Zombie Ur-Text

Title: Night of the Living Dead

Rating; 5 Stars

I haven’t seen this film in many years. Maybe because we’re in a pandemic, I seemed to have enjoyed it much more this go around.

Ben (Duane Jones) and a virtually catatonic stranger that narrowly escaped a zombie attack after witnessing her brother get killed end up at a remote house. Ben immediately starts reinforcing the house against the zombies. After doing all of this work, Ben discovers that a husband / wife / daughter and a boyfriend / girlfriend have been hiding in the basement all along. 

Bitter that they didn’t help him from the start, the relationship between the two sets of survivors remain difficult. Harry (Karl Hardman) is a sniveling blowhard coward that insists that the cellar is the safest place to be. Ben thinks that the cellar is a death trap and continues to reinforce the house.

Ultimate, the zombies come and, as to be expected, all survival plans fall apart and nearly everyone dies.

For those of you raised by wolves, this is the film that kicked off all zombie films. This is true even though the word zombie is never used during it (ghoul is the term of choice). It essentially defined the rules of the genre. There is a group of disparate people collected together fighting against the zombies. The zombies are mindless living dead only intent upon consuming flesh. The zombies are lurching and slow moving (apparently George Romero holds in contempt the current vogue of fast moving zombies, asking if the dead suddenly joined a fitness center and became world class athletes).

Made in 1968, it made what must have seemed a bold choice at the time to cast the hero, the get ‘er done man of courage, as a black man and the sniveling coward as a white man. Although Romero insisted that he cast Jones because he was the best man for the role, seeing this must have caused some cognitive dissonance with the viewers of the day.

I found the pacing of the film to be interesting. It’s about ninety minutes long. The first zombie attack takes place during the first third. Plans fall apart and people quickly die in the last twenty minutes. The middle part features relatively few zombie scenes. It’s mostly about the troubled dynamic between Ben and Harry. Harry alternately betrays and supports Ben. The tension in their relationship propels the middle third of the film.

Ben, in a fit of rage, ultimately shoots Harry. Harry dies from the wound. In fact, none of the dying is caused by random zombies. The boyfriend / girlfriend die in a fiery explosion when they try to gas up a truck. Harry is shot by Ben. Harry’s daughter has been injured during the entire film. She dies, reanimates, and then eats her father. She then kills and feasts on her mother. The young woman is fighting off the zombies when she recognizes her brother, now reanimated as a zombie. He kills her.

What does it mean that none of the main characters are killed by an unknown zombie? Is the known evil more dangerous than the unknown? Do we spend so much time preparing for the unknown that we miss on the threats immediately in front of us? Do we spend too much time obsessing on the threat of the other?

The last man left is Ben. He ends up holing up in the cellar. He survives the attack. Ironically, the coward that insists that they could all survive in the cellar proved to be exactly right. Ben’s heroics resulted in nothing more than the deaths of those that were counting upon him.

Ben, finally clear of the cellar, walks around the house to determine if all zombies are gone. Little does he know that there is police outside on a mission to shoot all zombies in the head. Seeing him in the window, the police shoot Ben dead.

Obviously, in 1968 Black Lives Matter wasn’t a thing. Equally obviously, police violence against Blacks was not exactly a rarity back in 1968. The police callously shooting him without even attempting to determine his health is a powerful statement about the usage of police power against people of color.

Not only does Ben die a non-heroic death, his disposal is even more callous. His dead body is dragged out and thrown onto a pyre of now dead zombies. They are then burned.

Any film that involves people trapped in a house unwilling to leave due to outside danger will have special relevance during a pandemic. Granted, we don’t have the undead walking among us, but still I could relate to wanting to board up windows and doors to stay safe.

Maybe I should move down into the cellar.

A Whiter Shade Of Pale

Title: The History of White People

Rating: 4 Stars

The first half or so of the book was at best moderately interesting. It went all of the way back to the Greeks and the Romans. Although they didn’t didn’t have the concept of race, they did have slaves and they did have some way of ranking people. There was a lot of talk about the historian Tacitus and of the Scythian tribes.

