds of protesters, and arresting journalists.

Protests and looting have been taking place across the country. Many cities have essentially dusk to dawn curfews. Here in Seattle, tonight’s curfew is at 6.

During all of this, Trump has been sending out positive, unifying messages. Yeah, not so much. He’s calling Democratic governors and mayors weak. He’s used inflammatory language like calling protesters “THUGS” (used almost always to describe black men), saying when the “looting starts, the shooting starts” (a phrase used during the riots of the late 1960s) and saying he has “vicious dogs” (a not so subtle throwback to Alabama’s Bull Connor).

So, what has 2020 brought us this far? The third presidential impeachment trial in 230 years. The worst pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Influenza. The worst economy since the 1929 Great Depression. The worse protests since the Vietnam War era in 1968.

And keep in mind that the year isn’t even half over.