One of the ironies of these supposedly post-racial Barack Obama times is that so much seventies-era identity politics has been has been coming back to haunt us like the “undead” in a horror movie.
And I’m not just talking about the excrescences of Wright, Pfleger and Meeks, et al. Director Spike Lee has reared his head to blow smoke from his joint again - targeting, of all people, Clint Eastwood.
According to Spike, the multiple Academy Award winning filmmaker erred by omitting black soldiers from his Iwo Jima movie Flags of Our Fathers. Never mind that Eastwood, director of Bird and evidently planning a film about Nelson Mandela, is about as far from a racist as you could get and never mind that historically the flag was hoisted over Iwo Jima by white guys, Spike had to get his two cents in. Crusty old Clint unsurprisingly told Lee to “Shut his face.”
Why would Lee pick this fight?
Unfortunately, it couldn’t be more obvious. Like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, time has been passing Spike Lee by. His worldview comes from another era and he has never really sought to revise it, to open his eyes. Proof of that is that for more than a decade Spike has barely made a film any of us can remember. Compare that to Eastwood, who, although some twenty-seven years Lee’s senior, is at the top of his career, having scored big in 2003-2004 with Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby.
No wonder Spike’s jealous. So what does he do? He reaches back to an era when he was more successful. He plays the old identity/race card. Now we could all laugh and say this is just another case of an (prematurely) aging artist grasping for attention, but these times are more complex than that. We don’t know which way are going-toward a post-racial future or back to a racist past.
I have been rooting very hard for the former so it was with some wistfulness I read that Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date was to see Lee’s Do the Right Thing. I very much liked the film at the time (1989), but somehow I wish the Obamas had gotten together over, say, a college production of Aeschylus or perhaps a reading of Pushkin. I don’t want to think of their marriage emanating from the stew pot of American racial despair.
We have to get over all that and the time for getting over it is now. At a certain point, rehashing the evils that our races and religions have done to each other is counter-productive and only work to preserve, even encourage, the enmities.
It’s time in America to say - enough.
Spike Lee - like Sharpton and Jackson - is now part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Roger L. Simon is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, novelist and blogger, and the CEO of Pajamas Media.
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panic said,
June 11, 2008 at 8:09 am
S Baker said,
June 12, 2008 at 11:05 am
Crispus_Attucks said,
“Who really cares what this malignant black dwarf says or does?”
A very enlightening statement from a typical redneck-inbred-hick. Clearly along the lines of Marion “no balls” Morrison, the skirt-wearing Jennifer Edgar Hoover, and the mindless idiot Reagan and his astrology running-the-country wife. Yes, another typical re-PUKE-lican girly actor with a fake stage name trying to rewrite AmeriKKKan history.
If you can read at all …YOU MIGHT LEARN SOMETHING!
http://www.africawithin.com/bios/crispus_attucks.htm
June 12, 2008 at 1:17 pm
The Man On The Street said,
Nice comeback…. Maybe you should try wearing your bigotry in your back pocket from now on… where it will obviously be closer to your brain….
Let’s see here….
From a real book, called a dictionary oddly enough, that I as a white person can read from…
Malignant: Spiteful, disposed to cause harm, suffering, or distress deliberately; feeling or showing ill will or hatred.
Yep. That sure fits Spike Lee and his ilk.
Black.
Yep, last I checked, he’s black.
dwarf: of unusually small stature or size; diminutive.
Yep, he is a small person… I’ll leave it at that.
So tell me Crispus_Attucks, what exactly did panic say that warranted such racism and bigotry?
TMOTS
June 13, 2008 at 7:57 am
emarel said,
Eastwood’s “Letters from Iwo Jima” does rewrite history, however, in what the film doesn’t accurately portray. The film had two scenes portraying Marines captured by the Japanese: one was bayoneted by several Japanese soldiers, and the other died of his wound despite humanitarian care by his captors. The truth is that both would have likely had their eyes gouged out, their ears cut off, their tongues cut out, their testicles and penis cut off and stuffed in their mouths, and probably skinned, all before they died. The Japanese were not disposed to treat prisoners of war any more kindly than they would treat civilian populations, due to their Code of Bushido.
Think Nanking.
Eastwood was obviously thinking of the Japanese audiences that would view this movie, a people who has never come to terms with their militaristic past.
Neither was there a portrayal of the many imported Korean slaves who dug much of the tunnels nor of the “Comfort Women” who serviced the Japanese soldiers.
This is the enemy that the Marines faced and fought against in the Pacific War, and from the very beginning at Guadalcanal, they quickly learned to return the “favor” many-fold with machine guns, bayonets, flame-throwers, and ultimately, nukes.
June 13, 2008 at 12:16 pm