It continued on to discuss how Caucasians became associated with being white. This is kind of interesting because this derives from the Caucasus mountain range, which sits on the border between Eastern Europe and  West Asia. This is nowhere near the geographic area where the Nordic and Teutonic tribes, the people typically considered to be the first white people, originated.

As I said, at best moderately interesting. This section was well researched. It featured many personalities that I’d never encountered. I just found it dry and pretty slow going. The point of going through this exercise is possibly to make the point that the idea of race is, from a historical point of view, a fairly recent phenomenon. That is interesting. I’m just not sure if I really wanted to spend 100 pages getting to that fact.

I might be showing my American bias, but things did start picking up once we got into the eighteenth century. 

Regardless there were a couple of things that I found interesting as I read. One is that so many of the race theorists that preached the virtue of virile, masculine, robust men conquering and establishing the master race were themselves puny and childless hypochondriacs.

Another is that, and I know most of you will find this amazing, most of these theorists ended up claiming that their own nationality / ethnic identity was one of the dominant races. No one seemed to notice this remarkable coincidence.

I’ve talked about this in other blog posts regarding other books that I’ve read, but what Americans have considered white has been by no means static. Usually the newest wave of immigrants are not considered white. Since the first settlers by and large came from England, in the colonial times white was synonymous with Anglo.

The German immigrants in the 18th century were not therefore considered white. Eventually they were assimilated and accepted as white. Next came the Irish. Sometimes known as the black Irish, their cartoon caricatures were nearly simian. They were considered ignorant, lazy, and dirty. They were thought to be of Celtic stock, which was considered to be an inferior grade to Anglo.

Next came the Italians. Coming from Southern Europe (the opposite end from where the vaunted Nordics came from), they were also looked upon as a non-white inferior race. Later came the Eastern Europeans (eg Poles, Hungarians, and Lithuanians) that also came from a non-approved part of Europe.

For most of the first part of American history, Teutonic was considered the ideal origination of the white race. With the advent of WWI, an adjustment was quickly required since the US was now at war with the dreaded Huns. To avoid this awkward association, American white people started calling themselves Nordic.

Another interesting part of the history of race determinism is that so much of it was about splitting hairs among European ethnicities. Especially in the early days, there was so much discussion about English vs Germans vs Irish vs Italians vs Poles that little space was given to Blacks and Asians. For the purpose of race discussions, they were not even considered.

I had previously known that there was much American work in the field of eugenics. I did not truly understand the scope of this. Americans were world leaders in the field of eugenics. The main organization for eugenics was called (I shit you not) the American Breeder’s Association. Some 65,000 American women were sterilized after being identified as mental defectives. This view carried forward well into the 1930s. It was only when Hitler and the Nazi party took eugenics and started running hard with it that Americans started to realize the ramifications of their ideas.

Speaking of WWII, its advent redefined who was white in America. Since Nazis were at war with nearly all of Europe, men from all nationalities and ethnicities eagerly volunteered to fight. Thrown in together far from home with men from a wide variety of other backgrounds, this forced a cohesion that ended with a newer, broader definition of whiteness.

If nothing else, this book highlights the absurdity of race. For millennia, people have been constantly migrating, invading, merging and conquering. Men and women from different ethnicities have had sex whenever they have had an opportunity to do so. It’s been proven at a DNA level that race has absolutely no meaning.

Of all of the things that differentiate men from each other, the color of their skin is the least interesting.

Not So Double Jeopardy

As I was reading the biography of the pirate Henry Every, I happened upon a historical event that, when I hear about it, I usually find at least annoying, if not outright dangerous.

An important legal concept is double jeopardy. That is, the state has only one chance to convict you of a crime. That makes sense. After all, a state has nearly unlimited resources while any individual, no matter how wealthy, has a finite amount. Therefore, it would be extremely dangerous if the state could just keep retrying you for the same crime. The state could continue to learn from previous mistakes. It could keep retrying a defendant until the defendant ran out of resources. If it wasn’t for the concept of double jeopardy, the state judicial system would essentially wield unlimited power.

