Making the click-through worthwhile: Presidential candidate Kamala Harris laments that the country has not had an honest conversation about race for a long time, Peggy Noonan shares how an idea to get more people into libraries turned into a social-media outrage session, almost all of the reviews that you read about Captain Marvel were wrong, and the problem of “asymmetric information” in health insurance.
Kamala Harris Says America Still Hasn’t Had ‘An Honest Discussion About Race’
Over at that magazine of cowards that is too intimidated by the woke crowd to publish Kevin Williamson, former congressman, White House chief of staff, and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel urges Democrats to banish the word deplorable from the 2020 campaign. When Rahm Emanuel — infamous table-stabber and dead-fish mailer — worries that your campaign themes could get too negative, it’s time to sit up and take notice.
Emanuel worries that his party may be embracing policies and a worldview that’s too radial to beat Trump:
Earth to Democrats: Republicans are telling you something when they gleefully schedule votes on proposals like the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, and a 70 percent marginal tax rate… After the past two years, the country now yearns for a return to normalcy—meaning that voters will likely want their next president to fit the part more credibly.
Does the 2020 Democratic crew sound like a return to normalcy? Last week, Kamala Harris declared, “For too long, frankly in our country, for too long we have not had these honest discussions about race. We’ve just not.”
Really? After Charlottesville, Ferguson, Baltimore’s riots, Ralph Northam, Jussie Smollett, Roseanne Barr, Kanye West’s various rants, Philando Castile, #BlackLivesMatter, the Dallas police shootings, the Charleston church shooting, the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina state-capitol grounds, Laquan McDonald, Eric Garner, Rachel Dolezal, former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling and arguments about subconscious bias and Starbucks’ #RaceTogether campaign and microaggressions, the regular controversies about associations with Louis Farrakhan, the arguments about Harvard’s admissions standards and Asian-Americans . . . in Harris’ eyes, this country still hasn’t had an honest discussion about race?
(Recently in Maryland, a white Democratic state legislator referred to a particular district as an N-word district. Her colleagues censured her, and like Northam, she resisted calls to resign . . . and life is going on, with local supporters insisting “That’s just not who she is.” If she were of the other party, would her fellow Democrats react the same way? Would “certain whites get a pass for racially insensitive comments, actions, or views because of their partisan affiliation” be part of this national honest discussion?)
We didn’t have an honest discussion about race in this country during the Obama presidency? The nutty birther allegations, Jeremiah Wright, Henry Louis Gates’s arrest, “the police acted stupidly,” the statement that Latinos need to “punish their enemies,”, the ubiquitous presence of Al Sharpton, the emergence of #BlackLivesMatter . . . none of those moments meet Harris’s definition of “an honest conversation about race”? (The comment is reminiscent of former attorney general Eric Holder’s declaration, one month after Obama’s inauguration, that Americans were “in things racial, we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, a nation of cowards.” The country didn’t have an honest discussion about race after Green Book, BlacKkKlansman, GetOut, Selma, Hidden Figures, The Help, Crash, The Butler, 12 Years a Slave, 42? Not after #OscarsSoWhite?
We’re not talking honestly about race and hatred recently? Didn’t we just spend the last few months debating Ilhan Omar and Steve King, with partisan shills insisting that offensive comments are less bad when someone on their preferred side makes them? Haven’t we spent years arguing whether Elizabeth Warren can legitimately claim to be Native American? Isn’t Julian Castro touting himself as an example of the benefits of affirmative action?
This country has had honest discussions about race — some would say perpetual and ubiquitous. Kamala Harris just doesn’t like the discussions that have occurred. We hear similar calls for “an honest national conversation about guns,” but this country debates gun-control proposals regularly — and for the most part, the country rejects them. The problem to progressives is not the lack of an honest conversation; the problem is that the honest conversation doesn’t end with the result they want. When a politician calls for “an honest conversation about guns,” a lot of people hear, “it’s time for a conversation where I call you a dangerous menace and you accept it, and then give up your Second Amendment rights out of guilt.”
When a politician calls for “an honest conversation about race,” a lot of people hear, “It’s time for a conversation where I call you a racist and you accept it, and then make concessions to me out of guilt.”
2020: The Circus vs. the Cultural Revolution
We know what we’re going to get with President Trump. His presidency brings its share of headaches and six forms of controversies that arise from his comments with metronomic regularity.
Trump is shameless and rarely thinks before blurting out the first thought that pops into his head. But one upside of that daily exhibition is that if the president of the United States can say anything, then anyone else should be able to say anything, too. An increasingly strong motivation on the Left is to ensure that you don’t feel like you can say anything that you want, and that if you’re unlucky enough to turn into the target of the online social-media mob one day, you can lose your job, your reputation, and your whole life, effectively.