The tricky thing is that if the state really, really wants to convict you, there are ways that it can continue to re-try you. Let me recite a couple of examples.

The first example is from Henry Every’s pirate crew. From my previous post about the history “Enemy of all Mankind”, I discussed how the Henry Every pirate crew took over a ship from the India ruler, the Grand Mughal. The Grand Mughal was infuriated and, thinking that all English people must be pirates, threatened to cut off all trade to England.

England, at that time in history, needing India way more than India needed England, desperately wanted to prove that it took the crime of piracy seriously. Although Every was never captured, several of his crew were. Wanting to prove a point to the public and to the Grand Mughal, the crew was put on a very public trial for the crime of piracy.

The case was stacked against the defendants. At this time in the English courts, defendants weren’t allowed lawyers. Each defendant was on their own to defend themselves. The prosecuting attorney and the judges were in cahoots to force a conviction.

Despite all of that, the jury, composed of citizens with no sympathy to the foreign Grand Mughal and with a romantic view of pirates, acquitted all of the defendants.

The defendants were overjoyed. Their joy was killed when they were immediately put back into prison. Embarrassed at the humiliation of the defendants being acquitted, the judges and the prosecutors conspired to re-try them on a different charge.

Instead of piracy, the defendants were charged with stealing a ship. The evidence was pretty much the same. The judges border lined threatened the jury to convict. This time, the jury dutifully convicted and most of the defendants were hung. England was able to prove to the world that it was willing to take a hard line against privacy.

That was a pretty blatant example of double jeopardy. Can you think of others?

One that leaps to mind are the police officers accused in the Rodney King beating. If you remember, there was video of police officers beating the shit out of Rodney King. The state arrested and charged the police officers. In a case that should startle no one that has been paying attention to today’s headlines, despite clear evidence of police beating a helpless black man with batons, they were all acquitted. This sparked the infamous riots where major parts of South Central Los Angeles burned.

In the aftermath of that, the Federal government stepped in. Instead of charging the police with assault, the Federal government accused the police of violating Rodney King’s civil rights. Similar to the piracy case, the evidence was pretty much the same in both trials. This time around, the police officers were convicted.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that the police officers definitely should have been convicted and punished. The injustice is that the state prosecutors couldn’t get a conviction. A case like this is exactly why double jeopardy is in place. During the Federal trial, the prosecutors learned from the mistakes that the state prosecutors made and changed strategies accordingly. This is an advantage that no prosecutor should have.

The second even more controversial example that I can think of is OJ Simpson. I’m sure that I don’t have to discuss at length here. During the criminal trial, despite overwhelming DNA evidence, Simpson was acquitted. After the acquittal, the murdered Ron Goldman’s father, Fred, sued Simpson in civil court. With the combination of Simpson not taking the civil trial as seriously, a lower burden of proof, and the plaintiff’s lawyers extensively working with the failed prosecution team, a very large civil judgment was awarded to Goldman.

Again, my point is not that Simpson was innocent and not deserving of punishment. It’s just that a civil lawyer using the extensive evidence and learnings from a failed prosecution criminal case is precisely the reason why double jeopardy is in place. Once proven not guilty in a criminal trial, the exonerated defendant should be able to wave their get out of jail card free in subsequent trials, regardless of the jurisdiction.

The main reason why I’ve been thinking about this is because of how our judicial system is so heavily stacked against defendants. Whether it’s the bail system or the complete leeway prosecutors have in overcharging to force a defendant to plead guilty to lesser charges, we need to make sure that the presumption of innocence is taken seriously.

Too many innocent people already find themselves in serious jeopardy in the judicial system. We don’t need to double it.