Peggy Noonan offered a vivid example in her column this weekend:
A few weeks ago a young woman on Twitter thought aloud: “What if public libraries were open late every night and we could engage in public life there instead of having to choose between drinking at the bar and domestic isolation.” This might get people off their screens and help them feel “included and nourished.”
A nice idea. Maybe some local official would pick it up. Instead there was a small onslaught of negative reaction. “Libraries are already significantly underfunded and they struggle to make do with what they’ve got.” “Before you suggest this understand that librarians are maxed out—our facilities are understaffed, we’re underpaid.” The idea would only work in “mainly affluent urban & suburban communities with already well-funded libraries whose wealth insulates them.” A woman soon to marry a librarian warned of “what this would do to the lives of the people who work there.”
After being batted about, the young woman apologized: “I made insensitive tweets abt public libraries & the individuals that staff them. I apologize for those tweets. I have much to learn abt the difficult challenges public librarians face, the services they provide, & how much they strive to meet the needs of communities they serve.”
She abased herself for having had a pretty idea. But that is dangerous when thought-cops are out there, eager to perceive insufficient class loyalty.
Today the editors call House Democrats’ election-reform bill an “unconstitutional, authoritarian power grab.” The Democrats know their brand identity well!
Captain Marvel . . . Is Not Like What the Reviews Claimed, At All
Can you stand another review of Captain Marvel? Can you stand one from a guy who feels like he watched a completely different movie than all of the critics who are raving about it as an epic feminist statement or groaning about it as a preachy, woke, social-justice warrior lecture?
Was there some other version of this film released in different theaters that included more heavily-handed agitprop and social commentary? Because the version I saw was . . . pretty good!
(Mild spoilers ahead.)
It’s probably somewhere in the middle of the pack for the Marvel movies, and Marvel doesn’t make many bad ones. If you like the digitally de-aged Samuel L. Jackson, lots of jokes about 90s-era technology, or the idea of a cat being the ultimate weapon to defeat an alien menace, this is your kind of movie. Whatever you think of Brie Larson’s off-screen comments about white male movie critics — I find them so over-the-top antagonistic, one might think she was trying to immunize herself for bad reviews in the future — she’s perfectly fine on screen. The early trailers emphasized the “For all of her life, people told her she couldn’t, and she’s proving them wrong; I am woman, hear me roar” theme, but the movie itself almost literally runs through all of that exposition on fast-forward. Carol Danvers’s real superpower is that she keeps getting back up, no matter how many times she gets knocked down. (If it sounds like we saw that theme before in Captain America . . . we did.)
It’s not a perfect movie. I wish we had been able to spend a little more time with the Kree strike force; I don’t quite understand why you cast Gemma Chan and then barely use her. (I thought the big guy was Kristofer Hivju, from Game of Thrones, but it was Rune Temte, a completely different huge bearded Viking-like actor from the frozen North.)
The big twist is probably more surprising if you have no familiarity with the comic books. I salute them for leading the audience along by casting two particular recently ubiquitous actors and having both of them play against type. (Certain actors such as Ray Wise have played villains so often that I’m convinced that the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat is going to have some giant twist where the friendly dentist neighbor turns out to be a serial killer.)
Because it’s a Marvel movie and they love to establish ties to other movies, there are nice little cameos from the villains of Guardians of the Galaxy and one of the Marvel movies’ most important MacGuffins pops up again. The conclusion sets up Captain Marvel to be Superman-level powerful, which is probably going to make future sequels more challenging; once you’ve established that your protagonist is virtually indestructible, how do you restore a sense of risk and drama?
The thermonuclear-level hot takes surrounding this relatively innocuous, mostly fun, not-all-that-political-or-ideological-at-all movie suggests to me that any big pop culture product that comes down the pike is going to be squeezed and squashed into the mold of a culture war hand-grenade.
ADDENDA: We would be better off if every GOP lawmaker listened to the likes of Kevin Williamson before formulating the policy response to any particular problem:
Republicans blew the health-care debate in 2009 with their mulish need to defend the status quo of what they insisted was “the greatest health-care system in the world,” never bothering to ask why so many people were so unhappy with such a superlative system. The answer, which is for obvious reasons less obvious to people with lots of money and good insurance, is: insecurity. Many people walk into doctors’ offices not knowing whether their insurance will cover the service they need, how much they’ll have to pay out of pocket, whether they’ll still have insurance in a week and whether it will offer the same benefits, etc. Asymmetric information means asymmetric power, and nobody likes to feel like he’s getting hosed — especially not when it comes to a life-saving procedure for his child or himself.