The Pirates’ Butterfly Effect

Title: Enemy of all Mankind

Rating: 4 Stars

Ostensibly this was a biography of Henry Every. He was a 17th century pirate. His claim to fame was that he led a mutiny to take over a ship that was due to be used on a Spanish expedition. With a small crew, he embarked on a short career of privacy. It culminated in the capture of a ship named Ganj-i-Sawai. This was a ship owned by the Grand Mughal, the ruler of India. It was loaded with tremendous riches, thus making Every possibly the richest pirate to have ever lived. Unlike some of his shipmates, Every was never caught. It is unknown how long he lived or how he lived. Did he lose all of his money and die in poverty or did he live a quiet life of easy comfort? No one knows.

That was the essential challenge with this book. Other than the very limited period between 1693 and 1696, virtually nothing is known of Every. Therefore, it’s a pretty tall order to fashion a biography from such thin material.

Knowing that he did not have enough material for a conventional biography, Johnson wisely chose to fill out the rest of the book with the indirect impacts piracy had on seemingly unrelated parts of history.

Let’s start with the East India Company. Before it rose to prominence, it was one trader among many in India. Such countries as Portugal and The Netherlands also had a trading presence. The English did not have any significant claim upon Indian trade.

In fact, compared to India, the European countries were fairly small potatoes. The Indian products, particularly its spices and its colorful cotton calico, were in high demand. The Indians weren’t particularly interested in European products, so ships would come from Europe laden with gold and would leave with spices and calico. Unfortunately, the Indians didn’t make much use of this trade imbalance, choosing to use precious metal as ornamentation instead of as an investment.

When the Indian ship was pirated, the Grand Mughal was outraged. He imprisoned all of the East India Company employees and threatened to cut off the trade with England.

While imprisoned, an East India Company employee had a brilliant idea. Under the guise of appeasing the Grand Mughal, the East India Company agreed to protect all ships coming to or from India from privacy. By agreeing to this seemingly benevolent gesture, the Grand Mughal essentially made the English India’s preferred trading partner. Over a span of decades, the English used this position to gain an ever larger share of Indian business and government. Eventually, the English ruled over all of India.

If it wasn’t for that one act of privacy, the English might never have had another opportunity. Considering how broad of an influence the English had over the world, it’s pretty incalculable how big of an impact this had on global history.

No other effects from pirates rise quite to that level, but I found them interesting all the same.

One form of music that I find weirdly fascinating are the so called murder ballads. These are mournful songs that, at least in the US, are relatively common in country music. They are songs that are usually about a man brutally (with sometimes graphic depictions) murdering a woman, getting caught, sentenced, and condemned to die. Often the song is sung from the perspective of the man on death row. Examples of such macabre songs include Tom Dooley, Knoxville Girl, and Pretty Polly. I’d even throw in Johnny Cash’s Cocaine Blues here.

To me, it’s such an odd genre. Why would you sing a song about murder from the perspective of the murderer?

Well, this goes back to a time before people were broadly literate. Before a public execution, poets would write a song about the crime committed. They would publish it as a broadsheet. Balladeers would sing the song while walking among the crowd waiting for the execution. It was a source of entertainment that went along with the actual staging of the execution.

Pirates, being some of the original romantic figures of what at the time would be considered to be true crime, were often the sources of such ballads.

I also found interesting the nature of pirate government. If that seems somehow paradoxical, it really isn’t. After all, the pirates were risking their lives for an uncertain reward. By definition, if you were a pirate, that would seem to imply that you would not shy away from a certain amount of violence. How do you keep order on such a ship?

To keep all sailors bound together on a pirate ship, the ships often created a charter. That charter was actually very democratic. Ship captains were elected. During a battle, the captains always led. When not in a battle, all decisions were made democratically. This was true even economically. Every one got an equal share of the bounty. There were only a few exceptions, but even the captain only got a double share. Compare that to modern CEO’s that make some 300 times what the average employee at their company makes. An argument can be made that a pirate ship was one of the first and, even now, most democratic governments ever formed.

All of that to say that while I did not find the biography of Henry Every very compelling, I did find myself thinking a bit about the pirates’ butterfly effect.